“Rage filled me at her words - cold, black, unending rage. Whatever happened to me, Mab would not hurt my sister again. She would not.”

“And my father, who never once in his life would have used the word 'nigger,' would smile and give an almost imperceptible laugh -- not a trace of rage on behalf of black people, not a trace of rage on behalf of me.”

“Or—but this more rarely happened—she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.”

“I could buy that she would murder me in a fit of rage, poison me out of flaming jealousy, or bomb my car out of sheer, stubborn pique. But she would never do it and feel nothing.”

“Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and she had been left with her rage--vestigial, girlhood rage--inappropriate and intact. She would hug her parents good-bye, the gentle, emptied sacks of them, and think Where did you go?”

“But then, with whatever time she had left, until life was taken from her, Neema would touch more pages; she would encounter there more of those far-flung sisters; she would listen to them whisper the unuttered words of her heart.”