“They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery / stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors / to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys / whose bodies / swelled purple and black into twice the original size / and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby / and then / they said this was brilliant”

“Otulissa swelled up to twice her normal size. 'Well, SPRINK ON YOUR SPRONK!”

“She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica's store sells in April.. there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida... but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrink-wrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica's little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then trows them in the same trash bin where her corn husks and citrus rinds go.”

“My grandma Ruthie, Jettie's sister, had been married four times, so many times I started calling every old man I saw at the grocery store Grandpa.”

“Because I want to go to the dance," I said."But why can't you go as a boy? Won't it be risky going as a girl?"Of course it would be risky. But everything I'd done for the past four months had been risky.I took a deep breath before speaking. "I want to go as a girl, because I want to dance with a particular boy."Mrs. Smithers rolled her eyes at this. "There's always a boy, isn't there?”

“Antiblack violencein Chicago was common since at least the 189-s, when blacks were brought in as strikebreakers. The violence grew with the black population. In the two years leading up to mid-July 1919, whhites bombed more than twenty-five homes and properties owned by blacks in white areas...One bombing killed a little girl...The police never arrested anyone, infuriating blacks.”