“There in the back of the church, I daydreamed a theory of what life was all about. I told myself that Mother and Felix and the Reverend Harrell and Dwayne Hoover and so on were cells in what was supposed to be one great big animal. There was no reason to take us seriously as individuals. Celia in her casket there, all shot through with Drāno and amphetamine, might have been a dead cell sloughed off by a pancreas the size of the Milky Way.
How comical that I, a single cell, should take my life so seriously!
I found myself smiling at a funeral.”
“A while later she said, “My peephole open, I see this woman, I say, ‘Who you?’ She say, ‘I’s you mama.’ I say, ‘How we doing, Mama?’ She say, ‘Ain’t doing good. Ain’t got no money, ain’t got no work, ain’t got no house, your daddy on the chain gang, and I already got seven other children whose peepholes opened up on them.’ And I said, ‘Mama, if you know how to close up my peephole again, you just go ahead and do it.’ And she say, ‘Don’t you tempt me like that, child. That’s the devil talking through you.’” “





