“So it was only for a few moments that Cora Emery thought she might go back home before she realized house or no house, she was as much at home as she would ever be again.” (Water from the Well, p.62)
“An old man’s voice that scratched like sandpaper said what you talkin’ about man, we all free now, and Big Daddy Zekiel said uh-huh, almost like he was agreeing.” (Water from the Well, p.86)
“And the women watched the very old men, left to linger under the horse-apple tree, filing handsaws, or bucksaws, or mending mule harnesses, or pitching horse shoes, or packing tobacco in their pipes.” (Water from the Well, p.28)
“And as the locust started buzzing with the setting sun, Phoenicia said lawdy she hoped all those years of givin’ preachers jars of her pickled peaches, green tomato preserves and muscadine jelly would balance out the one awful mark and maybe, just maybe, God Almighty would just tear up that page and throw it away.” (Water from the Well, p.145)
Water from the Well (Grove Press/Scribner Paperback, originally published in 1995)
ISBN: 978-0802137166
Sentences from Myra's Novels
The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble (Stone Creek Press, originally published in 2011)
ISBN: 979-8459670653
“Some of those who gathered at Fish Head Corner in Bethel, or on the slanted and rotting porch of the deserted building that once was Lincoln Bradley's Store–or in Sugars Spring at Gilbert's General store, or at Herbert’s Service Station and Cafe, or at Peggy Sue’s Curl Up and Relax House of Beauty, were sure the church burning was an act of arson.”(The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble, p.7)
“It was late September of 1899, that Rosetta Tramble, the oldest living soul in Bethel–which the whites called Chickenham–after having sat through a hell-fire and brimstone sermon at the Bethel Baptist Tabernacle Church at her second row seat —stood with the congregation, singing Were You There When They Crucified My Lord and fell out limp as a dishrag just as they sang oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble tremble.” (The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble, p.26)
“Even as she hit him, and even as he lost his balance and had to jump off the porch to keep from falling in any matter of disgraceful positions, she caught the smile in his brown eyes, and she felt her irritation disburse like a flock of birds that seem to scatter as they fly father and father away—and then disappear.” (The Last Will and Testament of Rosetta Sugars Tramble, p.63)
“Grammy Mac was seventy-seven years old, and she’d seen enough sickness to know the difference between the gettin’ well kind and the dyin’ kind—so when she figured out which kind she had, she determined to leave the county hospital.” (Becoming Robbie Lee, p.1)
“Like everyone said, Miz Vera gave Starlette way too much free rein. But I knew they wouldn’t really go to Daisy’s store—certainly not at night. It was a store owned by a colored and for coloreds. Whites did stop in to buy worms and soft drinks and Tom’s peanuts and such when they went fishing.” (Becoming Robbie Lee, p.20)
“I didn’t understand much of what Doc read to Grammy. I didn’t have the slightest notion what a sylph was, but I liked the way Doc read it, and I liked the way those lines went round and round in my head sometimes, like when I was down in Grammy’s pasture picking pasture-flowers where she and Grandpa used to raise honeybees. I planned to like poems when I grew up. That’s the one and only single solitary way I was ever in my life going to be the least little tiny bit like Grammy.” (Becoming Robbie Lee, p.54)
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