I recently read Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? By Kathleen Collins. I heard about her work after reading this article in the New York Times. Her daughter, Nina Collins, saved a trunk of her mother’s papers, which included the 16 stories published in this collection.

I’d never heard of Kathleen Collins before, and I’m both surprised and a little pissed off by that. (She was GOOD, so why haven’t I heard about her?) She was a playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker in addition to a fiction writer. She released a feature film in 1982 called Losing Ground that I’m planning to watch soon.

Some of the stories in Whatever Happened to Interracial Love were a punch in the gut, and very relevant today. Here are some of the lines that stayed with me.

ON RACE

“…who shared their bare existence of cornbread and chitterlings, while together they combed the hot dirt roads pleading with folks to come out and vote, come out and be shot, come out and lay down their life on the interracial line.”

“mythical underbelly of America . . . there where it is soft and prickly, where you may rub your nose against the grainy sands of illusion and come up bleeding.”

“…my father compounded his sins by choosing the most colored occupations. Undertaker. Mortician. Funeral director. Keeper of the dead.”

“…when he was sure he could cure himself of the double trauma of race and an overly stern and demanding mother.”

“…he had lost the will to struggle with life and that my aunt was a lazy, spoiled woman who thought her fair, almost-white skin would save her.”

ON LOVE

“She made a dreadful marriage at an early age to a man so poorly suited for her that he robbed her forever of her sparkle.”

“Only once do you know that kind of man, they say. Only once. But she would know them all her life. One after the other they would turn out to be that kind of man.”

“No unpleasant tongue-kiss, either. No over-moist search-and-seizure salivating the upper reaches of my throat.”

“There is nothing to be gained there. Not even a hot shower.”

“…a pair of thin, pointed shoes that smell of casual sex (lightly exhaled, like cigarette smoke).”

“But Lillie would be glad I told it this way, that I clustered the bright moments and made them shine.”

ON BEAUTY

“When I take my bath, I’m inside a blue-and-white bubble the scent of lavender, the feel of round lemon soaps that melt in my palm. The sun is all over this shiny little house.”

“Soaking up the fresh uncluttered smell that follows a rainy night.”

“Nature is beautiful that way . . . she leaves you with nothing to say.”

“One of those nights when talk spins a thick, womblike cocoon around the talkers and one grows drunk, ecstatic, joyfully sated with talk.”

ON LIFE

“If you’ve had less you know when you’ve got more, man.”

“I can usually hold a job for a while before it gets to me, but one day I walk in the office and vomit. Sometimes I’ll vomit four, five days in a row until I get the message and quit . . .”

“…life has so many tuneless days . . . what better posture to take than to become a whimsical motherfucker?”

“…every achievement had been a struggle.”

“All her life she had been surrounded by ideas and the struggle to see them come into being.”

“My own nostalgia for it is very great indeed, and I suspect this is true for most of us who remember our childhood only as a long series of sharp private wounds covered with shame, anxiety, embarrassment.”

“He shot himself in the head. Thought the gun was empty. Or maybe he knew it wasn’t.”

“He rode home with her to New Jersey and she took him into the backyard to look at her father’s roses . . . to look at her childhood, to look at what pricked and stung and was difficult to forgive.”