what she said

And there we are. My mother is beautiful and my grandmother is beautiful and I'm beautiful. You see that beauty as it finally is even though no one wants to see it as it is in a black woman in American, not a hoochie, not a ho, not a mammy, not a dyke, not a cliché, just a woman. A lot of women. Real women doing what they can, making art where they can, making their lives mean something where they can. And there's so much music in it, too, and beauty and love, and as you go from image to image and hear our voices and know our story you know that there's a power here, a power that can't be denied. As you look at our beautiful, beautiful faces, there's no getting around it. There is something there that can't be denied. --Martha Southgate, Third Girl From the Left

These are the final words in Martha Southgate's novel Third Girl From the Left, the last of the library books I checked out in late June and kept renewing, through vacations and breaks from reading and all, until I read those words and realized along with many things that another summer's now over. I have such a like/hate relationship with art that you'd think I'd just snort at those words, but having just read this beautiful story about three generations of women struggling to be creative individual without quite knowing how one manages it, but managing it nonetheless, I was rather moved by them. And needing inspiration. It's been one of those days.

And especially since one of the characters had a tiny part in the film Coffy (hence the book's title), and my sister Karyn actually played Coffy's sister:
I was inclined to like this book from the start.