“real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky.”
Twyla points out that she and her friend, Roberta, were seen as outcasts by the other orphans in the home and the children refused to play with them. The reason that the children decided to ignore Twyla and Roberta was that they were not "real’’ orphans—that is, at least one of their parents was still alive. This made Twyla and Roberta feel like impostors, and this also made the rest of the children want to avoid them as much as possible; interestingly, though, Twyla and Roberta wished, to an extent, that they were also "real" orphans so their position in the home would make sense and they would not have to come to terms with the fact that their mothers were disinterested, neglectful, and unwell.
"I could have killed her.’’
Twyla thinks these words three times during the time her mother is at the orphanage. The first time she thinks them is when she first sees her mother and realizes how she dressed for the meeting. The second time is when Mary looks at her own face constantly during the church service. The last time is when Twyla realizes that Mary was the only one who had not brought any type of food for herself and for her daughter to eat. Twyla obviously does not want to actually murder her mother, but the intensity of a child's rage is apparent here: she cannot control her disappointment in her mother, and she feels that she is stuck with a mother who does not behave in the way a mother should.
"Joseph was on the list of kids to be transferred from the junior high school to another one at some far-out-of-the-way place and I thought it was a good thing until I heard it was a bad thing.’’
After Twyla got married, she had a little boy whom she named Joseph. When Twyla reunited with Roberta, it was around the same time when the schools were forced to accept children from across town via busing in order to achieve racial integration, which resulted in many parents protesting. Twyla admits that in the beginning, she did not mind her child being transferred to another school. In her opinion, every school was the same and thus there was no real difference between various schools. Twyla changed her opinion only after everyone tells her that those schools were "bad." Twyla is an example of how people are easily swayed by others: she seems to be the more naive out of the duo of her and Roberta.
"So what if they go to another school? My boy's being bussed too, and I don't mind. Why should you?"
"It's not about that, Twyla. Me and you. It's about our kids."
Twyla and Roberta's friendship has many layers of complications due to the patriarchal, racist time and place in which they live. They are divided by race and by class, and, as Susanna Morris explains, "the protest over busing exemplifies the ways in which power dynamics among women—both allies and enemies—are less simple than the empowered/disempowered binary on which Twyla and Roberta relied previously." Since we do not know which woman is what race, we are precluded from simple assumptions like Roberta must be white because she does not like busing and Twyla must be black because she is fine with it. The women on either side are not simply "Big Bozos," nor are they just "mothers": they are "a complicated melding of various positions, positions that also depend on each other for meaning." This becomes even clearer when Twyla begins making signs that specifically reference Roberta, showing that the two women depend on each other to make meaning and sense of their lives.
"We changed beds every night and for the whole four months we were there we never picked out one as our own permanent bed."
In this very first paragraph, Twyla indicates just how transitory, how complicated, and even how traumatic her and Roberta's young lives were. The two girls never see St. Bonny's as a home, even though that is what is supposed to be. By refusing to even stake out a permanent bed for themselves, they reveal that they do not want to see this place as a home: if they can make it seem like it's just for a short time, then they can control how they perceive their lives a bit more. Tellingly, Twyla often comments on the concept of "shelter," saying that she likes Howard Johnson's because it seems like a shelter: it's not perfect, but it's a place where she chose to be.
"What could I do but laugh too and wonder why I was standing there with my knees showing out from under that uniform. Without looking I could see the blue and white triangle on my head, my hair shapeless in a net, my ankles thick in white oxfords."
Twyla and Roberta both fervently want to distance themselves from Maggie, who, to them, represents their mothers and a type of existence they decry. While Roberta confides, "[Maggie'd] been brought up in an institution just like my mother was and like I thought I would be too," Twyla focuses on the elements of her appearance that the girls hated so much in Maggie: her hat, her legs, and her "dumb-dressing like a kid." It horrifies Twyla to see herself like this, especially as she is in a service position, like Maggie was.
