I have been re-reading Alice Walker's In Search Of Our Mother's Gardens, yes, I know, I should be reading my text Homogenous and Heterogenous Substrates of Behavior and brushing up on afferent and efferent neurons in the S-R System of synapse. However, the essentials of conditioning and learning feel misplaced in my head alongside the womanist prose of Walker.

I love the way Janie Crawford
left her husbands
the one who wanted to change her
into a mule
and the other who tried to interest her
in being a queen.
A woman, unless she submits,
is neither a mule
nor a queen
though like a mule she may suffer
and like a queen pace the floor.

Janie Crawford is a character out of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Alice Walker found in Janie a heroine that inspired the words above. I have found in Alice Walker Calliope, the muse of heroic poetry and mother of Orpheus. Calliope is Greek for beautifully voiced, of which Walker most certainly is.