Creativity Quote by Ethel Waters

Waters lands the line like a rimshot: grand romance on one end, public-health emergency on the other. Calling her lovers “an epic” gives them scale and drama, the kind of story America likes to tell about itself - big feelings, bigger stakes, a heroine who survives. Then she undercuts it with “an epidemic,” a word that turns intimacy into exposure, something that spreads, disrupts, and leaves damage behind. The joke is tart, but it’s also a defense mechanism: wit as a way to keep control of the narrative when the narrative has so often been taken from you.

The subtext is that men weren’t just personal choices; they were environmental conditions. For a Black woman born in 1896 who became a star in a segregated industry, “the men in my life” includes lovers, managers, patrons, gatekeepers - the whole ecosystem of power that could elevate her one night and endanger her the next. “Epic” nods to the romance and the publicity machine that sells female performers as spectacle. “Epidemic” hints at the costs: coercion, dependency, reputational contagion, the way scandal sticks harder to women, especially Black women, than to the men who cause it.

The line’s intent isn’t bitterness for its own sake. It’s Waters refusing the tidy memoir arc where hardship turns into uplift. She gives you the punchline instead: love as both legend and illness, and her survival as the only constant.