Life's Pleasures Quote by Anne Spencer

Good communication, Anne Spencer suggests, is not the soft-focus ideal we like to sell ourselves. It is black coffee: bracing, unsweetened, honest about what it is. The line works because it refuses the usual romance around “good communication” as something soothing or universally pleasant. Spencer turns it into a stimulant, a jolt that wakes you up to reality and, just as importantly, keeps you up. The best exchanges don’t merely comfort; they sharpen. They make you more alert to another person’s inner weather and to your own evasions.

Then comes the sting: “and just as hard.” The joke lands in the body. Black coffee is simple, even minimal, yet plenty of people can’t take it without sugar or cream. Spencer’s subtext is that clarity is similarly intolerable unless we dilute it with euphemism, hedging, or performative niceness. “Good” communication isn’t synonymous with “kind” or “smooth”; it often means friction, the discipline of saying the thing you’d rather decorate. It’s hard because it demands restraint (no melodrama), courage (no hiding), and attention (actually listening rather than waiting to speak).

As a poet writing across eras that prized social polish while restricting Black women’s voices, Spencer’s metaphor has extra bite. Black coffee carries its own cultural associations: a plain, working, adult taste. The line reads like a small manifesto against ornamental talk - a reminder that real connection is often austere, energizing, and earned.