More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I seldom went there myself except with some of the fellows when word got out that a new bunch of girls had arrived from New Orleans. The school had tried to make the Golden Day respectable, but the local white folks had a hand in it somehow and they got nowhere.
He’s rich and sick and if anything happens to him, they’ll have me packed and on my way home.”
His lips parted, bluish, revealing a row of long, slender, amazingly animal-like teeth.
bursting through the noise as through an invisible wall.
“Look at those features. Exactly like yours—from the identical mold. Are you sure he didn’t spit you upon the earth, fully clothed?” “No, no, that was my father,” the man said earnestly.
head jerked like a jabbed punching bag. Five pale red lines bloomed on the white cheek, glowing like fire beneath translucent stone.
“We’re patients sent here as therapy,” a short, fat, very intelligent-looking man said. “But,” he smiled, “they send along an attendant, a kind of censor, to see that the therapy fails.”
“I want you to git that stool-pigeoning, joy-killing, nut-crushing bum back in there with you and sober him up.
I don’t put on but one man’s clothes and he’s in N’Orleans.”
“I want order down there,” Supercargo boomed, “and if there’s white folks down there, I wan’s double order.”
His head bounced against the steps making a sound like a series of gunshots as they ran dragging him by his ankles, like volunteer firemen running with a hose.
“Sometimes I get so afraid of him I feel that he’s inside my head.
filling in other effects in a bass voice that moaned like a bear in agony.
it was only his face but I felt a shudder of nameless horror. I had never been so close to a white person before.
“Girl, don’t you know that all these rich ole white men got monkey glands and billy goat balls? These old bastards don’t never git enough. They want to have the whole world.”
he’s either part goat or part ape. Maybe he’s both.”
the lids opened, revealing pale pools of blue vagueness that finally solidified into points that froze
“Long enough to forget some fundamentals which I should never have forgotten.” “What fundamentals?” Mr. Norton said. “What do you mean?” The vet smiled and cocked his head. “Things about life. Such things as most peasants and folk peoples almost always know through experience, though seldom through conscious thought …”
A drop of water caught in one of his eyebrows glittered like a chip of active diamond.
The sound of shouting and destruction welled up from below as I opened the door.
these hands so lovingly trained to master a scalpel yearn to caress a trigger.
It’s worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it.
Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!”
the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other.
I’m sick of both of you pitiful obscenities! Get out before I do you both the favor of bashing in your heads!”
Heat rays from the late afternoon sun arose from the gray concrete, shimmering like the weary tones of a distant bugle blown upon still midnight air.
My predicament struck me like a stab. I had a sense of losing control of the car and slammed on the brakes in the middle of the road, then apologized and drove on. Here within this quiet greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever known, and I was losing it.
the walks and buildings flowed and froze for a moment in mist, glittering as in winter when rain froze on the grass and foliage and turned the campus into a world of whiteness, weighting and bending both trees and bushes with fruit of crystal. Then in the twinkling of my eyes, it was gone, and the here and now of heat and greenness returned.
he was the example of everything I hoped to be: Influential with wealthy men all over the country; consulted in matters concerning the race; a leader of his people; the possessor of not one, but two Cadillacs,
What was more, while black and bald and everything white folks poked fun at, he had achieved power and authority; had, while black and wrinkle-headed, made himself of more importance in the world than most Southern white men.
Just inside the building I got another shock. As we approached a mirror Dr. Bledsoe stopped and composed his angry face like a sculptor, making it a bland mask, leaving only the sparkle of his eyes to betray the emotion that I had seen only a moment before.
an oil portrait of the Founder looked down at me remotely, benign, sad, and in that hot instant, profoundly disillusioned. Then a veil seemed to fall.
He was so crazy that he corrupted sane men. He had tried to turn the world inside out,
“Who’re you expecting, a broad-butt gal with ball-bearing hips?”
The sound of departing voices. Something of my life seemed to retreat with them into a gray distance, moiling.
the light falling upon his white hair as upon silk floss.
moved across the campus with groups of students, walking slowly, their voices soft in the mellow dusk. I remember the yellowed globes of frosted glass making lacy silhouettes on the gravel and the walk of the leaves and branches above us as we moved slow through the dusk so restless with scents of lilac, honeysuckle and verbena, and the feel of spring greenness; and I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass—gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath
...more
moving not in the mood of worship but of judgment;
drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man’s bloodshot eye.
above them, stretching to the ceiling, the organ pipes looming, a gothic hierarchy of dull gilded gold.
the talks of visiting speakers, all eager to inform us of how fortunate we were to be a part of the “vast” and formal ritual. How fortunate to belong to this family sheltered from those lost in ignorance and darkness.
back there looking at that co-ed smiling at that he-ed
listen to me, the bungling bugler of words, imitating the trumpet and the trombone’s timbre, playing thematic variations like a baritone born. Hey! old connoisseur of voice sounds, of voices without messages, of newsless winds, listen to the vowel sounds and the crackling dentals, to the low harsh gutturals of empty anguish, now riding the curve of a preacher’s rhythm
Like some of the guests, he wore striped trousers and a swallow-tail coat with black-braided lapels topped by a rich ascot tie. It was his regular dress for such occasions, yet for all its elegance, he managed to make himself look humble.
I felt a shudder. I too had touched a white man today and I felt that it had been disastrous, and I realized then that he was the only one of us whom I knew—except perhaps a barber or a nursemaid—who could touch a white man with impunity.
and I saw Dr. Bledsoe, his eyes roaming over the audience, suddenly nod without turning his head. It was as though he had given a downbeat with an invisible baton. The organist turned and hunched his shoulders. A high cascade of sound bubbled from the organ, spreading, thick and clinging, over the chapel, slowly surging. The organist twisted and turned on his bench, with his feet flying beneath him as though dancing to rhythms totally unrelated to the decorous thunder of his organ.
In spite of the array of important men beside him, and despite the posture of humility and meekness which made him seem smaller than the others (although he was physically larger), Dr. Bledsoe made his presence felt by us with a far greater impact.
I remembered the admiration and fear he inspired in everyone on the campus; the pictures in the Negro press captioned “EDUCATOR,” in type that exploded like a rifle shot, his face looking out at you with utmost confidence.
I saw a thin brown girl arise noiselessly with the rigid control of a modern dancer, high in the upper rows of the choir, and begin to sing a cappella. She began softly, as though singing to herself of emotions of utmost privacy, a sound not addressed to the gathering, but which they overheard almost against her will.
herself become before our eyes a pipe of contained, controlled and sublimated anguish, a thin plain face transformed by music. I could not understand the words, but only the mood, sorrowful, vague and ethereal, of the singing. It throbbed with nostalgia, regret and repentance,
