Black Bottom Saints Quotes

“me if everything was all right. I replied, “Everything’s copacetic.” And it was in fact “copacetic”—our word for “fine and dandy.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Some people are so sweet you can’t hold the thought of them and trouble in the same mind at the same time.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Swellegant is glamour, power, originality, and more. Swellegant is graceful power completely unaligned with God or this world’s ethics. Swellegant is bursting with the pagan joy and pagan pleasure of being beautiful and fruitful.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“November 10, 1962, is a day that will go down in Black Detroit ignominy. The police invaded the Gotham Hotel in what newspapers called the biggest numbers raid in Detroit history. Not long after the hotel was raided, Lou Sarko (a man referred to in the press as Detroit’s own “Barney Rubble,” and identified as a close crony of the mobster Tony Jack Giacalone) was hired to demolish the building. With a single payment the Detroit City government simultaneously destroyed evidence of Black Camelot and enriched the white Cosa Nostra. A dying era no longer had a tombstone.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“To feel the sun and see the orange light leak through the skin of my eyelids is copacetic-squared. Sight”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Catherine Fowler has a car so pretty that if she drove it back down to her little town in Mississippi, they would hang the car. John White noticed. John White said, “You called out an ambition hidden in every lynching: a desire to slaughter our beauty. Ofays are made crazy by our beauty.” I have committed to be beautiful as often and as publicly as I can. And I have determined to help more of mine see and be their beauty. John White conspired with me to achieve this.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“In Detroit we understand the phrase “Affirmative Action” a little different than they do in the rest of the world. In Detroit it means: Take a step, don’t step back, don’t talk, don’t wait—act! Knock your brother upside his head and drag him through the water, but save his life. Affirmative action is a lifesaving dance.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Black Bottom is walking tall, chin up, fist balled, brain firing on all cylinders. Black Bottom folk got steel in their spines, steel in their jaws, and steel in their will. But it wasn’t always an attitude. Before it was razed, it was a place.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Black Bottom is a defiant, inventive, modern swagger that has everything to do with being efficient, exact, ambitious, proud—and Black. The efficient and exact part comes from the assembly lines. The inventive part comes from the breadwinners, too. We didn’t get credit for all that we invented in the factories—from processes and tools to paint colors—but we invented in the factories. In Black Bottom, we celebrated what we invented as loud as we celebrated what we built. And we celebrated what we finna do loudest.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Folks that don’t understand that our safety is born of their not seeing who we are and what we are, as long as we see ourselves clearly and understand that their chatter about us is fully ignorant and not to be considered.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“love is the strut and hate is the stumble.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“We were copacetic.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“She was Detroit born, and Detroit bred, and when she died, she’d be Detroit-dead. She might not have much, but she had enough.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“I have only had one better name than Santa Claus. And it was not Ziggy. It was not Joe Ziggy, it was not Stanley or Livingstone, Brother, Son, Nephew, Friend, or Mr. Johnson. I have loved all those names. My best name is Daddy.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“King’s best speeches end with a wish for inclusiveness, his wish for a place where brown, Black, white, and yellow play together and are judged by their character. I have created that place now, today, but to do it I had to throw all the white people out.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“What did it mean if I helped one, if I helped twelve, twelve hundred, or closer to twelve thousand Black girls feel their own beauty, their own worthiness, exactly as they are—when one hundred thousand Black girls stared and listened mesmerized when every billboard and television show screamed they were not beautiful, they were not worthy?”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“It is past time everyone sees Negro girls can be touched by white hands without lust or anger. If Martha loses her show, that is nothing compared to what Negro girls lose every day when people don’t understand that.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“1952 there were over 700 cases of polio in Detroit. Dr. Bodywork Bob had told me that. I told Rouse; he bogeyed a hole. Polio was hitting families all over town, white and colored, rich and poor, center of the city and suburbs.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“It has been estimated that one-third of the 139 square miles designated “Detroit” is now vacant-land-prairie. That’s crime.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Paint me. Put me in a sports coat with a big pattern. In silk or wool or cotton. Padded shoulders. Nipped in at the waist. A wide tie. Silk, of course. Paint me in one of my light ties on a white shirt. Make my clean, heavily starched shirt jump from the canvas. Have my good Johnson and Murphy shoes shined. Make my creases sharp. Creases count all seasons of the year. If you don’t want to paint me in spring or autumn in a sports coat, paint me in winter when I have just come in from the cold wearing a suit, with a cashmere coat in the crook of my arm. Hat still on my head. Pocket square. Tie clip. All the Ziggy details in place. Or paint me in one of my shirts that let me wear a collar bar. Remind us that that is how, once upon a time, we did it. That ours was a world of pocket squares, and tie clips—tie clips were most important, as they held a dancer’s tie in place midflight—and stick pins, and gold cigarette lighters and silver key fobs and money clips of metal or a plain rubber band, and cufflinks, and good hats, and mohair V-neck golf sweaters and fine tuxedos and Murine. Don’t paint me dropping Murine in my eyes. Or me in my boxer shorts and white cotton V-neck shirt sitting at my dressing table in my room at the Gotham, my toes tickled by the wool wall-to-wall carpet. Or maybe paint that. How and where we got ready. And we were ready. Paint our readiness.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Autumn is the season when you know what’s coming next is harder than what is now. In pale spring you look forward to bright summer; in hot summer to the cool of fall; in winter to the hope of spring. In fall, you watch what you have blow away.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Sadye Pryor is a pillar of the Pensacola Mt. Zion Baptist Church. I myself see the inside of a church only when there’s a funeral. Aunt Sadye wears glasses and frumpy sack dresses and looks studious. I was born dapper and will die dapper; I don’t wear the reading spectacles I need. She is a librarian who’s known for raising her eyebrows to get students to quiet down. I am a show producer known for raising my eyebrows to get kids to project louder. Yes, presidents of Motown PTAs have been known to question whether I am a fit example for our young ones, because I consort with show folk and gamblers and others associated with nightlife. Sadye Pryor maintains perfectly proper associates (fellow board members of the YWCA, members of the Eastern Star lodge she leads, fellow Sunday School teachers) and is lauded as an example of PTA-praiseworthy deportment. In Pensacola, indeed across Florida, and all around these United States. Sadye was born a virgin and by choice will likely die a virgin. Some folks call me the old reprobate.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“siddity”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“He reached across the table and put both his cold hands on my face. Those hands that had—what did he say?—“opened doors of perception and windows of imagination and broken shackles of anxiety” were soft.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Sometimes we got nasty-silly. There was the legendary night when chocolate-brown Tadd Dameron walked through the Plantation Club drinking out of the ornate wine glasses that decorated the club’s tables, with Charlie “Bird” Parker following behind, smashing the filigreed drinking glasses to “protect” white patrons from drinking out of the vessels that Dameron had “contaminated.” Bird loudly declared, “Get yo’self a jelly jar! Don’t contaminate the white folks’ wetter water.” I loved Tadd for writing “If You Could See Me Now,” for Sarah Vaughan, but I loved him more for putting his beautiful lips on those ugly Plantation Club glasses.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“What I liked least about the Plantation Club? They plastered caricatures of us, drawings of darkies with protruding lips and gawking eyes on every matchbook, napkin, menu, and newspaper advertisement associated with or in the Plantation Club. Why? I suspect they hoped their filthy-as-homemade-sin visual lies would inoculate white folk from the shock of Black beauty. That left me, and many of the rest of the entertainers, exodusing for the inner sanctum of drunk.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“In reality St. Louis is located in a segregated South, filthy with paddleboat gambling, river mud, and hot white hate.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“After Basie married his Katie, she became one of the sidditiest of siddity sisters.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Regular Saints Day Books don’t do a thing about helping you make a feast. They just tell you on what day to do it. I’m not telling you exactly on what day to have your cocktail—but I am instructing you exactly how to make it, thanks to one of my favorite Saints, Thomas Bullock.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints

“Autonomy, ambition, renewal, pride, and creativity are the five basic positions we teach.”
― Alice Randall, Black Bottom Saints