Dark Laughter, Part 3

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Boni & Liveright, 1925 - African American men - 319 pages
Set in the early 1920s, a decade of unprecedented socioeconomic mobility and sexual freedom, it follows reporter John Stockton who changes his name to Bruce Dudley to flee his marriage and resettle in a small town in Indiana. There, he has an affair with Aline, the wife of Fred Grey, a wealthy factory owner and his employer. Bruce and Aline's affair happens in plain sight, and they belittle Fred behind his back for his obliviousness. Ultimately, Bruce and Aline escape with their passions, devastating Fred and leaving ambiguous the question of whether the new couple is satisfied.

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Page 161 - And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre; the field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth : there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.
Page 96 - And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. 10 And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also.
Page 198 - One night, in the time of the fighting, he went out on parade — no, it was patrol — in No Man's Land, and saw another man stumbling along in the darkness and shot him. The man pitched forward dead. It had been the only time Fred consciously killed a man. You don't kill men in war much, the book said.
Page 97 - And he turned unto her by the way, and said, Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto thee...
Page 118 - Bruce comes to hold the pragmatist's view of art as a process of making the world a different place in which to live: Perhaps if you got the thoughts and fancies organized a little, made them work through your body, made thoughts and fancies a part of yourself — they might be used then— perhaps as Sponge Martin used the brush.
Page 80 - Gauguin put a lot of pep in his book but they trimmed it for us. No one cared much, not after Gauguin was dead anyway. You get a cup of such coffee for five cents and a big roll of bread. No swill. In Chicago, morning coffee at cheap places is like swill. Niggers like good things. Good big sweet words, flesh, corn, cane. Niggers like a free throat for song. You're a nigger down South and you get some white blood in you. A little more, and a little more. Northern travelers help, they say. Oh, Lord!...
Page 106 - From the throats of ragged black men as they trotted up and down the landing-stage, strange haunting notes. Words were caught up, tossed about, held in the throat. Wordlovers, sound-lovers — the blacks seemed to hold a tone in some warm place, under their red tongues perhaps. Their thick lips were walls under which the tone hid. Unconscious love of inanimate things lost to the whites — skies, the river, a moving boat — black mysticism — never expressed except in song or in the movement of...
Page 75 - ... His wife, also in bare feet, sitting in a rocking-chair. Her teeth were black stumps. Two children in bare feet, lying on a narrow deck. The docks of the city go around in a great crescent. Big ocean freighters coming in bringing coffee, bananas, fruits, goods, taking out cotton, lumber, corn, oils. Niggers on the docks, niggers in the city streets, niggers laughing. A slow dance always going on. German sea-captains, French, American, Swedish, Japanese, English, Scotch. The Germans now sailing...
Page 10 - She had been a ripterror right from the start. No doing anything with her. You couldn't keep her away from the boys. Sponge tried and his wife tried, but what good did it do? 'Sponge's old woman was all right. When she and Sponge were out that way after catfish, and they had both taken five or six drinks of "moon
Page 73 - ... drawling speech, niggers were hoeing cotton, other niggers fished for catfish in the river. The niggers were something for Bruce to look at, think about. So many black men slowly growing brown. Then would come the light brown, the velvet-browns, Caucasian features. The brown women tending up to the job — getting the race lighter and lighter. Soft Southern nights, warm dusky nights. Shadows flitting at the edge of cotton-fields, in dusky roads by sawmill towns. Soft voices laughing, laughing....

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