bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Harmony
Authors: van der Leeuw Gerardus
Published: November 2023

In the examples we have cited, the holy often breaks forth violently from the beautiful. Not infrequently, very impressive religious music is anything but harmonious, as in the instances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Violence and struggle join in every chord.
“Laffin’ Fit Ter Kill” Black Humor in the Fiction of William Wells Brown and Charles W. Chesnutt
Authors: Carpio Glenda R
Published: November 2023

African American oral culture is rich in tales that use humor to represent the violence of slavery. The trickster animal tales featuring Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, first popularized by Joel Chandler Harris in Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings: The Folklore of the Old Plantation (1880), are but one, albeit complicated, example. The tales, in which weaker animals like the Rabbit often outsmart stronger ones such as the Fox through wit and cunning, allegorize the great imbalance of power between master and slave and the ways that the enslaved found to sabotage it. As Mel Watkins notes, the tales “probably represent” the slaves’ “most aggressive and cynical view of white America” short of physical rebellion. Yet Harris, a white journalist who collected the tales (and therefore did help to preserve them), defused them of their critical edge by presenting them as amusing stories that Uncle Remus, a faithful retainer “who has nothing but pleasant memories of the discipline of slavery,” would recount to a little white boy, the son of plantation owners, for entertainment. While the tales depict anthropomorphized animals that kill and maim each other brutally, Harris claimed that the stories depict only the “roaring comedy” of animal life. White southerners laughed, amused by the Rabbit’s guile and cleverness. The enslaved laughed too, but for very different reasons. As scholarship has shown, slaves used the tales not only to release aggression but also as a medium for turning southern racial taboos on their head. Thus, while they laughed at Rabbit’s elaborate tricks, they made the Fox, usually the hero of European trickster stories, the dupe of the weak and repeatedly staged his violent death.
Conjuring The Mysteries Of Slavery Voodoo, Fetishism, and Stereotype in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
Authors: Carpio Glenda R
Published: November 2023

In the late 1960s, when Richard Pryor temporarily abandoned the stage and his life in Hollywood for a period of introspection and reassessment in Berkeley, he met and befriended Ishmael Reed. Characteristically, this period was not in any sense monastic or sober for Pryor. Instead, it was a period in which, as jazz musicians put it, he “woodshed” his material in an atmosphere that was both inspiring and intoxicating. Pryor found the drug culture of late 1960s Berkeley a haven for his fierce appetite for cocaine and other drugs. He also befriended a group of young black writers, among them Reed, Cecil Brown, Claude Brown, David Henderson, and Al Young, who were (and many of whom remain) deeply committed to racial equality and who, besides being tremendously talented, were known for using their acerbic but disarming humor to protest racial injustice. Pryor was then transforming himself from his original image—a slim, mildmannered comedian with conked hair who had risen to some prominence with material patterned after Bill Cosby’s—to the revolutionary comic performer who would bring the power of black street humor to mixed audiences and use it to critique his country’s long history of racism. The young writers Pryor befriended in Berkeley would encourage and support his evolution, influencing his style and encouraging him to take the risks required for developing it.
The Tragicomedy Of Slavery In Suzan-Lori Parks’s Early Plays
Authors: Carpio Glenda R
Published: November 2023

Judging by the subjects and titles of Suzan-Lori Parks’s plays, particularly the early ones, one might conclude that the playwright has a somber imagination. Her first major play, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom (first produced in 1989), concerns some of the most painful aspects of New World slavery. “Open House,” the second section of this play, involves a dying slave whose teeth are extracted mercilessly as she recalls a life of dispossession. A character named Miss Faith extracts the slave’s teeth while she remembers two children to whom she served as a primary guardian and who may or may not have been her own and a master who may or may not have been the father of the children; the play purposefully leaves this ambiguity open, as if to suggest the intimate levels of oppression in two intersecting and often inter-changeable stories, that of the mammy and of the slave mother. Parks’s second play, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), by title alone suggests a dark topic. Its titular figure vividly recounts his own death by lynching and electrocution. Similarly, her third major work, The America Play (also produced in 1990), presents the repeated shooting of a black man.
A Town Springs Up
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

When J. M. D. Burrows stepped from “the magnificent steamer Brazil” that brought him up the Mississippi River from St. Louis on July 27, 1838, he looked out on a scene that delighted him. “The sloping lawns and wooded bluffs, with the sea of beautiful wild flowers were a picture of loveliness such as I never had beheld before.” After concluding his business in Rock Island, the town originally settled by Colonel George Daven port in 1832, he decided to take one of the wooden flat boats across the Mississippi to the “beautiful little hamlet of fifteen houses, with a population of about one hundred fifty people,” which Antoine LeClaire had first plaited in 18 35, called Davenport in honor of the colonel.
Families in Fact and Fiction
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Unlike her husband, Susan never formally traced her family’s lineage, but its history had a great impact on her. If the first generation provided a reified version of pioneer life, the next generation deconstructed the tale. While her grandfather Silas may have been a fine horticulturist, he was not a good businessman. At his death, little remained of the original family tract, and it was finally disposed of in 1882, when his widow Susan came to live with her younger son Elmer and his family, including six-year-old Susan. In the Glaspell line the men were less physically robust than the women and died sooner. In the case of Silas and Elmer, they also showed signs of mental as well as physical breakdown years before their death. Although depression at the time was deemed a “female ailment”-news-papers running numerous advertisements for remedies to “cure the ladies of their disposition”-it was the Glaspell men who suffered from a mental state far more debilitating than such euphemisms imply. Silas’s obituary indicates that after years of “nervous attacks” he was “glad to go, and so he died because he was literally worn out.”1 Elmer Glaspell, Susan’s father, was even less of a businessman than his father and seemed less mentally able to withstand the stresses he encountered. He worked at a number of trades-farmer, teamster, contractor, and hay and straw wholesaler-but for the last six years of his life he, too, would be an invalid, after suffering a “severe mental breakdown.” Susan seems to have had her father.
Travel at Home and Abroad
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

After the required two years “of solitary confinement,” as he called it, Jig was granted his divorce from Sara at the end of January 1908; and in early spring, he finally married Mollie Price. Floyd stayed on at the Cabin to greet the newlyweds on their return from their Chicago wedding. Only one year younger than Mollie, he was immediately drawn to the young woman who, with great vigor, threw herself into the role she was expected to play. In fact Mollie was double cast: as the wife of an iconoclast poet-cum-farmer, a socialist like herself, indifferent to bourgeois values, living on the outskirts of staid Davenport, and as the wife of the scion of a distinguished family, who had not decided himself which script he was going to follow. In Homecoming Floyd describes Mollie when she arrived, “happy and sparking and delightfully talkative.” But soon-under the pressure of societal approbation, immediate pregnancy, and life with her thirty-five-year-old, brooding husband-a new Mollie emerged. “Marriage had tamed this wild bird,” Floyd observed. It was one thing to be an anarchist and advocate free love from afar, quite another to fit this philosophy into the Iowa she encountered.
“Though Stone Be Broken”
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

What Jig had omitted from his letter was that Mollie was once more pregnant, but that fact did not alter his determination to end the marriage. A young wife who suffered from morning sickness, fatigued by caring for a toddler, and frustrated by her inability to recapture her own sense of vitality and self was hardly the muse Jig needed. Susan was ready and willing to provide a different kind of inspiration. At first, they were discreet. Their meetings were ostensibly to discuss his stalled novel and her new one. Soon, however, they took on a project that provided them opportunities to be together under the guise of social action. During the winter of 1910, the Labor Lyceum of Davenport sponsored a series of Sunday lectures. The speaker at the February 14 meeting, presided over by Jig, was Rabbi Fineshriber, whose talk “A Study in Religious Liberty” outlined the gradual encroachment of religious institutions in secular life and warned of such creeping theocracy. It was Susan who stood up at the end and described an example of just such an encroachment in the community. Recently the library board, appointed by the mayor, had voted to censure head librarian Marilla Freeman’s request for the purchase of a highly praised book entitled The Finality of the Christian Religion, written by George Foster, professor of the philosophy of religion at the University of Chicago. A newspaper reporter attending the lecture printed Susan’s criticism of the board, and it became the opening volley in what came to be known in Davenport as the “library controversy.” Responding
Staging Area for the Future
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

While Jig was waiting for his divorce, Susan spent most of her time writing and traveling. Although her family and Jig’s were not yet aware of their affair and their intention to marry, she was slowly disentangling herself from Davenport and home and moving physically and psychically closer to New York and the life they intended to establish there. She met with publisher Frederick A. Stokes to see about the publication of The Visioning, which appeared in April 1911. It is dedicated to her mother, and the epigraph, taken from Proverbs 29 reads, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Interlude R Greenwich Village, 1913: The Joyous Season
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

The spring of 1913 was a perfect time to start a new life, and Greenwich Village was the perfect place to do it. Other midwestern writers, artists, political activists, and seekers of change, like Susan, were heading there for many of the reasons that had motivated the original westward thrust: new opportunities, new freedoms, and new frontiers to conquer. As Ruth Holland explains in Fidelity about her own decision to restart her life in the East: “There were new poets in the world; there were bold new thinkers; there was an amazing new art; science was reinterpreting the world and workers and women were setting themselves free. Everywhere the old pattern was being shot through with new ideas. Everywhere were new attempts at a better way of doing things.” Besides, Holland adds, in New York City-unlike Freeport, “Nothing is mapped out.”
War and Peace
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Susan and Jig returned to Greenwich Village for the winter of 1914 but continued to consult realtors in Provincetown, looking for a cottage to buy. In the middle of May the Provincetown Advocate-which always referred to Susan by her married name-announced that “Mr. and Mrs. George Cram Cook have returned from New York and will occupy the Roseboro cottage, their last summer’s residence during the coming season.” Soon after their arrival, however, they purchased a home of their own, at 5 64 Commercial Street. It remained Susan’s residence for the rest of her life. In appearance it was typical of the houses in the area: a one-and-a-half-story Cape Cod “half-house,” resembling cottages in Corn-wall and Devon. Katie Dos Passos, who later lived across the street with her husband, John, described such houses as deceiving. “They seem frail but are sturdy, look small but are larger than they look, they are plainly built out of plain materials, and their chief beauty is their proportion.” The entrance, situated on the side, led immediately into the dining area; to the left was the living room/sitting room, facing the street and running the width of the house; to the right was a large rectangular kitchen. Between the two rooms, facing the door, were enclosed stairs that led to the second-floor sleeping rooms above the parlor and dining room. Behind the house was space for a garden.
A Theatre on a Wharf
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Just after New Year’s Day 1915, while Susan was still in Davenport, Jig wrote to tell her of the latest buzzing in the Village. A group calling itself the Washington Square Players had been formed and was planning to produce plays; they had even asked him to perform. “I said yes. You know I harbor a belief that maybe I can act.”1 Since he arrived in New York, Floyd had been in charge of play offerings at the Liberal Club, written by him and performed by a group nicknamed the “Dell Players,” including Helen Westley, Sherwood Anderson, Edward Goodman, and Kirah Markham. The audience, all Village friends, were greatly amused by the clever parodies of themselves and their lifestyle, and most seemed unconcerned by the lack of production values. However, there were some who longed for more. The 1911 Abbey Players tour of America had shown what theatre could be. Robert Edmond Jones had seen the Irish company and marveled at its skill in moving an audience: a fisherman’s house evoked by the mere placement of a net; peasant women indicated simply by bare feet and homespun skirts. Returning from Berlin, where he had worked with the legendary director Max Reinhardt, Jones dreamed of creating “images of magni-ficence” instead of the recipe-theatre he found on Broadway.
Summer 1916, Two Playwrights
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

It seemed that everyone in Greenwich Village wanted to get to Provincetown one way or another in the summer of 1916. Harry Kemp, the self-proclaimed tramp poet, who had a keen sense of where things were happening and an inflated appreciation of his own work, put an ad in the New York Times in May, asking for the use of a cottage there in exchange for “the manuscript of a well-known poet, an unpublished volume of verse. Leaser would receive any royalties that might accrue from the volume.”1 There is no record of how many responses Kemp received, but John Francis arranged for Kemp and his wife, the actor Mary Pyne, to stay in Francis’s Flats, the studios above his grocery store. Whether money changed hands is doubtful; Francis’s usual arrangement for impoverished writers to whom he took a fancy was to ask, “Oh, twenty-five dollars from now until the snow flies.” Francis provided similar rooms under similar terms for Eugene O’Neill in the following years and became his devoted friend, taking charge of repairing and renting O’Neill’s property, paying the taxes, securing domestic help, and handling other problems that came up. He fulfilled the same services for Susan and for other writers and artists. His grocery store was their meeting place, a sign entreating and inviting: “Please loaf in the rear.” Selling for him was less interesting than listening to the stories and ideas of those who gathered there.
A New Kind of Theatre
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Susan returned alone to Provincetown to put the house in order and to plan for the next several months. She and Jig had talked vaguely about spending the winter in Dobbs Ferry, New York, with the Hapgoods, Jig making the trip into the city from there and Susan joining him occasionally. After their separation, the idea sounded less appealing to both, despite its financial benefits. However, as she had been in 1914, Susan was hesitant about joining Jig, either an indication of recurring tensions or her ongoing concern about money. “Of course I want you to live in New York with me.... I feel terrible cut off from the Little Bear,” he assured her soon after he settled into his temporary quarters in one of Jack Reed’s rooms at 43 Washington Square South. Jack had offered the place because he and Louise were now living in the house he had just purchased in Truro. They became the first of the Provincetown crowd to seek the quiet of this smaller nearby community.
Inheritors
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Now that she was on “sabbatical,” Susan had the luxury of stepping back from the daily demands of the Players to think about new directions. “The Nervous Pig,” one of the two stories she wrote during the summer of 1919, explores this question of “busyness” and what happens to a person when “the mechanics of living ate life up.” The protagonist is a scholar who nervously burrows in details “in order to deepen his knowledge of life,” only to find he has somehow forgotten to live. He is like the pig of the title, who, nervous over motherhood, has eaten one of her young. For Susan, too, during the past few years, the mechanics of establishing and running the theatre had made it impossible for her to do much else. She and Jig were now free to break this pattern. One thing they did was to buy a Model Ford to start enjoying the surrounding areas on the Cape. Susan approached the car with much trepidation as she did all mechanical things that required that she do something with them.
Picking Up the Pieces
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Susan arrived back in the United States on March 16, 1924. She went first to Davenport to see her mother. She then spent a month with Lucy and her husband Eddie Goodman in New York, finally returning to Provincetown with Lucy to reopen her house and restart her life without Jig. Hardly had she time to unpack, however, when she was embroiled once more in an issue that had been simmering during her time away: the future of the Provincetown Players and her relation to the theatre. While she and Jig had been in Greece, Edna Kenton had acted as faithful proxy, keeping them apprised of the ongoing struggles on MacDougal Street through scrupulously detailed accounts, which would have done credit to any war correspondent. During the 1922-23 season, the Players had signed a two-year lease for the theatre at 133 MacDougal Street and had sublet it the first year. In the late spring of 1923, the lease once more reverted to them, and they once more had to decide who would occupy the space and what the group would be called. In June 1923, Edna reported that four of the seven corporation signators now wished to take over the theatre. She backed this move, arguing that it was better to allow them to do so than to return the property to Mrs. Belardi once and for all. Unlike other groups who had wanted to run it, they at least had some connections to the past and some claim to the name.
Novel Times
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

Now that The Road to the Temple was behind her, Susan was anxious to return to fiction. In preparation she began avidly to read new novels-and there were many from which to choose. In the three years since her return from Greece, Willa Cather had published The Professor’s House, My Mortal Enemy, and Death Comes to the Archbishop; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises; and John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer. All, with the possible exception of Cather’s, were examples of a new sensibility at work, a modernist bent, addressed to a postwar audience that no longer looked for, or believed in, one universal order or overriding belief system or ideal to guide their lives. Susan held to the idealist notion that love might meliorate the alienation of the present period and provide a lost generation with a compass pointing home. Rather than plots with complications and clear resolutions, these novels presented fragments of daily life and personal relationships without any attempt to systematize or explain either. For Susan, such writing was interesting, even admirable, but not what she wanted to do. She had begun her career as a newspaper writer at the beginning of the century, and she still believed in the efficacy of stories and the truths derived from them. She might believe that “Life, too is combinations that baffle classification,” and she might desire to break forms and move her women characters out of confining circles, but as far as her fiction went, she was still wedded to traditional structures.
Break Up
Authors: Ben-Zvi Linda
Published: November 2023

After the furor surrounding the Pulitzer, Susan felt the need to distance herself as much as possible from New York. Even Truro seemed too close. London had always warmly embraced her work, so she decided in the fall to finally visit there. Throughout the late summer of 193 I she made plans, trying to find a ship that suited their requirements-that is, a ready supply of alcohol. For Norman drinking was a way of dealing with his writer’s block, and he would begin his day with a few drinks to fortify himself. Susan, more abstemious because less fearful of her skill, only began drinking in the early afternoon after putting in her usual workday. When she was in New York, she did not drink at all, finding it impossible both to “do New York” and to drink. Navigating in the city was difficult enough for her because of the recurrent problem with her foot, which required that she wear a special shoe and brace whenever she stood or walked for extended periods. Yet, for her, too, drinking had now become part of her daily routine.
“Out Of Their Mouths”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

The author of Southern Road draws this “fair sampling of current talk among American Negroes from a store of conversations harvested up and down the Atlantic Seaboard, from Massachusetts to Mississippi, but mainly in the Deep South.” He writes: “Whether in army camps or juke joints or dorms or offices or commissaries or cabins or Jim Crow coaches or bus stations, I naturally found more wartime grousing than beatitudes. “A few were recorded on the spot at interviews; far more were bootlegged into many small notebooks, which sometimes got me into embarrassing predicaments and occasionally got me out of them. In their rendering, I found no better advice than Chaucer’s, written six centuries ago:
“Fats”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

The two fellows in the box of a smoker on the Georgia Central Railroad looked up when I came in, glancing distrustfully at my brief-case, and stopped talking. But after I had passed the time of day with them, with a word or two about the weather and the train, they opened up. One tall, fairly well-dressed chap went on with his complaining: “They tell me the Army is like a convict camp. Course I ain’t never been on no chain-gang, so I wouldn’t know. I wanted to be a Pullman Porter, now Sam is calling. I don’t mind going, but I don’t want it to be like no convict camp. One thing sure, if I ever get to be a free man again, I’ll never live in the South anymore.” Several railroad workers got on at a flag-stop on the edge of Atlanta. They were too many for the box which had only two long benches facing each other, divided by arms into four seats each. Two of them tried to squeeze in one of the seats, with a lot of laughter. It was Saturday; the weekend off had already started; some were already feeling their liquor. They were riding a fellow they called Scrapper, who wasn’t taking it so well.
“Words On A Bus”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

The first one who got on was a little girl with a market bag half as large as she; then came a sturdy urchin, rubbing his eyes, pushed along by his young, small mother, carrying bundles and a sleeping baby. An old man, having told the driver he was just helping his daughter with her things, started stowing away a big suitcase. Fortunately the couple behind me got off at Fayette and a seat was vacant. As this family entered, one of the wits in the Caucasian front of the bus had said, “Eeny-meeny-miney-mo!” Some of his mates tittered. He even looked back to our section for appreciation. It was not long after the patch of light had left the old man standing there at the culvert that the talk began. Most of us were a little beaten by the jolting and grinding of the bus; many had drowsed off, waking only when the driver clicked the lights on at Lorman, Fayette, the culvert. Before the lights went off again, however, one man had come up and sat himself on the arm of the chair opposite the mother and her brood. He asked her where she was going. She told him that she was hoping to get off at the bottom of a hill near a gas station and soft-drink place just before the bus got into Natchez itself. The bus driver, He, had told her that he didn’t know whether he could let off there or not, he didn’t know the place that she was talking about and that she’d better go on to the Tri-State bus depot in mid-city. But she hoped that she wouldn’t have to go there; she didn’t want to have to carry all of that luggage and those children all that way. Not with them sleepy and crying. But if she could get off at the foot of the hill, it wasn’t nowheres at all from there. Not nowheres, hardly.
“Symbol Of The Old South”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

I should see Natchez, I had been told, “where the Old South still lives.” Here, I learned from the guidebooks, more of the old plantation homes were still maintained than anywhere else; here “the leisurely charm of the Old South has lingered long after it was supplanted elsewhere by the grim efficiency of the twentieth century.”
“Gee’s Bend”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

“Man, what you want to see is Gee’s Bend,” B. T. said in Atlanta, and went on to tell me how far back the place was both in the sticks and in customs. If I could get in, that is, because if the water was high I couldn’t; and if it rained while I was there, I couldn’t get out. There was no guarantee, he added, that I would get out even in dry weather, if I made any missteps while down among those people. At Tuskegee I heard that the inaccessibility of Gee’s Bend had been exaggerated. But the legend of the wildness of the natives was current. The tall waiter at the lunchroom said, “Man, they say the folks are rough down there. Live like wild people. Whenever somebody up here at school doesn’t know how to act they tell him, ‘You must be from Gee’s Bend.’ I’d sure like to see that place.” I had read accounts of Gee’s Bend; one had made the New York Times; and I had planned definitely to see it, even before I heard the legends. Over at the Veterans Hospital, Dr. Peters expressed a long standing interest, partly professional, in the community which he had heard described as quite primitive. He wanted to go along. So did Max Bond of Tuskegee, but under the pressure of securing teachers for the coming school year, he couldn’t manage the trip. Nevertheless, with typically generous hospitality, he put a station wagon at my disposal, and Pete, and Moore the driver, an old friend by this time, and I set out one early Saturday morning.
“Insurance Executive”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

Though quite busy, E. M. Martin, secretary of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, affably gave me much time, and proved to be a good talker. He is a sturdily built, sharp-featured man with shrewd eyes; his color is that of sunburned white Southerners; his thin, graying hair is straight. He is energetic and forceful, and from all quarters I heard that he was a resourceful business man. One of his immediate concerns was an eight millimeter technicolor motion picture called “The Parade of Negro Progress” that the Atlanta Life Company had been exhibiting throughout the South. The picture took two years and a lot of money to make, he told me. The machinery belonged to the company and a photographer was employed for the filming and showing. Martin candidly admitted that the primary object of the film was to make money, but in a clean honest way, he said, “to build friendships, and to show others what we’re doing. Many Negro schoolboys in their history classes learned only one thing pertaining to the Negro and that is that Lincoln freed the slaves.” The picture stresses the “highlights of Negro life,” with such items as the Negro hospital in St. Louis, a commencement at Atlanta University, the new plant at the Tennessee A & I State College at Nashville, the celebration at Daytona Cookman Institute when Mrs. Roosevelt went down there on Mrs. Bethune’s anniversary; Negro farmers in southwest Georgia with large mechanized farms, warehouses, fine mule and horse teams, well-fed cattle, and tractors at work in the fields; hair-dressing establishments; the bank in Atlanta; girls at the intricate statistical machines in the Atlanta Life offices; gas stations owned and manned by Negroes; Paul Laurence Dunbar’s home in Dayton, Ohio; green troops marching in the camps; Negro pilots taking off at Tuskegee; Dean William Pickens selling bonds. And so the list went. “It would be an all-day proposition if we showed all the stuff,” Martin said. So it was edited to meet local interest, with the school and church stuff varying according to the section. When shown in Texas, for instance, a few Texas churches and schools would be spliced in.
“Let’s Look At Your Base”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

He comes naturally by his spunk. He and his sister told me tales of the family proving that. Their grandmother Ellen was their pride. Her slave master found places for all the good-looking slaves to work in the house, and when she came to Louisiana from far off Virginia, a fine looking fair woman, he put her to work in the house too. Old Mistis didn’t like her as well as Master did. Once when they were having a big party, Ellen made some mistake, and she was threatened with a whipping after the party was over. When the time came, Ellen was made to take off every piece she had on. At the third lick, however, she flew through the yard and sat on the front gallery on the base of one of the columns: “Stark bark naked” was the phrase her grandson used. Ellen was still young, but she was the mother of a child. The white children made a great fuss, yelling, “Look at Ellen, stark naked!” Mistis got all upset and ordered Ellen around to the back. But Ellen would not leave her perch until assured that she wouldn’t be whipped. Every time after that when Ellen was threatened with a whipping, she would dutifully strip and then go around to the front gallery, stark naked, to wait. Ole Mistis got sick of seeing Ellen walking around naked in front of her children and menfolks, and soon Ellen was no longer whipped. She had made a front porch affair out of what was supposed to be a back door matter.
“No Ties That Bind”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

I saw other historical cities: Lynchburg, Virginia; Augusta and Athens, Georgia; Nashville, Louisville, Montgomery, Mobile, and Vicksburg. Although called a “valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,” North Carolina still cherishes its old homesteads like its neighbors. In New Bern I saw the well-preserved homes and churches that resembled those of far-off Salem, Massachusetts, with whom the town traded, more than they do those of nearer Williamsburg and Charleston. In the Salem part of Winston-Salem, the com-pact and rugged dwellings and churches, graced with the hooded entrances that the Moravian settlers brought down from Pennsylvania, had a warm dignity that pleased me more than the ostentatious homes of the tobacco barons in the suburbs of Winston. Throughout the South almost every town had one or two showplaces. Sometimes on a back road an old columned big house would suddenly loom at the end of an avenue of cedars or out of a grove, or from high grown scrub pine. I saw many houses falling to pieces, the paint peeling or gone, the floors sprung, the roofs sagging, the blinds askew. In the towns, several decaying mansions took in poor whites or Negro roomers; I found two that were colored Y.M.C.A.s, and one that was an old folks’ home.
“Vicious Circle”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

It is not good to admit, but like many members of the teaching profession since Socrates, I have collected students’ “boners.” I was a party to a session discussing boners at the end of one summer school at Atlanta University. Three of us teachers gathered in the hall, near the rooms where our students were taking examinations by a sort of honor system. “I won’t stay out too long,” said Tic. “I don’t want them to steal too much of the wrong stuff.” “If they know where to find what I asked for in the books in one hour, they’re good enough to pass,” Bacote said. I had just about decided what grade my students had reached in the six-weeks gallop, so I was also at ease. Bacote said, “Man, I’ve got some howlers here. I corrected the papers last night for my American history class. Listen to these.” He read excerpts. We laughed. I asked to copy down two of the answers. One went as follows: “During the early days of history two men said they founded America and Columbus died thinking all the time that he had destroyed America. In 1492:
“Signs Of Improvement”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

With the hearty good cheer of a doctor at the bedside of a very sick patient, Virginius Dabney says, “Negro education has made tremendous strides below Mason and Dixon’s line during the past several decades.” I am skeptical of the word tremendous; it must have different meanings on different sides of the line. The best authorities that I could find agree that the patient has better than a fighting chance and that he is on the mend. But he is still a very sick man, and it will be long before he takes any tremendous strides. I have been as anxious as any to see signs of improvement. I have read reports of the philanthropic foundations; it is difficult to imagine what the diagnosis of Negro education would be had it not been for their generosity. Scattered over the South are nearly six thousand Rosenwald schools, warrants to a skeptical people of what could be done. And now the Rosenwald Fund is concentrating on the realistic preparation of rural teachers. The General Education Board, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Slater Fund, and the Jeanes Foundation have poured millions of dollars into Southern education, especially for Negroes. This philanthropy has meant the setting up of state agents for Negro schools who have worked to raise the standards of teachers and high schools; the partial payment of Jeanes supervisors; surveys, summer workshops, publications, and scholarships.
“And He Never Said A Mumbalin’ Word”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

Though he preferred talking of other things, Roland Hayes was a long way from forgetting Rome. His mobile face was expressive of anger and disgust when he referred to the apologetic note in the white press that the clerk did not know who he was, as if that could serve for apology. “I know that they knew who I was,” he said. “It wasn’t just a little rumpus.” He saw design in it. And the hushhush campaign was bad too: “They try to put blinders on us so that we cannot see. With troubles like this all around, they tell us to keep our eyes straight ahead.” Roland Hayes is not a propagandist, and he did not want this injustice to be made into a cause célèbre, nor into mere publicity of another outrage. He wanted something definitely done, something that would stick. Just as the trouble had affected the entire group, so he felt the punishments should be far-reaching. But he wasn’t talking much along that score. The affair was in the hands of his legal counsel and the NAACP. According to Cliff McKay, he promised the full details of the story in his forthcoming autobiography, but the book appeared with only this reference: “Once, not so long ago, I was beaten and thrown into jail.” Roland Hayes continues in his autobiography: “But I see no good in reciting the details of a thousand such misadventures.” And he tells of a white minister who wanted “to take up with somebody” a case in Duluth of discrimination. “There is nothing you can do,” Hayes said. “That is a job for me and my own people.” In that sentence probably lies the key to what perplexed several persons in Roland Hayes’s comments after the case. He confronted his ordeal with what seemed to be an oriental fatalism, probably derived from Africa, which, I learned later, informed so much of his personal philosophy. Was it a Gandhi policy of passive resistance, I wondered? I was not then and am not now sure. He had stacks of letters of condolence and protest; several of them, especially from Southern white sympathizers, who praised his lack of bitterness. And the white press focused their stories more on his statement, “As for me I am not bitter toward anyone, for the humiliation is on the other side. I am only ashamed that this should happen in my native state.”
“Po’ Wanderin’ Pildom, Miserus Chile”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

When Horace Mann Bond and Willis James regaled me with a report on their 1942 Summer Festival of Folk Music at Fort Valley, I was struck with envy. W. C. Handy, an honored guest, had played “St. Louis Blues” on his cornet, backed by a Georgia jam band of harmonica, guitar, and washboard. Buster Ezelle had sung “Salt Water Blues” to his own guitar playing, and then had played a oneman duet on guitar and a harmonica harnessed around his neck. The prize-winner for originality had played “John Henry” on a strand of haywire strung between two bricks on a plank. An inventor, this fellow certainly was going to have his music. But these were curiosities, Willis assured me: the real musical value of the festival lay in the guitar playing and singing. My unconcealed envy touched the sympathies of my informants, who put their heads together, invited me down to Fort Valley State College to give a talk, and managed to raise traveling expenses so that the two prize-winning quartets of the Festival could again drive over from Macon.
“Jitterbugs’ Joy”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

Before the war ban on bus traveling, Atlanta was a good city for one-night stands. Several Negro businessmen formed an entertainment company to sponsor Negro name-bands at the municipal auditorium. Under all-Negro management the affairs had only a comparative sprinkling of whites. But they weren’t missed; the Negroes came in droves. As Al Moron, the manager of the housing project, complained to me, “Atlanta Negroes will turn out in crowds for only two things: a free revival in church and a pay dance at the auditorium.” The crowds that I saw at those dances were composed largely of high school youngsters, of teen age, or in the early twenties: the boys in polo shirts and full draped trousers; the girls in flowered print dresses, or snuggling sweaters, dark skirts, bright colored socks, and low-heeled shoes. The place belonged to them those nights, and they took the lid off. Between numbers they screamed and chased each other about, but when the music started, they either went silently into their pirouetting, stamping routine, or pressed around the footlights, staring hungrily at the famous jazzmen, anticipating time-honored riffs, applauding triumphantly at some startling improvisation, more often taut and concentrating, slaves to the harmony and the rhythm.
“Cubs”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

Without difficulty Lieutenant Marchbanks, medical officer of the primary field at Tuskegee, obtained permission for me to hang around the headquarters room. There was a board indicating times of flight and records of the flyers. A placard read: “Don’t forget that aviation is not unsafe, but like the sea is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness or neglect.” A cartoon showing a torn-up house, its chimney off, and the tail of an airplane sticking out of it, told of “A Very Hot Pilot”: A very hot pilot was Henry Hightowers Who boasted of having three hundred hours To prove it he dove on his girl’s house one day They would have been married the fifteenth of May. In spite of these warnings, the flyers had made some mistakes, as indicated by gold stars beside their names. Mistakes were inevitable. Nevertheless, as instructor Charley Woods told me, it didn’t take but one mistake to bring down the curtain. Extra severity in marking the cadets might save trouble later. Charley was a tall, slim, nonchalant chap, with whom I could talk easily, especially when he recited a few stanzas of my Slim Greer poems. He had the reputation of being one hell of a fine pilot.
“Primary Field”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

John circled low over a patch of woods, landed on a large field, and jockeyed to the large hangar. Since it was Sunday, there weren’t many people about, but I met several mechanics, electricians, and a licensed parachute rigger. John named the planes for me: a Howard, nicknamed DGA for “damned good aeroplane”; a dismantled Stinson, a rugged, reliable load carrier; several Luscombes, Wacos, and small yellow Cubs for pilot training. John showed me the Link trainer for blind flying and described it: “They put you in, pull down the hood, and you get every sensation of flying. You’re supposed to learn to fly entirely by instruments.” At the field, cadets receive primary training under civilian instructors furnished by Tuskegee Institute under contract with the Army. The training is supervised by the Army, the maintenance by Tuskegee Institute. The general manager is G. L. Washington, formerly director of mechanical industries at Tuskegee. He told me a great deal of the history and purposes of the field. He had corralled Negroes from all over the country from Boston to Texas: pilots, airplane engineers, men trained in Civil Aeronautics, mechanics, all the many technicians needed not only for teaching flying but also to service engines, aircraft, and manage the multiple duties connected with aeronautics. The staff met all the standards. The prevailing attitude had been that of the skeptic who asked in the Congressional Record for February 1939 “if a Negro could really fly a plane,” though at that time there were approximately three hundred licensed Negro pilots. The Army naturally made frequent investigations to see that the field met the strict stipulations, and, every time, maintenance and training came up to snuff.
What’s the Matter with Reception Study?
Authors: Radway Janice
Published: November 2023

In posing the question contained in my title, my aim is not to suggest that reception study is somehow ailing. In fact, since the early 1980s, it has become an accepted part of literary studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and the still-developing field called “history of the book.” Judging by the success of titles such as Purnima Mankekar’s Screening Culture, Viewing Politics (1999), Elizabeth Bird’s Audience in Everyday Life (2003), Elizabeth Long’s Book Clubs (2003), and Lila Abu-Lughod’s Dramas of Nationhood (2005), different forms of reception study have established a substantial foothold within anthropology and sociology as well. Given the widespread adoption of reception study as a scholarly method, as well as the range of careful critiques of some of its founding assumptions, one would think that it would not be necessary to reflect further on the concept of reception or to raise the question of whether the research paradigm built on it will remain a useful one for the foreseeable future.
Blue Danube
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Film history offers Grand Hotel as one of the first Hollywood movies to layer scenes with nondiegetic music. Here, however, that process betrays its own immaturity by sending contradictory signals. Thus, beginning with the opening overhead lobby shot, Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube Waltz plays continuously for several minutes on the soundtrack, presumably issuing from the ballroom’s orchestra (boasting about his new residence, Kringelein claims, “[There’s] music all the time”).
Coffin
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In a shot unlike any other in Grand Hotel, the Baron’s coffin is loaded onto a Dickensian horse-drawn hearse and taken away. Outside the hotel’s luxury, beyond the film’s carefully planned sets and calculated lighting, something leaks through. Workers go about their unnamed business, moving in and out of overexposed sunlight and underlit shadows, as if in a documentary, or a dream. Men load packages, laughing and shouting, as the Baron’s body leaves the hotel. Any detailed description of this scene would necessarily include these elements.
Flaemmchen
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Flaemmchen (or Flämmchen, as Baum writes the name), is the diminutive of Flamme, “little flame.” While her name suggests the character’s sexual appeal and casual virtue, it also evokes the German expression auf kleiner Flammen kochen, literally “to cook over little flames” or “to make do with very little,” a connotation suiting Flaemmchen, who, as she admits to the Baron, gets by on “one meal a day.” The translation into English, however, sheds these connotations, and by doing so shifts Grand Hotel’s register from allegory to novel. In a famous objection to what he referred to as Anthony Trollope’s “fantastic names,” Henry James proposed: It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as an historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere.
Garbo
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Although to a modern audience, the Greta Garbo of Grand Hotel appears at least in her mid-30s, she was only 26 during the movie’s filming and thus 6 years younger than Julia Roberts in Notting Hill, 10 years younger than Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality, and 11 years younger than Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, all of whom seem, to contemporary eyes, far younger. Why? We know, of course, that standards of beauty evolve and that Garbo’s statuesque perfection (celebrated by Roland Barthes) has given way to a more idiosyncratic “cuteness.” When did this transformation begin? A quick answer: at some point between 1932, with Grand Hotel, and 1945, when the remake, Week-end at the Waldorf, replaced Garbo with the cute-not- beautiful Ginger Rogers, 34 at the time, but still capable of doing (as Garbo never was) what David Thomson calls “her child impersonations” (see The Major and the Minor, where the Garbo’s stardom, however, does seem vaguely threatening.