Dust Tracks on a Road: Chapters 9–12

I resented being patronized, more than the monotony of the job; those presumptuous cut-eye looks and supposed-to-be accidental touches on the thigh to see how I took to things.

I resented being patronized, more than the monotony of the job; those presumptuous cut-eye looks and supposed-to-be accidental touches on the thigh to see how I took to things.

I resented being patronized, more than the monotony of the job; those presumptuous cut-eye looks and supposed-to-be accidental touches on the thigh to see how I took to things.

I remember committing to memory, Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard over night, lest I never get a chance to read it again.

It would be dramatic in a Cinderella way if I were to say that the well-dressed students at school snubbed me and shoved me around, but that I studied hard and triumphed over them.

But at other times he would talk to me quite seriously about attitudes, points of view, why one man was great and another a mere facile politician, and so on.

It was only that night in bed that I analyzed the whole thing and realized that I was giving sanction to Jim Crow, which theoretically, I was supposed to resist.

But here were ten Negro barbers, three porters and two manicurists all stirred up at the threat of our living through loss of patronage.

Listening to him, I decided that I must be an English teacher and lean over my desk and discourse on the 18th-Century poets, and explain the roots of the modern novel.

He used to lunch every day with E. D. Davis, head of the Greek and German department. Davis was just the antithesis of Williams, so shy, in the Charles S. Johnson manner, in spite of his erudition.

He used to lunch every day with E. D. Davis, head of the Greek and German department. Davis was just the antithesis of Williams, so shy, in the Charles S. Johnson manner, in spite of his erudition.

She laid down a heavy barrage around E. C. Williams. He leaned back in his chair in the midst of her too obvious play and said suddenly, “Girlie, you would flirt with the Pope.”

She had her own plans all worked out what to do about the schism. I saw that they believed her so I just let it go, as much as it hurt me inside.

I have no lurid tales to tell of race discrimination at Barnard.

She was a New York girl with a sumptuous home down in W. 71st Street, near the Hudson.

Away from his office, Dr. Boas is full of youth and fun, and abhors dull, stodgy arguments. Get to the point is his idea. Don’t raise a point which you cannot defend.

It was a long step for the waif of Eatonville. From the depth of my inner heart I appreciated the fact that the world had not been altogether unkind to Mama’s child.

The first is his insatiable hunger for knowledge and then more knowledge; and the second is his genius for pure objectivity.

Often when she wished to impress upon me my garrulity, she would take this book from the shelf and read me something of Indian beauty and restraint.

She was merciless to a lie, spoken, acted or insinuated.

In some places, the “law” is forbidden to come on the premises to hunt for malefactors who did their malefacting elsewhere.

Big Sweet helped me to collect material in a big way. She had no idea what I wanted with it, but if I wanted it, she meant to see to it that I got it. She pointed out people who knew songs and stories. She wouldn’t stand for balkiness on their part.

My friend was large and portly, but extremely light on her feet.

A Negro barrister, who is not yellow, but who liked to think he was, had thrown down the gauntlet to Young.

Botts was up for reelection, and the young white stripling was dressed to “stand” for Botts’s district, which was in the outer Islands.

He was dressed in the latest from London and quite the patrician.

On Saturday, Leon Walton Young, his protégée and his coterie of workers boarded a big black boat to go out to Aleuthera.

The humble Negroes of America are great song-makers, but the Bahaman is greater. He is more prolific and his tunes are better. Nothing is too big, or little, to be “put in sing.”

Once they got started, the “lies” just rolled and story-tellers fought for a chance to talk. It was the same with the songs. The one thing to be guarded against, in the interest of truth, was over-enthusiasm. For instance, if a song was going good, and the material ran out, the singer was apt to interpolate pieces of other songs into it.

He described the awful slaughter as the Amazons sacked the city...The plight of those who fled through the gates to fall into the hands of the male warriors outside.

But, it was a tremendous thrill, though utterly macabre.
I went Canzo in Voodoo ceremonies in Haiti and the ceremonies were both beautiful and terrifying.

It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms, yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no.

I have seen the effects of that concert in all the Negro singing groups since then. Primitive Negro dancing has been given tremendous impetus.

They had marched with Colonel Shaw during the Civil War and hurled back the forces of the iniquitous South, who sought to hold black men in bondage.

But my own pinnacle would be made to reel and rock anyway by other things I heard from the very people who always applauded “the great speech,’’ when it was shouted to them from the school-house rostrum.

For instance, let some member of the community do or say something which was considered either dumb or venial and the verdict would be...

Somebody mocked Bronner’s cries and moans a time or two and the crowd laughed immoderately.

Then I would hear so much self- deprecation that I would be deflated.

I do not coyly admit to a touch of the tarbrush to my Indian and white ancestry.

Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!