("The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois"), "The Lions of Fifth Avenue"

[fiefoe]

I stopped around 53%. It may sound really petty but Ailey's ill-considered tangle with Abdul turned me off the most. Once again I seem to have stepped into the first novel trap, well-regarded as Honorée Fanonne Jeffers may be.

• The Treaty of New York in 1790, and the realization that our land would be fertile for short-staple cotton, and after this, there came an invention by a man named Eli Whitney. Think of him, a man stewing in the juice of mediocrity, the blankness of his legacy breathing down his neck, tinkering with his rude invention. Or did a slave invent the gin, as some have said? Workers tend to have more genius than the boss, to reduce the strain of labor.
• “Ailey, how many times have I told you that ‘ma’am’ is servant talk and we are not servants? At least we are not on my side of the family.”
• More white men along with their wives and children had pushed further west, bringing their ways of collecting days on paper, instead of recording moons.
• These are the incongruities of memory. It is hard to hold on to the entirety of something, but pieces may be held up to light.
• My mother wasn’t much into art. She tended to use books as decoration instead: one wall of our living room was taken up by custom shelves. The former owners had installed them, and when the real estate agent had walked my mother through the house and she saw those shelves, she’d instantly put down a bid.
• She’d read Out of Africa, and unless the movie had seriously changed the story, it should have been depressing as hell. The protagonist had syphilis.
• the twelve others in my tribe looked at me blankly whenever I offered my special, colored-person smile, which communicated that we were in this integration thing together. In the dining room if I put my tray down next to someone Black, they would rise and relocate at another table, sitting down in a sea of whiteness. The Black girls were the worst: none of them knew how to fix their hair. Besides me, every single girl relaxed, but didn’t grease at all. Their dry edges looked so broken and defeated.
• "Women push the family forward, Ailey, not backward. You are very, very brown, so you must find someone much fairer than yourself. You must think of your children. "
• The sailors threw her into the sea without the sheets used as shrouds for the two white men who had perished on board. The sharks tore at Kiné’s comrade, the water filling with her meat. It was the nature of those sea-swimming things: brutality seeks what is nearest.
• The mulatto boy held the woman down while the trader did the ax work. When the screaming started, Beauty made a bare spot in her mind. She crawled into it.
• Because I was a child, I’d believed what they told me, no matter how kind or cruelly they behaved. I lived surrounded by a fence made up of trust, one I’d assumed couldn’t be knocked down. But the day I heard Lydia yelling in my grandmother’s foyer, I walked up to that fence. The barest of touches and it fell so easily. This was the barrier separating my childhood from some other place.
• I walked over to Boukie and punched him in the arm, so he’d know I was full of contempt and painful possibility. <> He stuck his tongue out. “That ain’t hurt.”
• When Tommy Jr. showed on Sunday to sit with Pearl on her porch like he always did, I told him I hadn’t appreciated his calling me a nigger, but he said I would have appreciated swinging from that pecan tree even less, and he wasn’t about to apologize. That’s how my brother was. A savior one minute, and a white racist the next.
• but already, we both were smitten with her. She’d memorized that entire page on double consciousness from The Souls of Black Folk!
• she remembered that her mother’s grandfather had been called a “marabout,” which Kiné had told her was somebody who had power of Spirit. More than a preacher. A man who knew about medicines and roots and plants and things in the air that couldn’t be seen, but still existed. An important man. A man with power, and now she knew that one of Midas’s folks had been important and powerful, too.
• Aggie walked to the lantern and picked it up, then went back to the child, who was naked, too. Aggie lifted the lantern, and as the light cast its godly benediction, she saw the child was Mamie.
• “Down south, civilized Black men don’t carry weapons on our persons. We carry our intellects. Down here, African Americans must learn how to improvise. That’s what Mr. Booker T. Washington did at Tuskegee, and what Mr. De Saussure did here as well. He knew that certain southern whites did not want African Americans going to college, so he tricked those whites by requiring the vocational track. That way, they wouldn’t know he also was teaching us science, math, literature, and foreign languages.
• She planned to be a lawyer and live in Atlanta, so she needed Beta membership, because there wasn’t an African American city official in that town with any clout who didn’t have Greek letters—
• And Belle never had seen so many light-skinned folks congregated in one place. In particular, the sororities were filled with the fairest girls, whose curly, waved, or stick-straight hair definitely could pass a fine-tooth-comb test. Each of the sororities seemed to have a strict quota for members who were darker than brown paper bags, too, for there were no more than two girls per organization who could be characterized as “high brown.” Belle felt like a fly in the proverbial buttermilk,
• these were the years when the white men in the area would drive up to the tall iron fence protecting the college proper. They would park and lean against their cars for two or three hours, watching. Just watching, before they climbed back in their cars and drove away.
• her in-laws. They didn’t throw each other secret smiles or exchange any significant glances. There was a chilly unfriendliness between them, which made Belle hopeful. It seemed they weren’t united in their disapproval of her.
• When Belle’s time came, Dr. Moorhead brought in a group of male residents, who took turns peering at Belle’s shaved, gaping privates, and, oh, the pain that held her in its humiliating twist, because she was afraid to accept twilight sleep. And, Jesus, if this was labor cut in half, what was the full parcel?
• She put a stack of Aretha records on the player. Belle refused to call her favorite singer by her full name: where Belle came from, the last name “Franklin” was an insult.
• “This Mao man isn’t saying anything special. And he doesn’t even mention ladies.” <> Geoff told her that she didn’t get the point. Mao was all the way in China, but he was thinking about Black folks.
• “No, he’s not. He’s an excellent husband. And he knows I’m not having our child become a welfare baby, like one of those kids Moynihan talked about in that report.”
• Belle stopped showing up to community meetings. She was too embarrassed, watching her husband at Evelyn’s side. And she didn’t want Zulu’s three common-law wives tossing their cloth-wrapped heads in her direction. Throwing her triumphant looks, because Belle had thought she’d had a man to herself. But see there? She was no different. And if Zulu’s women had to get with the ways of Africa, so did Belle.
  For a week, she waited for her husband to come back, begging. That was the ritual, down where she was from. When a man stepped out on his wife, and she discovered his indiscretion—when grits had been thrown or the tires of his pickup slashed—there always was a husband’s contrition. And then, after the news had traveled through the Black part of town, there was the Sunday where the reunited couple would attend church, and the wife’s triumphant look: what God had joined, let no hussy wearing bright lipstick and a tight-ass dress tear asunder.
• “Evelyn, what I say? This ain’t none of your business. But now, if you want to cut a jig, I can cut one right on with you.”
  A crowd had formed to watch. Some weren’t even regular attendees of the meeting, but they’d come off the street because this was a new scene to them. There were used to the police getting rowdy and sometimes a brother beating on a sister and having to be pulled off, but they’d never seen a tiny woman with a very big voice getting her husband told. This was something else altogether. This was out of sight. Right on.
• The future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion. The present mincing horror at free womanhood must pass if we are ever to be rid of the bestiality of free manhood; not by guarding the weak in weakness do we gain strength, but by making weakness free and strong.
  —W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
• Before that speech, he was a god among our people. His white patrons gave him money to fund Tuskegee. He even had dinner at the White House, but whenever a Negro man, woman, or child was killed, he was silent. He kept his peace, and that day at the Atlanta exposition, the event was segregated.
• 'As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach, ready to lay down our lives, if need be, in defense of yours, interlacing our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life with yours in a way that shall make the interests of both races one. In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.’
• In the weeks after he hit me, as Abdul blew kisses, I felt trapped by what I’d desired. I’d hoped to wound Tiffany for embarrassing me at the rush, for ridiculing my sister, so I’d slept with Abdul and made it impossible for her to stay with him. Then I’d wanted to be his girlfriend, to prove that I was a good girl, and not a whore who only sneaked out of the dorm to drive to Abdul’s apartment. But the truth was I still felt dirty inside, even when Abdul had tossed me his jacket and everybody knew I belonged to him.
• But Coco didn’t have a mother’s love. Until a woman births her own, she can’t know what it feels like to have her breasts ache with milk, years later, after a dream, when there is no suckling child. Mama knew that marrow-filled affection, but finally, she let go of her hope that Lydia would return and shipped Daddy’s body to Chicasetta.
• He had been surprised to learn that, as Ezekiel had patiently explained to him, the majority of mulattoes were sterile, except in extraordinary cases. Samuel had also examined the works of Petrus Camper, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume from the eighteenth century, how they’d measured the skulls of Negroes and compared them with great apes’ and found them very similar. In his own century, he’d found the treatises of Samuel Morton to be immeasurable—and was very pleased that this brilliant scientist had carried his same name—but if Samuel Pinchard

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Fiona Davis apparently specializes in this kind of well-researched, deftly told historical fiction with a feminine perspective. I feel middle-aged and basic listening to it. Keywords: LGBT/book theft/chauvinist professor.

• While the library had lived up to its founders’ expectations as the largest marble building in the world, an inspired example of classical design that took sixteen years to complete, Laura hadn’t realized how remote their lives inside the white fortress would be.
• It was at the New York Public Library that she truly began to shine, manning her station at the reference desk in the Catalog Room next to the old pneumatic tubes that still carried the book requests down to the stacks far below.
• How much horse manure was dumped on the streets in 1880? Sadie scoured the Department of Sanitation’s books from that year and found the answer: approximately one hundred thousand tons.
• The woman leaned forward, suddenly eager to win the doctor’s approval. Dr. Potter had that effect. She took up space without apologizing for it, like a huge pine among saplings.
  Mrs. Marino counted on her fingers. “Let fresh air into the rooms. Bathe her every few days. Don’t give the baby beer. And I told the others to stop playing in the gutter, like you said.”
• His eyebrows rose up into black arches when he was disappointed or dismayed, and became an angry slash when crossed. A man pickled in misery.
• Slowing down? She knew she should stay quiet, but she couldn’t help herself. “Boy, I wish we had that luxury in class. With a deadline, it’s amazing how fast you get things done. Journalists don’t get paid if they don’t write, so it becomes less precious.”
  Her enthusiastic delivery did nothing to hide the snippiness of her words. Part of her didn’t care, though. Just get on with it already.
• Margaret Sanger spoke first, about fighting the obscenity laws that prevented her from publishing and disseminating information regarding contraception to the women who most needed it. She used words that Laura had never heard spoken out loud, like “pessary” and “condom,” “coitus interruptus,” and talked of douching with carbolic acid or Lysol as a preventive measure.
• Whitman ‘You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me.’
• Laura had noticed over the course of the first semester that students’ story ideas that had been summarily dismissed by Professor Wakeman sometimes turned up under his byline in the press. To ensure she got the thesis subject she’d wanted, she’d decided to pitch a throw-away idea first, to divert his attention.
• He did love her, it was true, but their competing demands for self-fulfillment didn’t fit well together, like two balloons stuffed into a small box.
• or having caught the latest Wendy Wasserstein play. She’d just spent a blissful evening listening to an Elgar concerto at Avery Fisher Hall, and wasn’t ready to leave.
• What Laura wanted, more than anything, was to sit across from Amelia all day, listen to her speak, and stare at her features, just take in her very being. The last time she’d felt this way was when the children were newborns—a rush of love, of devotion, that was unstoppable.
• “Dental floss is a traditional tool of rare map thieves.” She addressed Nick. “They put it in their mouths and get it wet; then, when the librarian isn’t looking, they lay it down on the page they want, right against the binding, and close it back up. After a few minutes, the page slips out easily, and voilà, the job is done. ”
• She’d burned all her sources and contacts for the book, for any future articles, in one fell swoop. She’d set herself up for this failure by falling for the allure of the forbidden, and had no one to blame but herself... The loss of the community of women stung hardest, as she had no similar role models in her life. They were taking a completely different tack from the other women she knew, and she’d desperately wanted to be part of that sea change. Not anymore. All ruined.
• His sobs were for all of them, she knew. For the family that was no longer there and the wrenching pain that came with the separation. They had planned on life going one way, and then it had blown to pieces, sending each of them flying up into the air and then crashing down hard. Pearl’s tightly wound goodness, Harry’s wildness, Jack’s despair.