"Ragtime"

[fiefoe]

The tragedy had been building up for a long time. One holds one's breath at this sentence, 'an act of courtship, a suspenseful enterprise that suggested the best of life was yet to come', because surely it would not be.

• One hundred Negroes a year were lynched One hundred miners were burned alive. One hundred children were mutilated. There seemed to be quotas for these things.
• Life was not something either of these people took carelessly. They lived in brutal subjection to their hopes and feelings.
• He thought she was some displaced African queen; her very awkwardness as she moved suggested that it would be grace in another country.
• He had created himself in the teeth of such feelings.
• She was, Mother realized, the kind of moral being who understood nothing but goodness. She had no guile and could act only in total and helpless response to what she felt. If she loved she acted in love, if she was betrayed she was destroyed. These were the shining and dangerous facts of the life of an innocent.
• Black ribbon flew from the four corners of the roof. The car was so highly polished the boy could see in its rear doors a reflection of the entire street. Everything was black including the sky. The street curved to a precipitous horizon.
• Reporters were everywhere, and... produced in the community a painfully swollen sense of itself.
• militarized his mourning
• Or is injustice, once suffered, a mirror universe, with laws of logic and principles of reason the opposite of civilization's? 

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