Word: blackness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From April, when the perfume of roses and orange blossoms is heavy in the night-shadowed streets, until September, when there is already a crisp tang in the air, we take long night rides through the black and silver of a moonlit countryside. Five minutes from the city, in any of three directions, we ride among irrigated fields cf alfalfa or cotton, orchards of citrus or other fruits, emerald grape vines, whence a cool moist breath rises in the summer air. . . . THELMA B. MILLER (MRS. Ross C. MILLER) Bakersfield, Calif...
...Haiti is a hot island, of listless winds, of low and cloudy mountains. Most of the people who live there are black or brown or yellowish because of their African blood; this was true also some hundred years ago, but then, beside the 500,000 sweating black slaves and the 24,000 effete, lazy, clever yellow freedmen, there were 40,000 whites-French planters, who danced and tippled in the big houses and ruled the island. Some of them often gathered in the billiard room of the Hotel de la Couronne where their scores were marked by a coal black...
...smoky sky, fugitives hid in the soft stillness of the mountains. A succession of dark generals led their ebony soldiers to cruel and bewildering victories. Ugly Toussaint, who beat a Napoleonic army, was captured and sent far away to die. Clumsy Jean Jaques Dessalines made himself emperor of the black island and imported two ballet masters to teach him how to dance; before he had time to learn, a soldier murdered him. Henry Christophe, the billiard marker, during all this time had done more than watch the sudden noisy game of war that his people were playing in the lazy...
...natured Negroes move slowly about their business. It would be incredible that wars had ever been waged under that muffling sky, as heavy as a curtain, that a splendid emperor had ruled the ruinous country- were it not for the fortress which still stands up on the hilltop, a black fist against the sky, the citadel of Christophe, the monument of a man born no one knows where, mysteriously named, a slave and a king, whose enemies defeated him. There is a rumor that Christophe with his own hands, at night, buried gold in the huge walls of his astonishing...
...Significance. The Literary Guild had the good sense to pick Black Majesty for its subscribers to read in March. The book is not written with genius either of style or of insight but it is written with intelligence and a proper sensitiveness to words. It can be asserted, with some justice, that, possessing these qualifications, no one could help writing a good book about King Christophe. Author John Vandercook, in a day when too many authors with abilities insufficient for their task attempt to decorate matters which are trite or trivial, deserves applause for choosing a superlative subject for human...