Word: coal-black
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...Communists swarmed on toward Junon, flushed with imminent victory. There was one last cutting and clubbing, and the helpless French pilots saw it: bayonet, knife and grenade in one ghastly arena less than 1,000 feet wide. Bearded French veterans, coal-black Senegalese and tough little Vietnamese even slugged at the Reds with chunks of wood and iron from their broken strong points. "It was like a spectacle of wild beasts in a Roman amphitheater," said one pilot afterward...
...show, in fact, is rather like a hit on the head. The canvas, a coal-black rectangle all of 13½ feet wide, is decorated with a smeary white explosion centering on what looks like a tangle of crimson worms. That is all, and the title, Homage to Philip III, "The Bold,"* was clearly not intended as an aid to understanding. The painting was no beauty in the ordinary sense of the word, and expressed no more meaning than a wordless shout in the dark...
...dreamed of his daughter. "I saw her," he said, "not clearly, but as through a haze. She held out her arms and said, 'Daddy, daddy, my hands are all black.' " Back at his digging next day, Yonosuke noticed for the first time a thick slime of coal-black clay oozing out of the debris. He dug in the slime until a side of the trench fell in. There, embalmed in the clay which had blacked their hands and faces, lay the bodies of his wife and his daughter. "Some villagers rushed up to congratulate me," said Yonosuke...
...Street gin mill called The Paddock. The lucky ones find seats close up at the bar, where the music is loudest, and with a deference equaling that of longhair purists, listen to an eight-piece band playing oldtime, home-town jazz. The leader of the band is a smiling, coal-black trumpet player named Oscar ("Papa") Celestin, 69 (or maybe 74), who has been playing the same kind of straight, hard jazz for more than 50 years...
...British Crown Colony of Kenya, while 3,000 coal-black tribesmen, huddled in a kraal, watched in awe, a goat was slowly beaten to death and buried alongside a virgin ewe. After that ancient rite, supposedly strong magic against evil, an official representative of the Great White Queen Across the Waters pronounced a solemn curse against the Mau-Mau. The Mau-Mau (rhymes with yoyo) is a native secret society which has lately been worrying the British. London is afraid that the Mau-Mau might plunge Britain's East African empire into guerrilla war, and turn Kenya into another...