Word: cotton
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...mainly focuses on routine reality. Sample, on the perils of being without an ordinary pencil: "If Onassis knocked on the door and wanted to buy our house for a highway phone booth, I would have to sign the agreement with (a) an eyebrow pencil, (b) yellow crayon, (c) cotton swab saturated in shoe polish, (d) an eyedropper filled with cake coloring, or (e) a sharp fingernail dipped in my own blood...
Jackson is well-acquainted with the problems of poor blacks. He was born in Greenville, S.C. where his father was a cotton grader who lived next door to his mother but was married to someone else. The fact that other black kids with "socalled legitimate beginnings" teased him. Jackson recalls, made him determined to succeed. His mother later married a janitor, and young Jesse often accompanied him on his night duties. One office his stepfather cleaned belonged to a Greenville lawyer named Clement Haynsworth...
Laughter, simmered in self-mockery, was the first black soul food. It fed the slave during his fierce day's travail in the shimmering Georgia cotton fields. It simultaneously comforted the second-class citizen and nurtured his sense of subservience during the agonizing disappointment of Reconstruction and through the long dark age of de jure segregation. Flight from reality, as illustrated in the nonsense lyric of Dan Tucker, formed the bedrock of the earliest Negro humor. Later, vaudeville, radio and the movies perpetuated the blackface minstrel stereotype of the happy-go-lucky devourer of watermelons...
Purlie Judson, unlicensed preacher and self-appointed messiah of his race, hoodwinks neo-Confederate, bullwhip-wielding Ol Cap'n Cotchipee (John Heffernan) and secures the money to buy Big Bethel Church and preach freedom to the workers in the cotton fields. The problem is how to believe this in 1970. The wheedling, tricking, self-inflating Purlie embodies a slavery-induced personality that no longer applies to a race increasingly infused with the will and strength to command its own destiny...
...death in bed, and he has only the flimsiest recollection of how it happened. Without a trial, he is summarily convicted by small-town mores and yellow journalism. But there is a knight in Harvard armor waiting on the prairie. Folks round those parts don't much cotton to the young lawyer because he's named Tony Petrocelli, and he defends the town drunk and talks back to officers of the law. But maybe. Dr. Jack figures, a young sharpshooter like Tony is just what he needs...