Word: headed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Stone's score began with a Dave Eaton head flick of a long chip toward the penalty box. The ball bounced from Eaton to Stone who banged a glorious shot home off the inside of the left post with the outside of his right foot...
...Colored Girls roused theatergoers while Pat Harris ruled HUD, so that was the Year of the Black Woman. This year must be the Year of the Black Relationship, since both Time and Newsweek wrote on that subject. Baldwin thinks so too. His newest novel, Just Above My Head, scrutinizes almost every possible variation of the black love relationship, homosexual to conjugal to incestuous to fraternal, while simultaneously indulging Baldwin's familiar obsession with the black church. His approach produces an odd melange of eroticism and spiritualism, which seems to alternate between embarrassing explicitness and slightly cloying romanticism. However, the book...
Just Above My Head traces the emotional and spiritual journeys of Arthur Montana, a gospel singer, and Julia Miller, a child evangelist, as seen through the eyes of Arthur's older brother Hall. Hall recounts Arthur's involvement with the Civil Rights Movement, Julia's fall from the ministry and subsequent exploitation by her father, Arthur's homosexual relationship with Julia's pianist brother Jimmy, and Arthur's mysterious death at the peak of his fame. The novel reads as if authored by Hall in an effort to understand his brother's life as an artist, in order to legitimize...
Unfortunately, Baldwin's female characters get no such support or sympathy. Whereas males in Just Above My Head find strength and identity through the love of other men, women are almost always victimized by men, and must then be redeemed by the love of--or more accurately, through sex with--yet another man. Women characters are not nearly so well drawn as the men, never as courageous or introspective or just plain deep. When the women are strong and serious, their virtues owe nothing to their own struggles, but result from serving men, being hurt by them or sharing their...
Despite these objections, Just Above My Head is a very moving work, carried along by the intensity of the author's own feelings. His painful discovery of his need for human contact, family, and identity makes inspiring, if not pleasant, reading. And though his protagonists are black, his message applies to whites as well: the more drastically our lives change, the more we all need each other's love, he seems to be saying. Even Time could agree with that...