Word: jay
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Emmett Jay Scott, 84, distinguished Negro leader, longtime (18 years) secretary to Booker T. Washington, onetime (during World War I) special assistant to Secretary of War Newton Diehl Baker, secretary-treasurer of Howard University (1919-34), author of The American Negro in the World War (1919), coauthor (with Washington) of Tuskegee and Its People; in Washington...
...novel's three parts is full of joy intensified by the painful difficulty of breaking out of loneliness and communicating this joy to loved ones: Rufus sees a Charlie Chaplin movie with his father and they walk quietly home looking "across the darkness at the lights of North Knoxville"; Jay, roused late at night to come to his sick father's bedside, makes his wife's breakfast in the 3:00 a.m. quiet of the kitchen to thank her because she had troubled to rise and make him something warm for the long night journey...
...second part is the somber and tense tragedy of Mary's brother identifying a body in the darkness along a country road, and of Mary waiting in the kitchen's stark white light, trying to adjust to the expected news of Jay's death. She waits alone despite her aunt's presence because sorrow, like joy, is a loneliness infinitely difficult to communicate even though, and yet because, it depends upon others...
...them, or sing to them. Mary no less then they, must become more "grown-up" and realize what this death will mean. She once said her children were "brought up to trust older people when they tell (them) something. . . ." But she had promised Catherine and Rufus the night of Jay's death that he would be home when they awoke...
Every detail in the book is keyed to the general tones and the death is meaningful to all it touches. The wife of a stranger who finds Jay's body replaces with a sheet the horse blanket her husband had put over the dead man. This is the only way she can participate in the tragedy; it's all a stranger can do to show her sorrow and it's enough...