Word: jiving
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...author, however, has seen to it that the reader is not left in quite so secure a position. He has made quite sure that you never know where you stand in relation to the book; although one minute you may be laughing with him at all the jive, at all the perversion, the next minute he's laughing at you. You've got to find your own way of dealing with the book, and it's not easy...
...came about. The style and general format of the novel are easy and without interruption; yet somehow, amid the general flow of things, realities are contorted, perspectives tiltcrazily, and the whole tone of the novel can shuttle back and forth from snide humor to outright malevolence. "All is jive," says Mr. Jiveass Nigger, and from the beginning of the book until its end, you're never quite sure if you might not just be the one who's being jived...
...with the tip of her Scripto looking for "meaning." But they will not find it here, not the same meaning they find in fine "homes" in the Berkeley hills, Wall Street, PepsiCola, Perry Como, Toilets, Nixon, crew cuts, and Cadillacs. You will have them understand what you mean by jive...
...Funky, jive, dawn, high, the Man, hawk, cool, hot, copped-out, cats, caps, kicked, reefer, Johns, juke, ofay, goofed, wing, hip, dig, soul, honkies, splib (spook as in Negro), grass and skag are just a few of the words appearing in black poetry that often have multiple meanings elusive to the white reader. For example, in Etheridge Knight's Poems from Prison, he says...
...reality" had no place. The experiences that they had collected and vainly tried to understand fell together by themselves when they were together. The boy had been wallowing in the wastelands of campus radicalism, agreeing with a Black Panther's quip that "white radicalism is a cross between jive and bullshit," Smothered by his inactivity, alienated from the suboulture of the alienated, he joyrides into criminality and personal liberation. During his hours in the desert, he found for the first time that he could fill himself by giving...