Word: negro
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LANGSTON HUGHES once told a story about a manuscript he submitted to a "well-known anthologist." The short story came back from the editor with a letter full of praise, but saying that the characters were not clearly white or black. Would Hughes make them definitely Negro? The re-editing did not take long. Hughes simply inserted "black" in front of the word "man" and "Brown skin" in front of the girl's name and the story was accepted. "Just a plain story about human beings," as Hughes called it, was not acceptable from a black writer. But you have...
...what? The important thing is that the chief villain is named Hedley Lamarr, and the actors insist on mispronouncing his name; that at a town meeting an anguished citizen complains that "people are being stampeded and the cattle raped"; that a black labor gang, ordered to sing a Negro spiritual by their straw boss, respond with a nice arrangement of Cole Porter's I Get a Kick out of You; that ex-Football Tackier Alex Karras, on hand to play a homicidal moron, gets in a fight with a horse and fells it with a single roundhouse blow; that...
...boss was an old-style Carolina gentleman, revamped. He had gotten tired of his retirement from the realty business, learned to say "Negro" instead of "nigra," at least to black people, and gone to work for the government. His face was red and full, topped by short white hair. His first name was Roscoe, but he very much preferred "R.C." so of course we called him "Arsey." He was continually sucking the life out of a stubby Raleigh--it seemed like he smoked a carton...
...Negro child perceives his separation as discriminatory and invidious, he is not, in a society a hundred years removed from slavery, going to make fine distinctions about the source of a particular separation...
MacDaddy, which is the season's first production by Manhattan's Negro Ensemble Company, is a free-form, episodic jour ney through black people's time. It ranges across 20th century America, criss crossing decades. MacDaddy (David Downing) begins as a sort of hustler-prince, a Prohibition vintner on the trail of his vanished friend Wine, who represents a lost magic, the secret of the race. A funky and inventive Candide, MacDaddy travels through peckerwood racism, black venality, Tomism and the death's-head enemy, heroin...