Word: slaving
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Torn Cloth. To Joplin, who was obsessed with opera, Treemonisha's failure meant the failure of his whole life. Born in 1868 in Texarkana, Texas, the son of an ex-slave, Joplin discovered the piano at age seven. His self-taught playing and improvising attracted so much attention that a local piano teacher waived his usual fees and took the prodigy in hand. After Joplin's mother died, the youngster had a falling out with his father and at 14 left home to take up the life of a honky-tonk pianist. He wandered to St. Louis, Chicago...
...gospel songs that Mahalia sang were descended from the Negro spirituals of the old slave plantations. As the granddaughter of slaves, she came by the heritage naturally; as the daughter of a stevedore in New Orleans, she just as naturally learned to combine it with the new beat of urban blues singers like Bessie Smith. She went to work at 13 as a washerwoman. After moving to Chicago at 16, she was a hotel maid, laundress and baby sitter before her choir solos won her a job on a crosscountry gospel crusade. Chicago remained her home until the end. There...
...told a newly-enfranchised ex-slave who had just cast his first vote for Ulysses S. Grant that the time would come when a Republican President would be faced by the possibility of defeat because of a lack of black support, he would have told you you were plumb crazy. The very notion that any black would ever vote against the party of Lincoln would have seemed to him as ridiculously impossible as the idea that a Republican President would one day be accused of practising the malignant neglect of a Southern Strategy...
...just one device employed by New York car thieves; another is the Curtis key punch, which costs about $150 and will fit in a shoe box. Using a code stamped on the lock tumblers of all American and most foreign cars, an operator can quickly make a "slave key" that will work in both door and ignition...
This is the backdrop before which Ed Sanders spins his tale of Manson and his band of slave-women, beginning from Manson's last prison term in the mid-Sixties, stretching to his final capture hiding crouched in a cabinet ("Hi," he said to policemen when found, "I'm Charlie Manson."), and including a detailed account of the numerous influences which supposedly turned him on the road to demon-killer...