Word: waif
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Take a Sunny Morning. The eyes that finally see through Max to his sad and waif-like soul are the sleepy eyes of Mrs. Morgan's 18-year-old son Jimmy. An epileptic and a problem child who refuses to believe anything his tutors tell him about basic trends or the continuity of Western culture, Jimmy wears his mother down until she opens the nursery door, lets him go along with Divver on a trip to the Polish Corridor in the summer...
...camera spares India neither praise nor blame. It takes a passing glance at the high, cool beauties of Kashmir, the shaded Western luxuries of India's rich, and the dark, woebegone face of an Indian waif circled by three buzzing flies. It watches a family of Untouchables eating a nameless dirty mush, then joins a poor but caste-proud Brahman for a chaste meal of fruit and vegetables, arranged, as elegantly as a still-life painting, on a large plantain leaf...
...picked up and taken to juvenile court where, he remembers, the magistrate told him that while he wasn't a bad boy he might get to be one if he kept playing around Perdido Street at night. Louis was packed off to ihe Colored Waif's Home for Boys, a New Orleans reform school...
Whatever he felt about the place then, he now remembers the Waif's Home with great affection. "I could do just about what I wanted and we ate regular. I feel at home there even now. I might end up there an old man some day, seein' over those boys like Professor Davis did." Best of all for Louis, "Professor" Davis taught him to read music a bit, and play, first the tambourine and drums, then the bugle, finally a battered pawnshop cornet. Unable to keep the small, smooth mouthpiece on his big lips at first, Louis filed...
Mahogany Exodus. Louis was a natural. He could blow clear and true, hitting the notes hard and clean. He never had to squeeze for a high one. But for three years after he got out of the Waif's Home (his mother got "a big white man" to spring him), he was too busy driving a coal wagon to blow a note. Then one night Bunk Johnson didn't turn up, and Louis sat in for him (for $1.25 a night) at Matranga's joint on Perdido Street; even the great Joe ("there...