J. Poindexter, ColoredCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
J. Poindexter, Colored
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
African Americans -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
At that I says to myself, I says:
"Well, betwixt w'ites an' blacks we su'ttinly is mekin' the world safe
fur them beauty doctors. Niggers down South spendin' all the money they
kin rake an' scrape togither gittin' the kinkiness tuck out of they
haids an' fashionable ladies up yere spendin' their'n gittin' it put in!
It's a compliment to one race or the other, but jest w'ich I ain't
purpared to say."
The other ladies is named Miss O'Brien and Miss DeWitt but it's kind of
hard for me at first to remember which from which seeing that the rest
of the party scarcely ever calls 'em anything except Pat and Bill-Lee.
They is both mighty nice and friendly but they is exclusively different
one from the other. Miss Pat she's got her hair chopped off short like a
little boy's and she acts kind of like a boy does, too--free and easy
and laughing a lot and smoking a cigarette so natural that it's like as
if she must a-been born with one in her mouth and it lighted. And yet
for all that, I seems to get the impression that way down underneath
she's kind of tired of herself and everything around her.
But this here Miss DeWitt she is tall and slender and kind of quiet. She
must a-been feeling poorly lately because her face is just dead-white
and her lips is still bright red from the fever and when she sets down
in a chair she just seems to kind of fall back into it, all limp-like.
She ain't saying much with her mouth but she does a sight of talking
with her eyes which is big and black and sort of lazy-like most of the
time. She sure is decked up with jewelry like the Queen of Sheba, too.
She's got big heavy necklaces round her neck and great long ear-rings in
her ears and many bracelets on both her arms. She's even got two big
bracelets clamped round one of her ankles, which I judges she didn't
have room for 'em nowheres else and so put 'em there to keep from losing
'em; and when she moves the jewelry all jingles freely and advertises
her. She walks with a kind of a limber swimming gait, soft and glideful;
of course it ain't exactly like swimming and yet that's the only way I
can designate what her walking puts me in mind of. She wears dead black
clothes and that makes her paleness seem all the more so.
Right from the first jump I can see that Mr. Dallas is drawed to her
powerful, and I thinks to myself that if he's fixing to favor this here
languid lady with his attentions it proves he's got a changeable taste
because she ain't nothing at all similar to Miss Henrietta Farrell,
which she is the one that he's been courting these past few months down
in Kentucky. In fact, she's most teetotally unsimilar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account