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Ma Rainey's Black BottomA Play
TOLEDO: Go ahead, then. Spell it. Music. Spell it.
LEVEE: I can spell it, nigger! M-U-S-I-K. There!
(He reaches for the money.)
TOLEDO: Naw! Naw! Leave that money alone! You ain’t spelled it.
LEVEE: What you mean I ain’t spelled it? I said M-U-S-I-K!
TOLEDO: That ain’t how you spell it! That ain’t how you spell it! It’s M-U-S-I-C! C, nigger. Not K! M-U-S-I-C!
LEVEE: What you mean, C? Who say it’s C?
TOLEDO: Cutler. Slow Drag, Tell this fool.
(They look at each other and then away.)
Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!
(TOLEDO picks up the money and hands LEVEE his dollar back.)
Here’s your dollar back, Levee. I done won it, you understand. I done won the dollar. But if don’t nobody know but me, how am I gonna prove it to you?
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (wilmarai)Premiered in1984 -
Ma Rainey's Black BottomA Play
MA RAINEY: Irvin, what is that I hear? What is that the band’s rehearsing? I know they ain’t rehearsing Levee’s “Black Bottom.” I know I ain’t hearing that?
IRVIN: Ma, listen… that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Levee’s version of that song… it’s got a nice arrangement… a nice horn intro… It really picks it up…
MA RAINEY: I ain’t studying Levee nothing. I know what he done to that song and I don’t like to sing it that way. I’m doing it the old way. That’s why I brought my nephew to do the voice intro.
IRVIN: Ma, that’s what the people want now. They want something they can dance to. Times are changing. Levee’s arrangement gives people what they want. It gets them excited… makes them forget about their troubles.
MA RAINEY: I don’t care what you say, Irvin. Levee ain’t messing up my song. If he got what the people want, let him take it somewhere else. I’m singing Ma Rainey’s song. I ain’t singing Levee’s song. Now that’s all there is to it. Carry my nephew on down there and introduce him to the band. I promised my sister I’d look out for him and he’s gonna do the voice intro on the song my way.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (wilmarai)Premiered in1984 -
Ma Rainey's Black BottomA Play
(TOLEDO and SLOW DRAG succeed in pulling CUTLER off LEVEE, who is bleeding at the nose and mouth.)
LEVEE: Naw, let him go! Let him go!
(He pulls out a knife.)
That’s your God, huh? That’s your God, huh? Is that right? Your God, huh? All right. I’m gonna give your God a chance. I’m gonna give your God a chance. I’m gonna give him a chance to save your black ass.
(LEVEE circles CUTLER with the knife. CUTLER picks up a chair to protect himself.)
TOLEDO: Come on, Levee… put the knife up!
LEVEE: Stay out of this, Toledo!
TOLEDO: That ain’t no way to solve nothing.
(LEVEE alternatively swipes at CUTLER during the following.)
LEVEE: I’m calling Cutler’s God! I’m talking to Cutler’s God! You hear me? Cutler’s God! I’m calling Cutler’s God. Come on and save this nigger! Strike me down before I cut his throat!
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (wilmarai)Premiered in1984
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Out ThereMavericks of Black LiteratureFrom"J.A. Rogers"
The experience of reading Sex and Race is one of embrace and recoil as Rogers indiscriminately loads us down with the provable and the forever dodgy, the serious and the frivolous. Sometimes his footnotes, not always adequate or acceptable, tell when he was at work on a given aspect of his subject, in the way that an itemized credit card bill is a diary, a record of movement. The references go in clusters: in the 1920s, he was reading about Syria, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia; in the 1930s, he was reading the memoirs of English travelers in Africa. Sometimes, he clearly couldn’t go back to a particular library or text to check his facts again. And sometimes Sex and Race reads as though it had threatened to consume him, because the first-person voice breaks through in the book at times of what could be called narrative stress.
Out There : Mavericks of Black Literature -
Out ThereMavericks of Black LiteratureFrom"Vincent O. Carter"
An unpublished manuscript is a like a message in a bottle, floating, floating, waiting to be found. A forgotten book is much the same, lost in the strong current. Vincent O. Carter is the author of both—the unpublished and the long out of print. Some thirty years ago, in 1970, the John Day Company of New York published The Bern Book: A Record of A Voyage of the Mind by Vincent O. Carter, a strange, disquieting, sometimes gorgeous account of what it was like for him to be the only black man living in Bern, Switzerland, between the years 1953 and 1957. Why Bern? Carter claims the Bernese themselves want to know, and this work is his attempt to answer them.
Out There : Mavericks of Black Literature -
Out ThereMavericks of Black LiteratureFrom"Caryl Phillips"
When Phillips published The European Tribe, Britain did not have a single black member of Parliament. He grew up hearing and not responding to jokes in Leeds about Pakis singing “We Shall Overcome.” It was the Britain of Enoch Powell. Yet it was also the time of Bob Marley and the Wailers and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Phillips describes his efforts to get in touch with that black Britain in the 1970s, how he left the “Nigger go home” scrawled next to his name on the notice board at his college, left the handful of blacks he could find university-wide, a Nigerian mathematics student here, a Rhodes scholar there, and took the train to London, where he would go from pub to pub in Brixton, trying to learn, to pick up something. Sometimes on these vague, sad trips to black London he would miss the last train back to Oxford and spend the night in a lounge at Heathrow. But he was always on time for his 9:30 A.M. class in lyric poetry.
Out There : Mavericks of Black Literature
Selected Works
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AngelsA Novel
In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.
Angels : A Novel -
AngelsA Novel
She’d discussed killing herself, she confessed, with Sarah Miller, her best friend, who’d gone to the same high school in West Virginia. Discussed how she’d do it in the style of Marilyn Monroe. She’d clean the trailer completely, and dress up in her black negligee. She’d use Sarah’s ex-husband’s revolver, and Sarah would listen in the night for the shot, and then listen in case the kids woke up. She’d stand right in the doorway when she did it, so she’d be the first thing he found when he came home late from running around on her, stretched out on the floor like a dark Raggedy Ann doll with her brains in the kitchen. Because already he’d stayed out two nights in a row. That was that, that was all, so long. The note would go like this: No Thanks.
Angels : A Novel -
AngelsA Novel
Now that the shooting was started, Bill Houston wanted it to go on forever. Holding his gun out toward the guard and firing was something like spraying paint—trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through. He didn’t want the guard to have any life left with which he might rise up and kill Bill Houston is return. When the guard was still, lying there at the open mouth of his C-shaped desk with his jaw hanging off to one side and the blood running down his neck and also back into his hair and his ear, Bill shot him twice more in the chest, and would have emptied his shotgun into the guard but caught himself up short, feeling he didn’t want to spend his shells, because shells were more precious than all the money that surrounded them now. The smoke of gunfire lay in sheets along the air around his head, where light played off the fountain’s pond and gave it brilliance. In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey. He heard nothing above the ringing in his ears.
Angels : A Novel
Selected Works
read more >Reinaldo Povod
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Cuba & His Teddy BearA Play
CUBA: If you wanna jump offa the Empire State Building but you live up in the Bronx—
JACKIE: Or Brooklyn—where I live.
CUBA: Anywhere.
JACKIE: Staten Island.
CUBA: If you ain’t got money for your token, you better beg, borrow, or steal. And if yer old enough to beg, you’re old enough to steal. So you end up what? You end up forgetting yer problems ‘cause you got money in yer pockets—and you’re living a life of crime.
Cuba & His Teddy Bear (povcuba)Premiered in1986- Print Books
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- Samuel French
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Cuba & His Teddy BearA Play
CUBA: …she gave me this powder. When the judge is gonna sentence you, she said, you bring it up to yer lips and blow it. Blow it hard. And you don’t do it before, you don’t do it after, you, you do it—
TEDDY: Right at that moment.
CUBA: Right at that moment, yeah. The judge says, all rise. I said, where’s the powder. On the count of first-degree possession with the intention of distribution—(Slowly for effect) I find—Anthony Vito, guilty. Richard Carlo, guilty. Rossi, guilty. Peppino, guilty. Tommy something, guilty. Joseph Cuba… I find you—I went like this, real fast—I find you—I blew it—(HE blows) not guilty.
Cuba & His Teddy Bear (povcuba)Premiered in1986- Print Books
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Cuba & His Teddy BearA Play
CHE: You, Cuba—yer a father, you gotta son, you know, yer doing what you can to raise him—to a lot of people yer nothing but a drug dealer. A nasty cliché. I’m a junkie who steals. I’m a junkie who steals, like a lot of junkies do. But I’m also a junkie who steals with a Tony Award. I’m a junkie who steals, I gotta Tony Award, and I got compassion in my heart for you. (To JACKIE) For you. (To TEDDY) And for you. I’m a junkie, I steal, I gotta Tony Award—compassion—and I’m Hispanic… that ain’t a cliché. The attitude for a junkie like me who is Spanish, is: “Turn him upside down and he got hemorrhoids.” It only affects him, and his own kind, and Kojak. I’m a junkie who steals but I got compassion in my heart for the dealer who sells me my dope.
Cuba & His Teddy Bear (povcuba)Premiered in1986- Print Books
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Selected Works
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Transactions in a Foreign CurrencyStoriesFrom"What It Was Like, Seeing Chris"
While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.
Transactions in a Foreign Currency : Stories -
Transactions in a Foreign CurrencyStoriesFrom"Flotsam"
“Charlotte!” Cinder said. “I know what this looks like, but I was an absolute wreck when Mitchell got here – wasn’t I, Mitchell? – and he literally glued me back together. You know what we should do, though. I’m absolutely starving. We should get some pirogi. Hey, I’ve learned this interesting new fact about men. The more weight they make you gain, the more attractive it means they are. God. Why can’t I be one of those little twitching things who shred their food when something goes wrong? I wish I were willowy and thin like you, Charlie.”
“You are willowy and thin,” I said. “I’m bony and big, like a dinosaur skeleton in a museum.”
“Dinosaur skeleton.” Mitchell centered me slowly in his gaze, and I faltered. “It’s been a long, long time since I thought about one of those,” he said.
“Mitchell, darling,” Cinder said, straddling him to massage his shoulders, “how could I get you to go next door and get us some pirogi? Like three orders, with extra sour cream. I am ravenous.”
“That stuff I glued you together with sort of absorbed my liquid assets,” he said.
“I have money,” I said, handing him a ten.
Transactions in a Foreign Currency : Stories -
Transactions in a Foreign CurrencyStoriesFrom"A Lesson in Traveling Light"
“Where do they live?” I said.
Lee took out a big U.S. road map. “They’re over here, in Baltimore.”
“That’s so far,” I said, following his finger.
“In a sense,” he said. “But on the other hand, look at, say, Pittsburgh.” His finger alighted inches from where we were. “Or Columbus.”
“Or Louisville!” I said. “Look how far that is – to Louisville!”
“You think that’s far?” Lee said. “Well, listen to this – ready? Poplar Bluff!”
“Tulsa!” I said. “Wait – Oklahoma City!”
We both started to shout.
“Cheyenne!”
“Flagstaff!”
“Needles, Barstow, Bishop!”
“Eureka!” we both yelled at once.
We sat back and eyed the map. “That was some trip,” Lee said.
Transactions in a Foreign Currency : Stories
Selected Works
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Timberlake WertenbakerPlays 1From"Our Country’s Good"
PHILLIP: The theatre is an expression of civilisation. We belong to a great country which has spawned great playwrights: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, and even in our own time, Sheridan. The convicts will be speaking a refined, literate language and expressing sentiments of a delicacy they are not used to. It will remind them that there is more to life than crime, punishment. And we, this colony of a few hundred will be watching this together, for a few hours we will no longer be despised prisoners and hated gaolers. We will laugh, we may be moved, we may even think a little.
Three Birds Alighting on a Field (werthree)Premiered in1991- Print Books
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Timberlake WertenbakerPlays 1From"Our Country’s Good"
KETCH: I was given a guardian angel when I was born, like all good Catholics, why didn’t my guardian angel look after me better? But I think he must’ve stayed in Ireland. I think the devil tempted my mother to London and both our guardian angels stayed behind. Have you ever been to Ireland, sir? It’s a beautiful country. If I’d been an angel I wouldn’t have left it either. And when we came within six fields of Westminister, the devils took over.
Three Birds Alighting on a Field (werthree)Premiered in1991- Print Books
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Timberlake WertenbakerPlays 1From"Our Country’s Good"
LIZ: Born under a ha’penny planet I was. Dad’s a nibbler, don’t want to get crapped. Mum leaves. Five brothers. I’m the only titter. I takes in washing. Then. My own father. Lady’s walking down the street, takes her wiper. She screams, he’s shoulder-clapped, says, it’s not me, Sir, it’s Lizzie, look, she took it. I’m stripped, beaten in the street, everyone watching. That night, I take my dad’s cudgel and try to kill him…
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The TunnelSelected Poems of Russell EdsonFrom"The Difficulty With a Tree"
A woman was fighting a tree. The tree had come to rage at the woman’s attack, breaking free from its earth it waddled at her with its great root feet.
Goddamn these sentiencies, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.
Look out, you’ll fall on me, you bastard, screamed the woman as she hit at the tree.
The tree whisked and whisked with its leafy branches.
The woman kicked and bit screaming, kill me kill me or I’ll kill you!
The Tunnel : Selected Poems of Russell Edson- Print Books
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The TunnelSelected Poems of Russell EdsonFrom"Ape"
I wish to hell you’d put underpants on these apes; even a jockstrap, screamed father.
Father, how dare you insinuate that I see the ape as anything more than simple meat, screamed mother.
Well, what’s with this ribbon tied in a bow on its privates? screamed father.
Are you saying that I am in love with this vicious creature? That I would submit my female opening to this brute? That after we had love on the kitchen floor I would put him in the oven, after breaking his head with a frying pan; and then serve him to my husband, that my husband might eat the evidence of my infidelity…?
I’m just saying that I’m damn sick of ape every night, cried father.
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The TunnelSelected Poems of Russell EdsonFrom"The Toy-Maker"
A toy-maker made a toy wife and a toy child. He made a toy house and some toy years.
He made a getting-old toy, and he made a dying toy.
The toy-maker made a toy heaven and a toy god.
But, best of all, he liked making toy shit.
The Tunnel : Selected Poems of Russell Edson- Print Books
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Selected Works
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A Bright Room Called DayA Play
AGNES:
I feel at home.
My friends like it here,
better that their own apartments.
I’m not a fool.
I know that what’s coming
will be bad,
but not unlivable,
and not eternally,
and when it’s over, I will have clung to the least last thing,
which is to say, my lease.
And you have to admit, it’s a terrific apartment.
I could never find anything like it if I moved out now.
You would not believe
how low the rent is.
(End of scene.)
Slide: JANUARY 30, 1933.
Slide: PRESIDENT HINDENBURG
Slide: APPPOINTS ADOLF HITLER
Slide: CHANCELLOR OF THE GERMAN REICH.
A Bright Room Called Day (kusbrigh)Premiered in1987- Print Books
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A Bright Room Called DayA Play
GOTCHLING:
Pick any era in history, Agnes.
What is really beautiful about that era?
The way the rich lived?
No.
The way the poor lived?
No.
The dreams of the Left
are always beautiful.
The imagining of a better world
the damnation of the present one.
This faith,
this luminescent anger,
these alone
are worthy of being called human.
These are the Beautiful
that an age produces.
As an artist I am struck to the heart
by these dreams. These visions.
We progress. But at great cost.
How can anyone stand to live
without understanding that much?
A Bright Room Called Day (kusbrigh)Premiered in1987- Print Books
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A Bright Room Called DayA Play
MALEK:
On the border, in Karlsbad, there’s a house: 30 Herze Street. Memorize the address, don’t write it down. 30 Herze, like the mountains. The front of the house is in Germany. The back of the house is in Czechoslovakia. The people who live there are… friends of ours, and the Nazis don’t know about it yet – the system is full of little holes like this. Go there by train, at night, if it gets bad here; knock on the door and tell them you’re looking for the Green Front. They’ll take you to the back door, and you’re out.
If you need to. Ask for the way to the Green Front. The borders are full of holes.
A Bright Room Called Day (kusbrigh)Premiered in1987- Print Books
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ArabesquesA Novel
The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.
Arabesques : A Novel -
ArabesquesA Novel
As the Jews’ army was making its way along the road winding up to Deir El-Kasi, Abu Shacker was looting its houses. The inhabitants of Deir El-Kasi had not waited for the convoy to arrive. They were already across the border. And Abu Shacker, who had felt their outstretched arm upon his back in the days of the Arab Rebellion, now entered the home of Mahmood El-Ibraheem, who had been the regional commander in the days of the rebellion. The gate to the courtyard was open, as if the inhabitants of the house had just stepped out for a moment to visit a neighbor. Abu Shacker entered through the gate and shut it behind him as if he were trying to preserve, if only for a moment, the vanishing past, and he stood in the courtyard, in the very spot where he had stood ten years before.
Arabesques : A Novel -
ArabesquesA Novel
Imagine, then, a British soldier plummeting from the roof high above the third floor down into our courtyard, landing in a puddle of water from the early-December rain. The water splashes on the gas mask over the face of a boy playing by the puddle and blurs his vision. But first imagine a shot, just a single round from among the hundreds that had begun with the gray dawn, whose trajectory crisscrossed the skies of Haifa, in the warp and woof of the war between Jews and Arabs. Then imagine this one bullet hitting the soldier standing watch on the roof. He falls, and behind him the sharp spire of St. John’s Church rises toward the brightening sky. The boy, who is about seven, freezes to the spot where the thud has caught him trying to frighten a neighbor’s daughter with the gas mask he has bought from a peddler of military equipment. Now imagine the long second that passes between the thud and the scream: the silence that falls on the courtyard and is cast over the body, and then is lifted by the scream, which hangs in the air until the silence wraps itself again around the still body.
Arabesques : A Novel
Selected Works
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Marvin's RoomA Play
DR. WALLY: Do you mind if I call you Augustina?
BESSIE: Well, my name is Bessie.
DR. WALLY: Bessie. Of course. I’m sorry. Things have been a bit hectic around here. Dr. Serat is away on vacation and this morning our receptionist quit. Usually Nurse Abrams would draw the blood for any blood test but… where’d I put the whatchamacallit? The uh, do you see it?
BESSIE: What?
DR. WALLY: You know, that um, um, I tie it around your arm to make your veins pop out.
BESSIE: Tourniquet?
DR. WALLY: Yes, that’s it. Oh, I’m sitting on it. How’d that happen? Okay, give me your arm please.
Marvin's Room (mcpmarvi)Premiered in1990 -
Marvin's RoomA Play
RUTH: Being confined to your bed is nothing to be afraid of.
BESSIE: I’m not confined to my bed. I’m just a little tired today.
RUTH: I was confined to my bed most of my life. You find things to do.
BESSIE: Like what?
RUTH: Oh my, well, you can sleep or you can lay there awake…
BESSIE: Do you want any of this?
RUTH: No, no. That’s all for you. You eat that and be strong. Have you made a stinky today?
BESSIE: Yes.
RUTH: That’s good. That’s important.
Marvin's Room (mcpmarvi)Premiered in1990 -
Marvin's RoomA Play
BESSIE: They always have a last picnic down by the river. This year there was kind of a cold snap so a lot of people were bundled up. But Clarence, he’ll deny it, but he likes to be the center of attention. Clarence goes swimming anyway. And he knows everybody is watching him. Everybody is there, his family, his friends, me. And he bobs up out of the water and he’s laughing, making that monkey face, which gets all of us laughing, and he dunks under again and pops up somewhere else laughing even harder which gets us laughing even harder. And he dives under again and then he doesn’t come up and he doesn’t come up and he doesn’t come up. Laughing and choking looked the same on Clarence. He drowned right in front of us. Every time he came up for air, there we were chuckling and pointing. What could be have thought?
Marvin's Room (mcpmarvi)Premiered in1990