Sublime

a screen, a Japanese one, perhaps, with rich and mellow,…

Annie Allen had won Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950.

Here was the theory of racial equality about to be put into practice, and she only hoped she would be equal to being equal.

It was while Maud Martha was peeling potatoes for dinner that Mrs. Burns-Cooper laid herself out to prove that she was not a snob. Then it was that Mrs. Burns-Cooper came out to the kitchen and, sitting, talked and talked at Maud Martha. In my college days. At the time of my debut. The imported lace on my lingerie. My brother’s rich wife’s Stradiva

She had never understood how people could parade themselves on a stage like that, exhibit their precious private identities; shake themselves about; be very foolish for a thousand eyes. She was going to keep herself to herself. She did not want fame. She did not want to be a “star.”

And the theater itself! It was no palace, no such Great Shakes as the Tivoli out south, for instance (where many colored people went every night). But you felt good sitting there, yes, good, and as if, when you left it, you would be going home to a sweet-smelling apartment with flowers on little gleaming tables; and wonderful silver on night-blue v

In my search for an honest way to write about race, I wanted to comfort the afflicted, but more than that, I wanted to afflict the comfortable; I wanted to make them squirm in shame, probably because I too identify with the comfortable.