Frankie and Johnny were lovers, O lordy how they could love, Swore to be true to each other, true as the stars above;... He was her man but he done her wrong.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Frankie threw back her kimono, she took out her forty-four. Root-a-toot-toot, three times she shot, right through that hardwo...od door.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings or ...die. For our salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright is providing wings. He will also have to provide a new insect to use them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O sinewy silver biplane, nudging the wind's withers! There, from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk... Two brothers in their twinship left the dune; Warping the gale, the Wright wind wrestlers veered Capeward, then blading the wind's flank, banked and spun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
God of the machine, Peregrine machine,... Some still think is Satan, Unto you the thanks For this token flight, Thanks to you and thanks To the brothers Wright....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in... social oppression. And--again excepting the animal fables--it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes--and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them--in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don't want to see another commission that studies the ...needs of kids. We need to help them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »