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The Narrows

Book by Ann Petry · 4 quotes · Blacks, African Americans, Black Men

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The Narrows Quotes

“The attendant looked at Camilo, looked at Link, blandly, incuriously. Link thought, In New York all the black boys who go in for what they like to call Caddies also go in for white girls. So this is old hat to him. He figures that if I'm rich enough--numbers or women or rackets of one kind or another--to drive one of these crates, then almost any good-looking white girl is going to find me acceptable. Money transforms the black male. Makes him beautiful in the eyes of the white female. Black and comely. No. It was black but comely, take it for granted that blackness and comeliness were not only possible but went hand in hand.”

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“Well, of course," Camilo said, and grinned back at JohnRolandJoseph and his long line of bought and paid for ancestors, as friendly and unselfconscious as though all her life she had been looking for men, black men, big black men--plantation bucks (stud) look at his thighs, look at that back, look at his dingle-dangle--as though all her life she had been looking for colored men to whom she was not married, to whom she would never be married because she was already married to a nice young white man, as though all her life she had told uniformed monkeys who pulled elevators in rundown colored hotels, in Harlem, that she couldn't find, had lost, misplaced, a gentleman of color named Williams.”

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“She supposed the young colored men of Link's generation couldn't have manners like Mr. Powther's, though she didn't know why. Wars and atom bombs and the fact that there was so much hate in the world might have something to do with it. There were times when she had thought that rudeness was a characteristic of Link's; that other young men had a natural courtesy he would never have. Then she would see or hear something in The Narrows that suggested all these young men were alike--something had brutalized them. But what?”

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