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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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“Back in the eighteenth century I would have been a sliver-collar boy. Did you ever hear about them? The highborn ladies of the court collected monkeys and peacocks and little blackamoors for pets. Slender young dark brown boys done up in silk with turbans wrapped around their heads and silver collars around their necks, and the name of the lady to whom they belonged was engraved on the silver collar. They were supposed to be pets like the peacocks and the monkeys, but in the old oil paintings, the lady's delicate white hand always fondled the silkclad shoulder of the silver-collar boy. So you knew they were something more useful, more serviceable--”

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“All marriages are like this. The component parts are contempt and irritation because we know each other by heart, by rote; we're all graduates of the blab school for double harness. Then he looked at the redgold hair, the sweet curve of the mouth, and thought, Truthlie, because marriage is more than that. It's part hate, part love. It's remembered agony, and remembered delight.”

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