Читать книгу Look Homeward, Angel. A Story of the Buried Life онлайн

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Or, crouched in the concealing shrubbery of Gant's yard, they waited for romantic negro couples climbing homeward, jerking by a cord, as their victims came upon the spot, a stuffed black snake-appearing stocking. And the dark was shrill with laughter as the loud rich comic voices stammered, stopped, and screamed.

Or they stoned the cycling black boy of the markets, as he swerved down gracefully into an alley. Nor did they hate them: clowns are black. They had learned, as well, that it was proper to cuff these people kindly, curse them cheerfully, feed them magnanimously. Men are kind to a faithful wagging dog, but he must not walk habitually upon two legs. They knew that they must "take nothin' off a nigger," and that the beginnings of argument could best be scotched with a club and a broken head. Only, you couldn't break a nigger's head.

They spat joyously upon the Jews. Drown a Jew and hit a nigger.

The boys would wait on the Jews, follow them home shouting "Goose Grease! Goose Grease!" which, they were convinced, was the chief staple of Semitic diet; or with the blind acceptance of little boys of some traditional, or mangled, or imaginary catchword of abuse, they would yell after their muttering and tormented victim: "Veeshamadye! Veeshamadye!" confident that they had pronounced the most unspeakable, to Jewish ears, of affronts.