The Best Short Stories by Black Writers [antikvár]

Introduction Just as many Americans believe, solely from having seen La Dolce Vita on the screen, that Rome is one vast seraglio teeming with orgiastic vices, so many also think, from having seen The Cool World, that all Negroes are primitive, dirty and dangerous. White persons of the older generation add to their contemporary concepts the ancient stereotypes lazy, grinning and illiterate, drawn from memories of Stepin Fechit, Rochester and Amos and Andy. Art (and some motion pictures may be classified as art) molds the thoughts, opinions and concepts of millions of people, even before the age of reason. On one of my recent lecture tours, I was the house guest of a charming white professorial couple on a very advanced Midwestern campus of the caliber of Kenyon or Antioch. At dinner my first evening there, I was inwardly amused and not unduly surprised when the ten-year-old daughter of the house asked me [across the table], "Mr. Langston Hughes, can you teach me to shoot dice?" Her embarrassed parents blushed deeply. "Darling, why do you ask such a thing of Mr. Hughes?" "I see colored people all the time shooting dice in the TV movies," the child said. I laughed. "At night they revive a lot of very old pictures, and they show a lot of old-time colored actors like Sunshine Sammy and Nicodemus and Mantan Moreland. But Negroes don't always shoot craps in real life and many have never even seen a pair of dice. Still, there's no harm in your learning. So if your daddy has a pair of dice, after dinner I can show you what I learned when I was in the Merchant Marine. Then if you ever go to Las Vegas — where white people shoot dice all night — you will know. Dice is a very old game, mentioned in the Bible — played by King Ahas-uerus and his court. And today there's a very fashionable gambling casino at Monte Carlo where high society shoots dice,"