NEGRO LITERATURE
205
The long monologue by "Flap" Conroy in Redding's
No Day
of Triumph,
in its combination of bitter misery with high-spirited
defiance, is almost an extended blues. Flap opposes the reality prin–
ciple to blues fantasy,
«White
folks
got the world in a jug an' the
stopper in their hand," and then immediately denies it, "That's what
they
think." Bigger and his friend Gus in
Native Son
daydream of
flying planes and dropping bombs on the white world. In
The Out–
sider,
this has become a vision, by a Negro in a bar, of flying saucers
landing from Mars and disembarking
colored
men, come to put the
white overlords of earth in their place. In Langston Hughes's
Simple
Speaks His Mind,
Simple, who alternates between feeling "like I
got the world in a jug and the stopper
in
my hand" and varieties of
depression, .also alternates between fury that Negroes are not allowed
to run trains and fly planes, and fantasies of space flight:
Why, man, I would rock so far away from this color line in the U.S.A.,
till
it wouldn't be funny. I might even build me a garage on Mars and
a mansion on Venus. On summer nights I would scoot down the Milky
Way just to cool off. I would not have no old-time jet-propelled plane
either. My plane would run on atom power. This earth I would not
bother with no more. No, buddy-oJ The sky would be my roadway and
the stars my stopping place. Man, if I had a rocket plane, I would rock
off into space and be solid gone. Gone. Real gone! I mean
gone!"
Balancing this complex of misery and compens.ation in the slow
blues, we have the abuse and bawdry of the fast blu:es. Georgia
White sings:
When we married, we promised to stick through thick and thin;
When we married, we promised to stick through thick and thin.
But the, way you thinned out is a lowdown dirty sin.
"Speckled Red" sings:
Now you're a dirty mistreater, a robber and a cheater,
I slip you in the dozen, your pappy is your cousin,
Your mama do the Lordy-Lord.
(The reference is to "the dozens," a formalized Negro game, p.artic–
ularly common among children, creating what John Dollard calls "a
pattern of interactive insult" by exchanging slurs on the cleanliness,
odor, legitimacy, fidelity, and heterosexuality of the opponent's im–
mediate family.) Simple and Hughes's narrator slip each other re-
