Friday, March 31, 2017

the last book I ever read (John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, excerpt seven)

from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:

It was a good fight. Hazel tripped and got kicked in the face twice before he could get to his feet again. The Franklin stove went over with a crash. Driven to a corner the newcomers defended themselves with heavy books from the bookcases. But gradually they were driven back. The two front windows were broken out. Suddenly Alfred, who had heard the trouble from across the street, attacked from the rear with his favorite weapon, an indoor ball bat. The fight raged down the steps and into the street and across the lot. The front door was hanging limply from one hinge again. Doc’s shirt was torn off and his slight strong shoulder dropped blood from a scratch. The enemy was driven half-way up the lot when sirens sounded. Doc’s birthday party had barely time to get inside the laboratory and wedge the broken door closed and turn out the light before the police car cruised up. The cops didn’t find anything. But the party was sitting in the dark giggling happily and drinking wine. The shift changed at the Bear Flag. The fresh contingent raged in full of hell. And then the party really got going. The cops came back, looked in, clicked their tongues and joined it. Mack and the boys used the squad car to go to Jimmy Brucia’s for more wine and Jimmy came back with them. You could hear the roar of the party from end to end of Cannery Row. The party had all the best qualities of a riot and a night on the barricades. The crew from the San Pedro tuna boat crept humbly back and joined the party. They were embraced and admired. A woman five blocks away called the police to complain about the noise and couldn’t get anyone. The cops reported their own car stolen and found it later on the beach. Doc sitting cross-legged on the table smiled and tapped his fingers gently on his knee. Mack and Phyllis Mae were doing Indian wrestling on the floor. And the cool bay wind blew in through the broken windows. It was then that someone lighted the twenty-five-foot string of firecrackers.



Thursday, March 30, 2017

the last book I ever read (John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, excerpt six)

from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:

Henri has been living in and building his boat for ten years. During that time he had been married twice and had promoted a number of semi-permanent liaisons. And all of these young women had left him for the same reason. The seven-foot cabin was too small for two people. They resented bumping their heads when they stood up and they definitely felt the need for a toilet. Marine toilets obviously would not work in a shore-bound boat and Henri refused to compromise with a spurious landsman’s toilet. He and his friend of the moment had to stroll away among the pines. And one after another his loves left him.

Just after the girl he had called Alice left him, a very curious thing happened to Henri. Each time he was left alone, he mourned formally for a while but actually he felt a sense of relief. He could stretch out in his little cabin. He could eat what he wanted. He was glad to be free of the endless female biologic functions for a while.



Wednesday, March 29, 2017

the last book I ever read (John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, excerpt five)

from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:

Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row. In the gray time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light. The street lights go out, and the weeds are a brilliant green. The corrugated iron of the canneries glows with the pearly lucency of platinum or old pewter. No automobiles are running them. The street is silent of progress and business. And the rush and drag of the waves can be heard as they splash in among the piles of the canneries. It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era of rest. Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. Silent early morning dogs parade majestically picking and choosing judiciously whereon to pee. The sea gulls come flapping in to sit on the cannery roofs to await the day of refuse. They sit on the roof peaks shoulder to shoulder. From the rocks near the Hopkins Marine Station comes the barking of sea lions like the baying of hounds. The air is cool and fresh. In the back gardens the gophers push up the morning mounds of fresh damp earth and they creep out and drag flowers into their holes. Very few people are about, just enough to make it seem more deserted than it is. One of Dora’s girls comes home from a call on a patron too wealthy or too sick to visit the Bear Flag. Her makeup is a little sticky and her feet are tired. Lee Chong brings the garbage cans out and stands them on the curb. The old Chinaman comes out of the sea and flap-flaps across the street and up past the Palace. The cannery watchmen look out and blink at the morning light. The bouncer at the Bear Flag steps out on the porch in his shirtsleeves and stretches and yawns and scratches his stomach. The snores of Mr. Malloy’s tenants in the pipes have a deep tunnelly quality. It is the hour of the pearl—the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.



Tuesday, March 28, 2017

the last book I ever read (John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, excerpt four)

from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:

“Well, get back as soon as you can, will you? We’ll just stay right here.”

“Anyways you won’t go running off without a needle valve,” said Gay. He stepped out to the road. He thumbed three cars before one stopped for him. The boys watched him climb in and start down the hill. They didn’t see him again for one hundred and eighty days.



Monday, March 27, 2017

the last book I ever read (John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, excerpt three)

from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:

The next owner took off the front of the cab and the windshield. He used it to haul squids and he liked a fresh breeze to blow in his face. His name was Francis Almones and he had a sad life, for he always made just a fraction less than he needed to live. His father had left him a little money but year by year and month by month, no matter how hard Francis worked or how careful he was, his money grew less until he just dried up and blew away.

Lee Chong got the truck in payment of a grocery bill.



Sunday, March 26, 2017

the last book I ever read (John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, excerpt two)

from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:

“Oh!” said Hazel and he cast frantically about for a peg to hang a new question on. He hated to have a conversation die out like this. He wasn’t quick enough. While he was looking for a question Doc asked one. Hazel hated that, it meant casting about in his mind for an answer and casting about in Hazel’s mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum. Hazel’s mind was choked with uncatalogued exhibits. He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. Everything was thrown together like fishing tackle in the bottom of a rowboat, hooks and sinkers and line and lures and gaffs all snarled up.

Doc asked, “How are things going up at the Palace?”



Saturday, March 25, 2017

the last book I ever read (John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, excerpt one)

from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:

Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.



Friday, March 24, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt twelve)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

But the curiousest thing was Dewey Dell. It surprised me. I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn’t nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it. And then I always kind of had a idea that him and Dewey Dell kind of knowed things betwixt them. If I’d a said it was ere a one of us she liked better than ere a other, I’d a said it was Darl. But when we got it filled and covered and drove out the gate and turned into the lane where them fellows was waiting, when they come out and come on him and he jerked back, it was Dewey Dell that was on him before even Jewel could get at him. And then I believed I knowed how Gillespie knowed about how his barn taken fire.



Thursday, March 23, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt eleven)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

Sometimes I aint so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

Because Jewel is too hard on him. Of course it was Jewel’s horse was traded to get her that night to town, and in a sense it was the value of the horse Darl tried to burn up. But I thought more than once before we crossed the river and after, how it would be God’s blessing if He did take her outen our hands and get shut of her in some clean way, and it seemed to me that when Jewel worked so to get her outen the river, he was going against God in a way, and then when Darl seen that it looked like one of us would have to do something, I can almost believe he done right in a way. But I don’t reckon nothing excuses setting fire to a man’s barn and endangering his stock and destroying his property. That’s how I reckon a man is crazy. That’s how he cant see eye to eye with other folks. And I reckon they aint nothing else to do with him but what the most folks say is right.



Wednesday, March 22, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt ten)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

The cow watches us as we enter. She is backed into the corner, head lowered, still chewing though rapidly. But she makes no move. Jewel has paused, looking up, and suddenly we watch the entire floor to the loft dissolve. It just turns to fire; a faint litter of sparks rains down. He glances about. Back under the trough is a three legged milking stool. He catches it up and swings it into the planking of the rear wall. He splinters a plank, then another, a third; we tear the fragments away. While we are stooping to the opening something charges into us from behind. It is the cow; with a single whistling breath she rushes between us and through the gap and into the outer glare, her tail erect and rigid as a broom nailed upright to the end of her spine.



Tuesday, March 21, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt nine)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.



Monday, March 20, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt eight)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

“Nothing,” she said. “He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire. Even though I have laid down my life, he will save me.”

“How do you know, without you open your heart to Him and lift your voice in His praise?” I said. Then I realized that she did not mean God. I realized that out of the vanity of her heart she had spoken sacrilege. And I went down on my knees right there. I begged her to kneel and open her heart and cast from it the devil of vanity and cast herself upon the mercy of the Lord. But she wouldn’t. She just sat there, lost in her vanity and her pride, that had closed her heart to God and set that selfish mortal boy in His place. Kneeling there I prayed for her. I prayed for that poor blind woman as I had never prayed for me and mine.



Sunday, March 19, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt seven)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

“If ever was such a misfortunate man,” pa says. He looms tall above us as we squat; he looks like a figure carved clumsily from tough wood by a drunken caricaturist. “It’s a trial,” he says. “But I dont begrudge her it. No man can say I begrudge her it.” Dewey Dell has laid Cash’s head back on the folded coat, twisting his head a little to avoid the vomit. Beside him his tools lie. “A fellow might call it lucky it was the same leg he broke when he fell offen that church,” pa says. “But I don’t begrudge her it.”



Saturday, March 18, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt six)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon, hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn’t act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.

“You say it’s higher than you ever see it before?” he says. “God’s will be done,” he says. “I reckon it wont go down much by morning, neither,” he says.



Thursday, March 16, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt four)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

It was nigh toward daybreak when we drove the last nail and toted it into the house, where she was laying on the bed with the window open and the rain blowing on her again. Twice he did it, and him so dead for sleep that Cora says his face looked like one of these here Christmas masts that had done been buried a while and then dug up, until at last they put her into it and nailed it down so he couldn’t open the window on her no more. And the next morning they found him in his shirt tail, laying asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the box bored clean full of holes and Cash’s new auger broke off in the last one. When they taken the lid off they found that two of them had bored on into her face.



Wednesday, March 15, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt three)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

He could do so much for me if he just would. He could do everything for me. It’s like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can by any room in it for anything else very important. He is a big tub of guts and I am a little tub of guts and if there is not any room for anything else important in a big tub of guts, how can it be room in a little tub of guts. But I know it is there because God gave women a sign when something has happened bad.

It’s because I am alone. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.



Tuesday, March 14, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt two)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

And so it was because I could not help it. It was then, and then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words, and I knew he knew because if he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been there and saw us. But he said he did know and I said “Are you going to tell pa are you going to kill him?” without the words I said it and he said “Why?” without the words. And that’s why I can talk to him with knowing with hating because he knows.



Monday, March 13, 2017

the last book I ever read (William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, excerpt one)

from As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

Why, for the last three weeks I have been coming over every time I could, coming sometimes when I shouldn’t have, neglecting my own family and duties so that somebody would be with her in her last moments and she would not have to face the Great Unknown without one familiar face to give her courage. Not that I deserve credit for it: I will expect the same for myself. But thank God it will be the faces of my loved kin, my blood and flesh, for in my husband and children I have been more blessed than most, trials though they have been at times.



Friday, March 10, 2017

the last book I ever read (Mary Astor's Purple Diary, The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, excerpt seven)

from Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel:

A year later, Little Women (1948) took a particularly heavy toll on her. She was in debt again, and not well physically or emotionally. As a result everything and everyone in that overproduced film put a strain on her. Young Elizabeth Taylor got engaged to Conrad Hilton Jr. and giggled on the phone while everyone waited on the set. June Allyson, who was assigned the role of sensitive and poetic Jo, chewed gum constantly and irritatingly. Worst of all was Peter Lawford’s inability to pronounce the word “porcupine” in take after take; it always came out as “porkypine.” The young cast found his endless flubs hilarious. Mary did not.



Thursday, March 9, 2017

the last book I ever read (Mary Astor's Purple Diary, The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, excerpt six)

from Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel:

When Mary had no partner she would, as she later wrote, drink, and her loneliness repeatedly led her to believe, after a single springy night in the sack, that she had found her redeemer. Next up would be Manuel Martinez del Campo, a Mexican socialite and polo player raised in England whose father was in the British diplomatic service.

A woman director from London had introduced them, assuring Mary that the handsome twenty-four-year-old was a class act, and not to worry about the seven-year age difference. Both of them hung back, sharing a lunch and a dinner before deciding they were in love. When Manuel’s father died suddenly in Mexico City, Mary chartered what AP called “the elopement plane” and flew to Arizona, where they had the Yuma curse laid on them at four in the morning before the groom flew on alone to the funeral (they would stage a proper wedding later). Only afterward did Mary think to ask her daughter whether she liked him. Yes, said Marylyn; “I like potatoes, too.”



Wednesday, March 8, 2017

the last book I ever read (Mary Astor's Purple Diary, The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, excerpt five)

from Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel:

The prospect of being grilled in court about his intimate affairs terrified this very private man, and he had to get out of California before the subpoena was served. Kaufman made a frantic call to MGM’s “boy genius” producer chief, Irving Thalberg, to save him from the law. Thalberg, thirty-seven, second in command at MGM, had lured the proud citizen of Broadway back to glitzy Gomorrah the preceding year with an offer of $100,000 to coauthor the Marx Brothers’ first film for MGM, A Night at the Opera, with Morrie Ryskind. Thalberg was the only movie producer Kaufman respected, and the feeling had become mutual after the playwright—author of a fierce clause in the Dramatists Guild contract, informally named for him—once responded to pressure for a rush treatment with, “Do you want it Wednesday, or do you want it good?”



Tuesday, March 7, 2017

the last book I ever read (Mary Astor's Purple Diary, The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, excerpt four)

from Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel:

Many thought Goldwyn a complete idiot, but the playwright Sidney Howard had hard evidence to support his belief. Years earlier he had urged the producer to buy Dodsworth—it was only $20,000—and Howard offered to write the script. The produced declined. So Howard adapted it for the stage, and it became a smash. Now Goldwyn had to have it—for $160,000. When Howard teased him, the former Samuel Goldfish, née Schmuel Gelbfisz, said he’d actually been canny to wait: “This way I bought a successful play. Before it was only a novel.”



Monday, March 6, 2017

the last book I ever read (Mary Astor's Purple Diary, The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, excerpt three)

from Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel:

Woolley, a Mormon from Utah, was no stranger to clients with scandalous sex lives. As a young lawyer in the 1920s, he had represented Aimee Semple McPherson. The glamorous evangelist who owned her own church and radio station had run off for a tryst with one of her employees, later telling a wild story about having been kidnapped. She was charged with perjury, but Woolley got her acquitted. Now he was almost as famous as the stars he represented. Mary found him friendly and understanding, but he flinched when he heard details about the diary. Still, after mulling it over, he told Mary he thought he could keep it from being entered into evidence. Marylyn had been living with her for a year and was thriving. Woolley suggested Mary sue for custody.



Sunday, March 5, 2017

the last book I ever read (Mary Astor's Purple Diary, The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, excerpt two)

from Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel:

After moving into a small rented apartment in Hollywood, with an obligatory extra room for a maid, Mary went to work at Paramount for her first talkie, Ladies Love Brutes. She’d dropped twenty pounds in the meantime, and the stills from that movie show an emaciated figure. In the course of one scene, Mary again fainted.

Maybe it was the plot. An Italian building contractor, Joe Forziati, with mobster friends, wants to marry a high-society dame, Mimi Howell (Mary), awaiting a divorce from her husband, Dwight Howell. Mary says she has to think of her child and can’t marry a man with ties to gangsters. The contractor decides to kidnap the boy and then heroically rescues him. But then . . . well, Citizen Kane it wasn’t, though it was co-written by Herman Mankiewicz, ten years before he wrote his masterpiece. Whatever caused Mary’s swoon, she revived after brandy and a raw egg.



Saturday, March 4, 2017

the last book I ever read (Mary Astor's Purple Diary, The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936, excerpt one)

from Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel:

This seems as good a time as any to explain how Eddie Schwartz morphed into Edward Sorel. You can see why on so many levels I had to rebel against my father, so after I landed my first good-paying job ($85 a week) at Esquire magazine, I decided to have my last name legally changed. I chose Sorel because I had read Stendahl’s The Red and the Black, that nineteenth-century novel about an ambitious bounder who is catnip to women and rises socially beyond his provincial upbringing. Like me, Julien Sorel hated his father, the clergy, and the corrupt society of his time. Even the fact that he ended up guilltotined appealed to me. Surely I’d end up the same, considering all the left-wing committees I was on during the McCarthy hysteria. Although plainly I wasn’t beheaded, I did get a visit from an FBI agent in 1959 after I published a few issues of Sorel’s Affiche.

The Affiche was a broadside in which I satirized anything that came into my head, usually of a political nature. For the first two issues I asked my friend Warren Miller to write the text. Warren, a well-known novelist, had once been a member of the Communist Party, like many of my older friends. That may explain what happened after the second issue of Sorel’s Affiche was mailed to hundreds of art directors in New York.



Friday, March 3, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt seventeen)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Everyone who has witnessed the historic presidency of Barack Obama—and the historic opposition to him—should now know full well that the more Black people uplift themselves, the more they will find themselves on the receiving end of a racist backlash. Uplight suasion, as a strategy for racial progress, has failed. Black individuals must dispose of it as a strategy and stop worrying about what other people may think about the way they act, the way they speak, the way they look, the way they dress, the way they are portrayed in the media, and the way they think and love and laugh. Individual Blacks are not race representatives. They are not responsible for those Americans who hold racist ideas. Black people need to be their imperfect selves around White people, around each other, around all people. Black is beautiful and ugly, intelligent and unintelligent, law-abiding and law-breaking, industrious and lazy—and it is those imperfections that make Black people human, make Black people equal to all other imperfectly human groups.



Thursday, March 2, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt sixteen)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

Bush’s political dancing on the King beating angered antiracists as spring turned into summer. He fanned the fury on July 1, 1991, when he nominated a Black jurist, Clarence Thomas, to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Thomas saw himself as a paragon of self-reliance, even though he had needed antiracist activism and policies to get him into Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, and even though he had needed his racist Blackness to get him into the Reagan administration in 1981, first as assistant secretary of education for the Office of Civil Rights. He had been the backseat driver of antiracist and racist forces throughout his career. And now, Bush had called Thomas to the Supreme Court, claiming he was the “best qualified at this time,” a judgment that sounded as ridiculous as those officers trying to justify the beating of Rodney King. The “best qualified” forty-three-year-old Thomas had served as a judge for all of fifteen months.



Wednesday, March 1, 2017

the last book I ever read (Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, excerpt fifteen)

from the 2016 National Book Award winner for Nonfiction Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi:

In 1989, Public Enemy recorded one of the most popular songs in Hip Hop history, “Fight the Power.” The song headlined the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s critically acclaimed 1989 urban rebellion flick, Do the Right Thing. “Fight the Power” tied together the commencement of the socially conscious age of Hip Hop and Black filmmaking and scholarship. Do the Right Thing was Lee’s third feature film. His second, School Daze (1988), addressed assimilationist ideas related to skin tone and eye color (the lighter the better) and hair texture (the straighter the better), a theme suggest by the fact that Black Power’s Afros were being cut or permed down. Some Blacks were even bleaching their skins White. The most known or suspected skin bleacher in the late 1980s and early 1990s was arguably the nation’s most famous African American, singer Michael Jackson. It was rumored Jackson lightened his skin and thinned his nose and lips to boost his career. Indeed, light-skins still secured higher incomes and were preferred in adoptions, while dark-skins predominated in public housing and prisons and were more likely to report racial discrimination. Racists were blaming dark-skins for these disparities. Antiracists were blaming color discrimination. “The lighter the skin, the lighter the sentence,” was a popular antiracist saying.