Recounts three generations of a family, but primarily concerned with war veteran grandfather and grandson with AIDS and a theme of the humility of survival. American English in Mind is an integrated, four-skills course for beginner to advanced teenage learners of American English. Thought-provoking reading, listening, speaking, and writing topics motivate teenage students of American English. Content-rich photostories and dialogues present contemporary. Ruby the Foster Dog.
Be a star that shines for others. Abandoned in an animal shelter, Ruby, an adorable mixed breed puppy with an underbite, wonders if a family will ever adopt her. When a goofy looking, scruffy-faced man stops by the shelter, he adopts Ruby.
James is not the family she was. I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, classics lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Vivaldo staggered backward from the bed into the corner which held the sink and a water glass went crashing to the floor. But it also seemed to Vivaldo that she was a little frightened and a little ashamed. They stared at Vivaldo with a calm, steady hatred, as remote and unanswerable as madness.
But it really seemed better— and it seemed, weirdly enough, that the girl was silently trying to convey this to him— to say as little as possible. So he only said, after a moment, as mildly as he could. I fell for the oldest gag in the business. Here I am. What do you want? He watched Vivaldo, waiting for Vivaldo to speak again. He saw a bird dog, tense, pointing, absolutely silent, waiting for a covey of quail to surrender to panic and fly upward, where they could be picked off by the guns of the hunters.
So it was in the room while the man waited for Vivaldo to speak. Whatever Vivaldo might say would be turned into an opportunity for slaughter.
Vivaldo held his breath, hoping that his panic did not show in his eyes, and felt his flesh begin to crawl. Then the man looked over at the girl, who stood near the bed, watching him, and then he slowly moved closer to Vivaldo. Vivaldo handed him the wallet. The man lit a cigarette which he held in the corner of his mouth as he deliberately, insolently, began looking through the wallet. But this had struck some nerve in him and he felt himself beginning to be angry again.
At the same time this question made him tremble with rage and he realized, with another part of his mind, that this was exactly what the man wanted. There remained at the bottom of his mind, nevertheless, a numb speculation as to why this question should make him angry.
You know what you guys do. The man considered him a moment more, looked at the girl, then looked down to the wallet again. He took out all the money. The man took it all. The man gave him his wallet. Charlie caught him with Miss Anne.
The man watched him, the girl watched the man. He got to the door and opened it and realized that his legs were weak. He had reached the first landing when he heard a door above him open and quick, stealthy footsteps descending.
Then the girl stood above him, stretching her hand over the banister. He walked in without knocking. Rufus was standing near the door, holding a knife. Or were you planning to cut yourself a hunk of salami? Vivaldo slowly let out his breath.
Vivaldo knew the face before him so well that he had ceased, in a way, to look at it and now his heart turned over to see what time had done to Rufus. He had not seen before the fine lines in the forehead, the deep, crooked line between the brows, the tension which soured the lips. He wondered what the eyes were seeing— they had not been seeing it years before. He had never associated Rufus with violence, for his walk was always deliberate and slow, his tone mocking and gentle: but now he remembered how Rufus played the drums.
He moved one short step closer, watching Rufus, watching the knife. The bald kitchen light burned mercilessly down on the two orange crates and the board which formed the kitchen table, and on the uncovered wash and bathtub. Dirty clothes lay flung in a corner.
On the bed was a twisted gray sheet and a thin blanket. Rufus stared at him. He seemed not to believe Vivaldo; he seemed to long to believe him. His face twisted, he dropped the knife, and fell against Vivaldo, throwing his arms around him, trembling. Vivaldo led him into the bedroom and they sat down on the bed.
This shit has got to stop. The room in which they sat seemed very far from the life breathing all around them, all over the island. If all you can do is beat her, well, then, you ought to leave her. Rufus rose from the bed and walked restlessly up and down the two rooms. I done had enough company to last me the rest of my life. They got the world on a string, man, the miserable white cock suckers, and they tying that string around my neck, they killing me.
Sometimes I lie here and listen, listen for a bomb, man, to fall on this city and make all that noise stop. I listen to hear them moan, I want them to bleed and choke, I want to hear them crying, man, for somebody to come help them.
I sure would like to see it. You know all that chick knows about me? The only thing she knows? He sat down on the bed again. But fear drained his voice of conviction. Is that what you want? Do you know? I know that. I want to make her love me. I want to be loved. He half-smiled. At the same time his heart lunged in terror and he felt the blood leave his face. He tried to force his mind back through the beds he had been in— his mind grew as blank as a wall.
He stared at Rufus. Rufus laughed. He lay back on the bed and laughed until tears began running from the corners of his eyes. It was the worst laugh Vivaldo had ever heard and he wanted to shake Rufus or slap him, anything to make him stop.
But he did nothing; he lit a cigarette; the palms of his hands were wet. Rufus choked, sputtered, and sat up. He turned his agonized face to Vivaldo for an instant. He had stopped laughing, was very sober and still. He crushed out his cigarette on the floor. He was beginning to be angry. At the same time he wanted to laugh. I better get out of here. I just want to see Leona one more time. I thought all you white boys had a big thing about how us spooks was making out.
Now Vivaldo and Rufus sat together in silence, near the window of the pizzeria. There was little left for them to say. They had said it all— or Rufus had; and Vivaldo had listened. Music from a nearby night club came at them, faintly, through the windows, along with the grinding, unconquerable hum of the streets. And Rufus watched the streets with a helpless, sad intensity, as though he were waiting for Leona. These streets had claimed her.
She had been found, Rufus said, one freezing night, half-naked, looking for her baby. She knew where it was, where they had hidden her baby, she knew the house; only she could not remember the address.
And then, Rufus said, she had been taken to Bellevue, and he had been unable to get her out. The doctors had felt that it would be criminal to release her into the custody of the man who was the principal reason for her breakdown, and who had, moreover, no legal claim on her. Now she sat somewhere in Georgia, staring at the walls of a narrow room; and she would remain there forever.
Vivaldo yawned and felt guilty. He wanted to go home and lock his door and sleep. He was tired of the troubles of real people. He wanted to get back to the people he was inventing, whose troubles he could bear. But he was restless, too, and unwilling, now that he was out, to go home right away. Vivaldo watched him, feeling it all come back, his love for Rufus, and his grief for him. He leaned across the table and tapped him on the cheek. He sighed, relieved, also wishing to call the words back.
The waiter came. Vivaldo paid the check and they walked out into the streets. A policeman, standing under the light on the corner, was phoning in.
On the opposite pavement a young man walked his dog. A heavy Negro girl, plain, carrying packages, and a surly, bespectacled white boy ran together toward a taxi.
The yellow light on the roof went out, the doors slammed. The cab turned, came toward Rufus and Vivaldo, and the street lights blazed for an instant on the faces of the silent couple within. The bar was terribly crowded. Advertising men were there, drinking double shots of bourbon or vodka, on the rocks; college boys were there, their wet fingers slippery on the beer bottles; lone men stood near the doors or in corners, watching the drifting women.
The college boys, gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity, made terrified efforts to attract the feminine attention, but succeeded only in attracting each other. Some of the men were buying drinks for some of the women— who wandered incessantly from the juke box to the bar— and they faced each other over smiles which were pitched, with an eerie precision, between longing and contempt. Black-and-white couples were together here— closer together now than they would be later, when they got home.
These several histories were camouflaged in the jargon which, wave upon wave, rolled through the bar; were locked in a silence like the silence of glaciers.
Only the juke box spoke, grinding out each evening, all evening long, syncopated, synthetic laments for love. The place seemed terribly strange to him, as though he remembered it from a dream. He recognized faces, gestures, voices— from this same dream; and, as in a dream, no one looked his way, no one seemed to remember him. Just next to him, at a table, sat a girl he had balled once or twice, whose name was Belle.
She was talking to her boy friend, Lorenzo. She brushed her long black hair out of her eyes and looked directly at him for a moment, but she did not seem to recognize him. When did they let you out, man? He could not remember the name which went with the face. He could not remember what his connection with the face had been.
The voice dropped to a whisper. I heard you got busted, man. Well, crazy. See you around, man. Then, while they stood there, not yet having been able to order anything to drink and undecided as to whether or not they would stay, Cass appeared out of the gloom and noise. She was very elegant, in black, her golden hair pulled carefully back and up. She held a drink and a cigarette in one hand and looked at once like the rather weary matron she actually was and the mischievous girl she once had been.
But I guess I came to the wrong store. Cass turned to Rufus and put her hand on his arm. Her large brown eyes looked directly into his. Are you looking for a new woman?
If so, you too have come to the wrong store. After a moment they both laughed. Richard just sold his novel. She took Rufus by the hand and, with Vivaldo ahead of them, they began pushing their way to the back. They stumbled down the steps into the back room. Richard sat alone at a table, smoking his pipe.
He and Richard grinned at each other. Then Richard looked at Rufus, briefly and sharply, and looked away. Perhaps Richard had never liked Rufus as much as the others had and now, perhaps, he was blaming him for Leona. He sat down. How does it feel? You, Rufus. Richard was being kind, he told himself, but in his heart he accused him of cowardice. Richard stroked her hair and picked up his pipe from the ashtray.
We change, boy, we grow—! I might as well make the most of my night out. Do you mind my head on your shoulder? He looked at Vivaldo. Anytime, baby. Vivaldo turned to Richard. I want to find out if I should be. How long is it? Because we still love you. He hesitated. I was drinking too much and running around whoring when I should have been— being serious, like you, and getting my novel finished.
He almost looked again like the English instructor Vivaldo had idolized, who had been the first person to tell him things he needed to hear, the first person to take Vivaldo seriously. And I hope you make a fortune. They had bugged him then. Yet how he wished now to be back there, to have someone looking at him as Vivaldo now looked at Richard. And the way the people had looked at Rufus was not unlike this look. They wondered where it came from, this force that they admired.
Dimly, they wondered how he stood it, wondered if perhaps it would not kill him soon. Vivaldo looked away, down into his drink, and lit a cigarette.
Richard suddenly looked very tired. A tall girl, very pretty, carefully dressed— she looked like an uptown model— came into the room, looked about her, peered sharply at their table. She paused, then started out. She turned and laughed. Rufus turned to watch her move daintily up the steps and disappear into the crowded bar. He looked at the door again, shifting slightly in his seat, then threw down the last of his drink.
He felt black, filthy, foolish. He wished he were miles away, or dead. He kept thinking of Leona; it came in waves, like the pain of a toothache or a festering wound.
Cass left her seat and came over and sat beside him. She stared at him and he was frightened by the sympathy on her face. He wondered why she should look like that, what her memories or experience could be. She could only look at him this way because she knew things he had never imagined a girl like Cass could know. He did not want to answer. He did not want to talk about Leona— and yet there was nothing else that he could possibly talk about.
They come and took her out of Bellevue. She said nothing. She offered him a cigarette, lit it, and lit one for herself. I had to see him, I made him see me. He spit in my face, he said he would have killed me had we been down home.
He remembered the walls of the hospital: white; and the uniforms and the faces of the doctors and nurses, white on white. Had they been down home, his blood and the blood of his enemy would have rushed out to mingle together over the uncaring earth, under the uncaring sky. Thank God for that. They took the kid away from her. Or too long. He stared at her. She smiled. The thing is not to lie about them— to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it.
From far away, from the juke box, he heard a melody he had often played. He thought of Leona. Her face would not leave him. He did not know why this woman was talking to him as she was, what she was trying to tell him. Rufus was suddenly afraid to see her go. She stared at him across the width of the table.
Vivaldo was staring at something, at someone, just behind Rufus and suddenly seemed about to spring out of his seat. Her short, graying hair was carefully combed, which was unusual, and she was wearing a dark dress, which was also unusual. Perhaps Vivaldo was the only person there who had ever seen her out of blue jeans and sweaters. She sat down. Jane looked at Rufus, beginning, it seemed, to recover her self-possession. For the first time she looked directly at him.
Richard was paying the waiter and had stood up, his trench coat over his arm. He longed to do something to prolong that smile, that moment, but he did not smile back, only nodded his head. She turned to Jane and Vivaldo. See you soon. So long, Jane. The seats the others had occupied were like a chasm now between Rufus and the white boy and the white girl.
So long…. For a lot of money? He stood at the door for a moment, watching the boys and girls, men and women, their wet mouths opening and closing, their faces damp and pale, their hands grim on the glass or the bottle or clutching a sleeve, an elbow, clutching the air.
Small flames flared incessantly here and there and they moved through shifting layers of smoke. The cash register rang and rang. One enormous bouncer stood at the door, watching everything, and another moved about, clearing tables and rearranging chairs. Two boys, one Spanish-looking in a red shirt, one Danishlooking in brown, stood at the juke box, talking about Frank Sinatra. Rufus stared at a small blonde girl who was wearing a striped open blouse and a wide skirt with a big leather belt and a bright brass buckle.
She wore low shoes and black knee socks. Her blouse was low enough for him to see the beginnings of her breasts; his eye followed the line down to the full nipples, which pushed aggressively forward; his hand encircled her waist, caressed the belly button and slowly forced the thighs apart.
She was talking to another girl. She felt his eyes on her and looked his way. Their eyes met. He turned and walked into the head. It smelled of thousands of travelers, oceans of piss, tons of bile and vomit and shit.
He added his stream to the ocean, holding that most despised part of himself loosely between two fingers of one hand. He looked at the horrible history splashed furiously on the walls— telephone numbers, cocks, breasts, balls, cunts, etched into these walls with hatred. Suck my cock. I like to get whipped. I want a hot stiff prick up my ass. Down with Jews. Kill the niggers.
I suck cocks. He washed his hands very carefully and dried them on the filthy roller towel and walked out into the bar. The two boys were still at the juke box, the girl with the striped blouse was still talking to her friend. He walked through the bar to the door and into the street. Only then did he reach in his pocket to see what Cass had pushed into his palm. Five dollars. Well, that would take care of him until morning.
He would get a room at the Y. The bars were beginning to close. People stood before bar doors, trying vainly to get in, or simply delaying going home; and in spite of the cold there were loiterers under street lamps. He felt as removed from them, as he walked slowly along, as he might have felt from a fence, a farmhouse, a tree, seen from a train window: coming closer and closer, the details changing every instant as the eye picked them out; then pressing against the window with the urgency of a messenger or a child; then dropping away, diminishing, vanished, gone forever.
That fence is falling down, he might have thought as the train rushed toward it, or That house needs paint, or The tree is dead. In an instant, gone in an instant— it was not his fence, his farmhouse, or his tree. As now, passing, he recognized faces, bodies, postures, and thought.
Son of a bitch is stoned again. It was very silent. He passed Cornelia Street. Equally , it is present history which moves them forward , always into unknown territory. Contributed to the city with yet another empty building, packed up my things and returned to Canada. This is to say that returnees' migration experiences seldom end with return, for there is always another country to which one is One country's gain is always another country's loss.
Tourism could boost the global economy only if productivity in tourism exceeded the average throughout the economy. This may be the case with air transport, but in accommodation and So it is that in these interviews, some of the Southerners, On the supply side, if the authorities increase the pressure against one specific country's export of drugs to the United States, there is always another country ready to fill in the gap.
Destroy one crop of drugs, another crop can be As another young man says, speaking of the large corporation in general: They try to do what's best for you and Vietnam is in the past, and the past, for many Americans, is always another country.
Skip to content. There is a whirlwind loose in the land' Sunday Times When Another Country appeared in , it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit.
The essays in Public Intellectuals in South Africa apply this interpretive prism and activist principle to a South African context and tell the stories of well-known figures as well as some that have been mostly forgotten.
The essays capture the thoughts and opinions of these historical figures, who the contributors argue are public intellectuals who spoke out against the corruption of power, promoted a progressive politics that challenged the colonial project and its legacies, and encouraged a sustained dissent of the political status quo.
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