Unit 2: Vocabulary from Readings 3

Each dollop
of sherbet, later,
is a miracle,
like salt on a melon that makes it sweeter.

Once upon a time, I was a "socially disadvantaged” child.

Mine was a childhood of intense family closeness. And extreme public alienation.

Thirty years later I write this book as a middle-class American man. Assimilated.

I am considered a dupe, an ass, the fool—Tom Brown, the brown Uncle Tom, interpreting the writing on the wall to a bunch of cigar-smoking pharaohs.

But how dare her lady-fingered pieties extend to my life!

There are those in White America who would anoint me to play out for them some drama of ancestral reconciliation.

Perhaps because I am marked by indelible color they easily suppose that I am unchanged by social mobility, that I can claim unbroken ties with my past.

From the mythic Midwest of my childhood to the mesmerizing Chicago of
later years, this holiday has always evoked a place.

I want to be free from both the material glut and the Pandora's box of emotions that opens every November and doesn’t safely close until Jan. 2.

Not the boulder, the huge house with its secret niches nor even the golden turkey served on an antique platter that my grandmother unearthed every year from the depths of a buffet held any appeal.

On the wide boulevard of Michigan Avenue, I’d follow women in their fat fur coats, amazed and appalled.

The mezzanines of department stores—Lord & Taylor, Marshall Fields—dazzled me; the glint of light reflected on makeup-counter mirrors, the intoxicating waft of perfume on a cacophony of voices.

This was a family in which relatives existed in heaps, all appearing in boldface and underlined with their various eccentricities.

Neuroses and guarded secrets, petty jealousies and unpaid debts were all placed on the back burner for this one day while people reacquainted themselves, hugging away any uneasiness.