Shouting Darkness into Darkness

From the Oxford American magazine:

bessie_smithThere is a remarkable story tucked halfway through Bessie, Chris Albertson’s biography of the blues singer Bessie Smith, in which Smith approaches a circle of robed North Carolina Klansmen, places one hand on her hip, and begins shaking the other in the air. She hollers obscenities at the men—who were disassembling the tent her touring company had erected earlier that night, in a particularly childish bit of public dissension—until “they finally turned and disappeared quietly into the darkness.”

Read about Bessie Smith.

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