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Back The Great Pretenders
Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise for The Great Pretenders
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. PART I
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. PART II
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. PART III
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-one
  29. Chapter Twenty-two
  30. Chapter Twenty-three
  31. Chapter Twenty-four
  32. Chapter Twenty-five
  33. Chapter Twenty-six
  34. PART IV
  35. Chapter Twenty-seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-one
  40. Chapter Thirty-two
  41. Chapter Thirty-three
  42. Chapter Thirty-four
  43. Chapter Thirty-five
  44. PART V
  45. Chapter Thirty-six
  46. Chapter Thirty-seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  51. Readers Guide
  52. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  53. Acknowledgments
  54. About the Author
  55. What’s next onyour reading list?

Liza Jane,

If I’m an outside agitator, well, time to agitate, damnit, and not just watch, witness, and write. I took the extra money the NAACP gave me and bought a prewar Ford. It’s a bucket of bolts, but it runs. I bought it so I can drive to one of the lots owned by black businesses and pick up people and take them to their jobs. I drive. They talk. I listen. Their shoes are wearing out, but not their spirit.

But that car? That car! Roxanne, that is an experience that’s seared into me for the rest of my life. I bought it off a white man, and god forgive me, I had to promise him, no sir, I wouldn’t be driving no nigras to work. He called me boy. He was toying with me, all along, and finally said he wouldn’t sell it to me because he didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t a local. I sure as hell wasn’t about to show my California license. I had to get Rev Cooke to come down and buy it, and when he showed up, the cracker called Rev Cooke uncle. I wanted to punch his guts out. And I couldn’t allow my face to show that I wanted to punch his guts out. I thought I’d have a hernia I was so goddamned mad. And he was still toying with us, cat and a pair of hapless black mice. After all that shit he put us through, he said that he would only sell the car to a white man. He wanted to be sure it wouldn’t be used as a taxi for blacks who ought to be riding the bus. Rev Cooke telephoned a white pastor here in Montgomery, and he came and the cracker sold it to him.

Baby, just writing this I feel like I ought to take a shower and wash all that bullshit jive off of me, really, physically off of me. I miss you so much.

Love,

Terrence

PS: I think of my father living here, growing up here, and how going to war, how that must have shaken him to his core. He once said that before he was twenty he had never looked under the hood of a car, never seen anything but down the mouth or behind the butt of a mule. That’s all I know of his Alabama life, but the more I see of the people of Montgomery, the more I want to know. Are these my people even if they’re not my relatives? What brought him to California, and what took him away? It’s late and I’m tired. I’ll write more soon.