Strivers Row Read Online Free PDF

Circuit. The green, rolled tennis courts filled with men and women in their tennis whites; the art shows and the yachting regattas; the cocktail parties served under huge, striped tents down by the water.
    But above all, there was Adam. Dressed in an outlandish, bright yellow suit, now complete with matching socks and shoes. Throwing back his big handsome head to laugh at his own jokes and stories, dancing down the porch like some sort of bacchanate to wave the gin bottle over their drinks—
    That last evening Amanda had brought up the Wright book, Native Son, which she had finally convinced her Ladies’ Self-Improvement Class at the New Jerusalem to read that spring. Jonah had been wary but he hadn’t tried to warn her off it, figuring it was her business—and, as he had suspected, she had been more outraged by the book than the ladies of the congregation. When she decided to give voice to that outrage on Adam Clayton Powell’s front porch, Jonah had cringed inside but said nothing—wanting, he had to admit, to see his wife hold her own against Adam.
    â€œI thought it demeaned the race,” she had insisted. “That boy, that Bigger Thomas, is an animal, hardly human at all! He is everything that a Rankin or a Bilbo would have white people believe about the modern Negro—”
    To Jonah’s surprise, Adam had nodded, and knocked out his pipe against the bottom of his loafer.
    â€œI didn’t like it very much, either,” he said, starting to fill the pipe again. “I thought it was much too optimistic.”
    â€œ Optimistic? ” Amanda stared at him.
    â€œSure, it’s downright Pollyannaish. Much too easy on the white man!” he said calmly, puffing the pipe to life—winking at Jonah as he did.
    â€œHow in the world could you possibly find that depraved book optimistic ?”
    â€œConsider it,” Adam told her. “Here you have that white boy— what’s his name? The communist? Bigger takes his girlfriend and kills her. Strangles her like a chicken, in her own bedroom. Then he cuts off her head and stuffs the body into a furnace. He does! My apologies, ladies—”
    He grinned over at his wife, and at Hycie, who only giggled back at him. Amanda was listening furiously, her brow furrowed in concentration that way Jonah had always loved. Realizing some kind of fun was being had at her expense, but still trying to decipher exactly what it meant.
    â€œBut that’s what he does!” Adam appealed. “He kills her, stuffs her body into the furnace. And nevertheless, by the end the white boy—because he’s a good little communist —forgives him!”
    â€œBut—”
    â€œI mean, he cut off her head! ” Adam had roared again, pulling his pipe from his mouth and grinning from ear to ear.
    â€œHe cuts off his girl’s head, stuffs her in the furnace, and the white man forgives him. There’s your racial propaganda! What kind of tinhorn saint is that white boy? I swear, we got nothing on these communists when it comes to the religion business!”
    All of them were laughing now, swept along by Adam’s sheer ebullience. Even Jonah—even Amanda, though he could see that her laughter was halting, and more frustrated than anything else, but trying to be a good sport. Adam could sense it, too—and gently steered the conversation off in another direction.
    â€œSay, did I ever tell you about the summer I met Robert Todd Lincoln, up in Vermont?”
    â€œOh, Adam!”
    He had, many times. But Isabel and Hycie knew that Amanda had never heard it before, and so they clamored obligingly for an encore.
    â€œTell it! Oh, tell it anyway, Adam!”
    â€œAll right then.”
    He sat back down in his hurricane chair and leaned in confidentially toward Jonah and Amanda, a small grin working its way across his face. Drawing them back in, including them all again, especially Amanda, in that