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Kamala F. Harris, with Oprah, vowed to fight crippled children in Africa (or wherever they're hiding). "We'll sniff the little buggers out," Oprah snarled as her big fat *** wobbled hypnotically causing Gayle King's urinary bladder to leak for 20 seconds.
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Lynching the Black Male Body in Theodore Dreiserโ€™s โ€œ****** Jeffโ€: Did He โ€œGet it all inโ€?
Patricia D. Hopkins , Roark Mulligan
American Literary Realism
University of Illinois Press
Volume 45, Number 3, Spring 2013
pp. 229-247  

A race without a country, a people without a national ideal. We laugh at their humor. We build up fiction out of their quaint wisdom. We hang and burn them when they interfere with our women. โ€”Theodore Dreiser

In January 1894, as a journalist for the St. Louis Republic, Theodore Dreiser witnessed and reported the lynching of John Buckner in Valley Park, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. A year or two later, he wrote a fictional narrative based on the Buckner case. This story titled โ€œA Victim of Justiceโ€ may have been the authorโ€™s earliest attempt at fiction, but it was never published. In 1899, encouraged by his friend Arthur Henry, Dreiser wrote four short stories that were published, and one of these was another retelling of the Buckner lynching titled โ€œ****** Jeff.โ€ The story first appeared in Ainsleeโ€™s magazine (1901). Then in 1918 Dreiser significantly revised โ€œ****** Jeffโ€ for publication in his collection Free and Other Stories. In other words, including two 1894 articles for the St. Louis Republic, Dreiser over a twenty-four-year period when lynching was a national epidemic wrote five accounts based on the Buckner case, yet these narratives, their similarities and differences, have never been fully analyzed. Many factors have contributed to this neglect. First, the 1918 short story โ€œ****** Jeffโ€ is the only version readily available to scholars, and it is seldom republished because the title has proven an embarrassment, preventing editors from anthologizing the work. Second, until recently critics have mistakenly assumed that the narratives were based on an unknown lynching or on the Red Hill, Missouri, lynching of William Jackson, a case that differed so drastically from Dreiserโ€™s short stories that a comparison was meaningless. Without knowing the lynching on which the stories were based and without examining the various versions, both non-fiction and fiction over a twenty-four year period, a full analysis of the narrativeโ€™s cultural significance is impossible. Further, without knowing what Dreiser decided to leave in or leave out of each version, we have no way of evaluating whether or not Dreiser lived up to his incipient artistโ€™s maxim in the 1918 version: โ€œIโ€™ll get it all in!โ€
Kick gangster- and homie-*** the easy way! Do you deplore violence?
Me too. But when a homie comes all up in your face, you got to
take him out and the easiest way is with ghetto-adapted Kung
Fu. Now (and till later), I'm offering free Kung Fu lessons in
Motel 6 by I-95 (room 27 where Big Bob & Tina were stay-
ing). Come early and receive a free demonstration!
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