EXCERPTS FROM BRUCE'S BOOKS
Excerpts from THE
NIGHT ACTION
“It is Innocent,” she told herself. “Remember, it is innocent.”
The traffic light clicked and changed and the traffic started in one direction and stopped in the other two or three. It was a confused intersection, three busy streets meeting at any angle but a right angle, an intersection to terrify tourists and challenge natives, an intersection to make even Mrs. Summertree pause before ignoring the light. Grant Avenue crawled up from Market, passing through fashionable Maiden Lane (that once infamous alley of whores) and commercially exotic and picturesquely overcrowded Chinatown, leaped here across both Broadway and Columbus, and continued modestly into North Beach and up Telegraph Hill where it was overlooked by the stark, phallic grandeur of Coit Tower. The intersection was the center of the strip, the flashy new Tenderloin, the reborn Barbary Coast, Saturday-Night Land; it divided the corpse of Bohemia from the remains of Chinatown and the spreading neon tentacles of the strip. Every night the Wild West of American night life burst loose around this intersection; every night a riot of hatred threatened as people thronged to the intersection in their desperate pursuit of escape and fun, in their search for the action. Cassandra Summertree saw that she would make it across the street if that lavender Buick would stop and she knew that it would, so she began waddling over, the lights of the intersection flashing around her white head….
…The night was only slightly misty, not really foggy, and warmer than usual; it was as if a large, damp blanket hung over the city, protective, incomprehensible in its dark serenity, dappled by the glow of the lights, torn by the shrill laughs of men and women and the hoarse barks of automobiles. It seemed as if something was about to happen, something cataclysmic, something that even these people around Cassandra would feel, something to change lives or end them; it seemed as if something would happen. Everybody would be relieved if something, anything, did happen, so they spent their nights trying to create happenings. And old Cassandra Summertree wandered among them, grimacing, and slowly filling her shopping bag.
Excerpts from MAN ON FIRE, A Novel of Revolution
Lady Day Honeycomb, a tall and proud brown-skinned woman under a halo of natural, black hair, nodded slightly at a very black man on the opposite side of the crowded ballroom. In the old days, Decatur had said that she looked like a black Renaissance Venus, a soul Madonna, but that been more white nigger talk. He had shouted revolution, but deep down he had wanted to be just like Whitey. Lady could think of hundreds of examples. Every time he praised something or somebody, it was by comparing it or her or whoever to something or somebody white. Honey, she had told him again and again, we’re not part of that European culture you’re always talking about. Forget it. We’re African!
No, he had said, we’re not European or African. We’re revolutionaries.
But, she had to admit again, she had fallen for him, and his words, for a long time. Too damn long. And she wasn’t the only one. The hell of it was, she still hurt when she thought of him. And she hated him. Hated him completely, hated every idea he believed, every word he said. When, she wondered, would she hate him enough to destroy the pain that he had left in her?
* * *
“I see before me beautiful black sisters dressed in flowing African robes, their hair wrapped in bright-colored skashoks,” began Decatur. “I see handsome black brothers with natural hair and shirts of African design, and I think how wonderful it is to be black! But, brothers and sisters, this emphasis on the roots, on the glories of black culture—and we know now that black culture is glorious—this emphasis is only obscuring the fact that we black people in America are still a captive people! Your clothes and jewelry are beautiful, you are beautiful, but still you are trapped! Learning Swahili and donning African costumes wins no revolutions!”
Excerpt from STREET SMARTS
If T.C. thought that she hadn’t had much privacy in the commune, she discovered that she had no privacy at all living in the ruins of a demolished office building’s basement with an old man and a teenage boy and God only knew how many other people wandering in and out of the shadows. She hadn’t intended to move into one of the crumbling subterranean cubicles, but already two days had passed: two days and two nights in that dark, underground niche, among the rubbish left behind by previous squatters; two days and two nights of listening to the scuffling and gnawing of rodents and their battles with the ever-prowling cats.
“Some of these basements been here since the gold rush,” Moss told her. “These here brick foundations, they’re eighty, ninety, a hunnerd years old. Lookit them bricks; they don’t make bricks like them no more.”
T.C. listened to the old man, but she didn’t care about antique bricks, not even about the gold rush. She watched him puffing on his battered pipe and rubbing his pock-marked face with his twisted fingers and wished that she could find a better place for Caper and her to live. She wasn’t ungrateful to the old man, but she wished that he would leave her alone for a while.
She had run across several squatters living in these holes under the pavement and had glimpsed still others. Three days ago, she wouldn’t have believed that human beings lived in places such as this, but here she was with Caper, in her own corner of a brick and concrete cave.
Excerpts from DELPHINE
Delphine talked on the phone with her daughter in Rome, describing everything she’d seen in Palestine. The ancient stones. The weathered masks of the old men and old women. Men hunched on donkeys silhouetted on a hilltop at sunset. Bedouin shepherds tending their flocks in stony pastures. The scarred adults and children who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She said that she felt like Alice in Wonderland or one of those reckless youths in books who journey to the center of the earth or blast into Outer Space—or like the hero of her father’s favorite novel, Candide. This was a world beyond understanding—beautiful and often appealing, sometimes frightening, and very foreign to her own experience.
She said that she’d made friends and told Jessica about Layla, but she didn’t mention Omar—although she did say that a friend had taught her how to cook some of the mezze that they both liked eating.
Sitting in her little room, sweat dripping down her neck, she told Jessica of the spicy aromas of cooking food seeping from under doors and through half-closed windows. She described large-eyed children playing on narrow, alley-like streets. She told of the views from rocky hills toward white, flat-roofed villages and of olive and almond groves soon to produce their bounty. She described the sun vivid in a huge sky, so hot that it almost seemed to ignite the gold-brown earth. She described an ancient, ruggedly beautiful land in danger of burning up.
“There was a girl about your age carrying a basket of small purple eggplants. She dropped them. I helped her pick them up.”
“You like that place, don’t you, mama?” asked Jessica. Then: “But it makes you sad, doesn’t it? Are you crying? Are you crying, now, while you’re talking to me?”
“Of course not. I’m telling you how beautiful this place is. Why would I be crying?”
* * *
Delphine couldn’t forget the bomb squad—or Layla’s story of the suicide bombing. An ordinary day, a day of shopping and working, of prayers and studies, shattered with potential violence. And so many times the violence was real and terrible.
Suddenly she stopped, staring through an open window at a thin, bearded young man dressed, as far as she could tell, entirely in black, bent over a long table, books open before him. His figure slumped forward in concentration, he seemed completely unaware of the world around him. Certainly, he didn’t seem to know that she or anyone else could see him as they passed by the window.
“Many people have died and suffered,” Layla told her. “Not only here. On both sides.”
“But why?” she asked Layla, watching the youth scratch at his skimpy black beard as he studied the text resting on the table. “Why does it go on and on? Why the killing?”
“You’ve seen yourself, you’ve heard the stories. You know what’s being done to our people. That doesn’t excuse killing innocents, but our people are innocent, too. Can you imagine what those young people must feel to give their own lives—as well as to take lives?”
How, Delphine asked, could this sacred place be such a center of hatred? Why?
“It must be religion,” she said. “Religion makes people hate each other.”
“No, Delphine. That’s too easy. It’s economics. Selfishness. Power. People and their fears, their need to dominate. To control. To show their superiority. The hunger for revenge. The desire to ‘right’ wrongs. That’s what does it. All of those. Religion is only one excuse. History is another.”
* * *
They continued up the street, Delphine glancing back one last time through the window at the young man bent over his table. Such concentration. Whatever he was studying held his attention completely. He reminded her of her father. How wonderful, she thought, to be able to focus like that. How wonderful to have something before him that merited such dedication.
“It is Innocent,” she told herself. “Remember, it is innocent.”
The traffic light clicked and changed and the traffic started in one direction and stopped in the other two or three. It was a confused intersection, three busy streets meeting at any angle but a right angle, an intersection to terrify tourists and challenge natives, an intersection to make even Mrs. Summertree pause before ignoring the light. Grant Avenue crawled up from Market, passing through fashionable Maiden Lane (that once infamous alley of whores) and commercially exotic and picturesquely overcrowded Chinatown, leaped here across both Broadway and Columbus, and continued modestly into North Beach and up Telegraph Hill where it was overlooked by the stark, phallic grandeur of Coit Tower. The intersection was the center of the strip, the flashy new Tenderloin, the reborn Barbary Coast, Saturday-Night Land; it divided the corpse of Bohemia from the remains of Chinatown and the spreading neon tentacles of the strip. Every night the Wild West of American night life burst loose around this intersection; every night a riot of hatred threatened as people thronged to the intersection in their desperate pursuit of escape and fun, in their search for the action. Cassandra Summertree saw that she would make it across the street if that lavender Buick would stop and she knew that it would, so she began waddling over, the lights of the intersection flashing around her white head….
…The night was only slightly misty, not really foggy, and warmer than usual; it was as if a large, damp blanket hung over the city, protective, incomprehensible in its dark serenity, dappled by the glow of the lights, torn by the shrill laughs of men and women and the hoarse barks of automobiles. It seemed as if something was about to happen, something cataclysmic, something that even these people around Cassandra would feel, something to change lives or end them; it seemed as if something would happen. Everybody would be relieved if something, anything, did happen, so they spent their nights trying to create happenings. And old Cassandra Summertree wandered among them, grimacing, and slowly filling her shopping bag.
Excerpts from MAN ON FIRE, A Novel of Revolution
Lady Day Honeycomb, a tall and proud brown-skinned woman under a halo of natural, black hair, nodded slightly at a very black man on the opposite side of the crowded ballroom. In the old days, Decatur had said that she looked like a black Renaissance Venus, a soul Madonna, but that been more white nigger talk. He had shouted revolution, but deep down he had wanted to be just like Whitey. Lady could think of hundreds of examples. Every time he praised something or somebody, it was by comparing it or her or whoever to something or somebody white. Honey, she had told him again and again, we’re not part of that European culture you’re always talking about. Forget it. We’re African!
No, he had said, we’re not European or African. We’re revolutionaries.
But, she had to admit again, she had fallen for him, and his words, for a long time. Too damn long. And she wasn’t the only one. The hell of it was, she still hurt when she thought of him. And she hated him. Hated him completely, hated every idea he believed, every word he said. When, she wondered, would she hate him enough to destroy the pain that he had left in her?
* * *
“I see before me beautiful black sisters dressed in flowing African robes, their hair wrapped in bright-colored skashoks,” began Decatur. “I see handsome black brothers with natural hair and shirts of African design, and I think how wonderful it is to be black! But, brothers and sisters, this emphasis on the roots, on the glories of black culture—and we know now that black culture is glorious—this emphasis is only obscuring the fact that we black people in America are still a captive people! Your clothes and jewelry are beautiful, you are beautiful, but still you are trapped! Learning Swahili and donning African costumes wins no revolutions!”
Excerpt from STREET SMARTS
If T.C. thought that she hadn’t had much privacy in the commune, she discovered that she had no privacy at all living in the ruins of a demolished office building’s basement with an old man and a teenage boy and God only knew how many other people wandering in and out of the shadows. She hadn’t intended to move into one of the crumbling subterranean cubicles, but already two days had passed: two days and two nights in that dark, underground niche, among the rubbish left behind by previous squatters; two days and two nights of listening to the scuffling and gnawing of rodents and their battles with the ever-prowling cats.
“Some of these basements been here since the gold rush,” Moss told her. “These here brick foundations, they’re eighty, ninety, a hunnerd years old. Lookit them bricks; they don’t make bricks like them no more.”
T.C. listened to the old man, but she didn’t care about antique bricks, not even about the gold rush. She watched him puffing on his battered pipe and rubbing his pock-marked face with his twisted fingers and wished that she could find a better place for Caper and her to live. She wasn’t ungrateful to the old man, but she wished that he would leave her alone for a while.
She had run across several squatters living in these holes under the pavement and had glimpsed still others. Three days ago, she wouldn’t have believed that human beings lived in places such as this, but here she was with Caper, in her own corner of a brick and concrete cave.
Excerpts from DELPHINE
Delphine talked on the phone with her daughter in Rome, describing everything she’d seen in Palestine. The ancient stones. The weathered masks of the old men and old women. Men hunched on donkeys silhouetted on a hilltop at sunset. Bedouin shepherds tending their flocks in stony pastures. The scarred adults and children who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. She said that she felt like Alice in Wonderland or one of those reckless youths in books who journey to the center of the earth or blast into Outer Space—or like the hero of her father’s favorite novel, Candide. This was a world beyond understanding—beautiful and often appealing, sometimes frightening, and very foreign to her own experience.
She said that she’d made friends and told Jessica about Layla, but she didn’t mention Omar—although she did say that a friend had taught her how to cook some of the mezze that they both liked eating.
Sitting in her little room, sweat dripping down her neck, she told Jessica of the spicy aromas of cooking food seeping from under doors and through half-closed windows. She described large-eyed children playing on narrow, alley-like streets. She told of the views from rocky hills toward white, flat-roofed villages and of olive and almond groves soon to produce their bounty. She described the sun vivid in a huge sky, so hot that it almost seemed to ignite the gold-brown earth. She described an ancient, ruggedly beautiful land in danger of burning up.
“There was a girl about your age carrying a basket of small purple eggplants. She dropped them. I helped her pick them up.”
“You like that place, don’t you, mama?” asked Jessica. Then: “But it makes you sad, doesn’t it? Are you crying? Are you crying, now, while you’re talking to me?”
“Of course not. I’m telling you how beautiful this place is. Why would I be crying?”
* * *
Delphine couldn’t forget the bomb squad—or Layla’s story of the suicide bombing. An ordinary day, a day of shopping and working, of prayers and studies, shattered with potential violence. And so many times the violence was real and terrible.
Suddenly she stopped, staring through an open window at a thin, bearded young man dressed, as far as she could tell, entirely in black, bent over a long table, books open before him. His figure slumped forward in concentration, he seemed completely unaware of the world around him. Certainly, he didn’t seem to know that she or anyone else could see him as they passed by the window.
“Many people have died and suffered,” Layla told her. “Not only here. On both sides.”
“But why?” she asked Layla, watching the youth scratch at his skimpy black beard as he studied the text resting on the table. “Why does it go on and on? Why the killing?”
“You’ve seen yourself, you’ve heard the stories. You know what’s being done to our people. That doesn’t excuse killing innocents, but our people are innocent, too. Can you imagine what those young people must feel to give their own lives—as well as to take lives?”
How, Delphine asked, could this sacred place be such a center of hatred? Why?
“It must be religion,” she said. “Religion makes people hate each other.”
“No, Delphine. That’s too easy. It’s economics. Selfishness. Power. People and their fears, their need to dominate. To control. To show their superiority. The hunger for revenge. The desire to ‘right’ wrongs. That’s what does it. All of those. Religion is only one excuse. History is another.”
* * *
They continued up the street, Delphine glancing back one last time through the window at the young man bent over his table. Such concentration. Whatever he was studying held his attention completely. He reminded her of her father. How wonderful, she thought, to be able to focus like that. How wonderful to have something before him that merited such dedication.
Want to read more? Click HERE to get your own Kindle version or paperback of DELPHINE.