Charleston Dance Quotes

I have a recognition dance, to acknowledge that I heard and understood you. So when Savannah says she loves me, and I reply by doing the Charleston, I’m just trying to show my love for her.

They flourished and shone with jewels, lovely clothes, brilliant hair and dazzling complexions; when they danced they really did seem to float, except when it was the Charleston, and that, though angular, was so accomplished that it made us gasp with admiration. Their conversation was quite evidently both daring and witty, one could see it ran like a river, splashing, dashing, and glittering in the sun. Linda was entranced by them, and decided then and there that she would become one of these brilliant beings and live in their world, even if it took her a lifetime to accomplish.

And she loved Mattie. Living with her in simple friendship might be akin to dancing the Charleston when what you really ached for was a slow waltz -- but the music still played; it was, in its way, still a dance.

Saturday and Sunday nights the long gray car would be parked among Fords and Chevrolets, as if it had littered or spawned on the gravel quay beside the club. Inside, the five-man Negro band pumped jazz—Button Up Your Overcoat and I’ll Get By and That’s My Weakness Now, interspersed with numbers that had been living before and would be living after: San and Tiger Rag and High Society—while the planters and bankers, the doctors and lawyers, the cotton men and merchants made a show of accompanying each other’s wives through the intricacies of the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Barney Google, or else backed off and watched one of the women take a solo break, improvising, bobbing and weaving, wetting her thumbs and rolling her eyes, ritualistic, clinging desperately to the tail end of the jazz age—so desperately, so frantically indeed, that a person looking back upon that time might almost believe they had foreseen the depression and Roosevelt and another war and were dancing thus, Cassandra-like, in a frenzy of despair. Jeff

The Capital inks my black or white tone in the deep Night.

Black innovators were the force behind a burst of cultural creativity, from the poetry of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance to the crossover dance craze of the Charleston to jazz, the soundtrack of the age—“the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile,” as Hughes called it.

But when he reached the door, he heard his name. “Yes, sir?” “Remember one thing, Quenton.” “Yes, sir?” “No matter how cool you think your generation is, fifty years from now when they show pictures of you all dancing, you’re going to look just as ridiculous as those guys doing the Charleston.

When people ate what Anna O'Brien baked, they smiled wider, laughed louder, and left the bakery she'd inherited with more confidence than when they arrived. Her chocolate chip cookies made Jordan Hillman propose to Julie Farmer on their fourth date. Her OREO brownies caused Roger Jackson to think he could dance the Charleston like he had in the '40's. One sip of her Saturday morning hot chocolate made everyone a good neighbor. People in town swore Anna could make anything better than the original, and they were right. It was a skill she'd been honing since she was big enough to stand on a step stool and help her grandma in the kitchen. While most children spent their after-school time watching cartoons and their summers flying kites and playing pickup games of baseball, Anna spent almost all her free time helping at Bea's Bakery. Anna had a superior sense for knowing how to combine ingredients and flavors into delicious creations. She also had an unusually strong sense of smell, which gave her an incredible advantage for pairing ingredients in a way that enhanced the eating experience. Each treat she made engaged the eyes, the nose, the tongue, and every pleasing nerve in the body.

The pathos of the Garden vision quest is not that Jesus is going to his death. It is that Jesus is going into exile. Isolation is what Jesus faces as the Native Messiah, a fate far worse than death for any Native person. The fearful thought of permanent exile is the cup from which Jesus is asked to drink. As we will see in the next chapter, Jesus will become an exile to include every life in his dance. To reach beyond the margins of creation, however, means being cut off from creation. The courage of Jesus is not in facing death, but in facing what it means to be alone.

Charleston Charlie dances while the small negro [sic] fiddles and the animal nods his approval.” Others, such as “Chicken Snatcher,” reflected the virulent racism and racial stereotypes of the age. According to the toy’s description, “the scared looking negro [sic] shuffles along with a chicken dangling in his hand and a dog hanging on the seat of his pants. Very funny action toy which will delight the kiddies.”4

The music started, and we began to dance. It was like magic. A ghost can't lead, of course; he can't tell you where to go, with just a bit of pressure on your hand or your back. But I knew, anyway. I knew exactly where to turn, where to move. It was as if he was telling me with his eyes, which were locked on mine. And it was as if I was seeing another time through his eyes, because even though I was still in the Quackadoodle, at the same time I was back in Charleston, a hundred and twenty five years before.

Politicians continued their mantra, saying that Americans were much too smart to be fooled! As a nation we believed this nonsense. However, as a people, we had no idea what was happening and, even worse, we didn’t know to what extent the depression would affect us. The major problem was that the wealth of the nation was spread unevenly, with the rich getting richer and the poor being abused. A vast difference developed between the country’s productive capacity and the ability of the people to purchase manufactured products. In other words, the consumer base had been eroded to the point where Americans could no longer afford to buy the necessities of life, thus ending the need to manufacture things. As factories closed and people were laid off, the downhill spiral became complete. Everybody was left wondering what had happened to the country that had promised them an opportunity to have a better life than their parents had had. The 1930’s became the most difficult years that the United States had ever had to face economically, and the people we had entrusted with political power and our welfare, caved in to special interest groups. Rudy Vallée typified the era as he sang songs such as Brother, Can You Spare a Dime and Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries, through his handheld megaphone. The dances of the day were the Charleston and the Peabody and, if you believed the film industry, everyone was doing them. Hollywood provided a fleeting escape from reality. That is, if you could afford the price of admission to the theaters that had just opened in almost every hamlet in the country.

On the working-class, multiethnic Upper West Side alone, Moses bulldozed two stable communities of color. One, along West 98th and 99th Streets, he destroyed as a gift to the builders of a market-rate development called Manhattantown (now Park West Village). At a reunion in 2011, a former resident told the Times, “It was a great neighborhood to live in. I remember playing jacks, eating Icees, playing stickball and dodge ball, jumping double Dutch and when it got really hot out they would open up the fire hydrants.” Said another, “It wasn’t a slum; why tear it down?” The other neighborhood was San Juan Hill, destroyed to make way for Lincoln Center. An African-American and Latino working-class community, San Juan Hill was full of theaters, dance halls, and jazz clubs. In the early 1900s, it was the center of black cultural life in Manhattan, where James P. Johnson wrote the song “The Charleston,” inspired by southern black dockworkers on the Hudson River. Still, it was branded as “blight.” While they fought the city in court, 7,000 families and 800 small businesses were removed and scattered.

Walter White’s more remarkable achievement in print was the book Rope and Faggot, which distilled his firsthand accounts of more than forty lynchings. Passing for white, he witnessed the murderous rage, carnival atmosphere, and unfathomable barbarism of the mob. With few discernible Negro characteristics, Walter White stood in the crowds and reported back on the very worst mob violence of the early twentieth century. Some of the details are so gruesome, they read like slasher fiction, doubly horrifying against the new prosperity of the Industrial Revolution and happy images of flappers dancing the Charleston.