I don't believe I've ever known a woman named 'Whitney', I said, trying not to look too deeply into her bright blue eyes. Or, hell, even a man for that matter. You've never heard of Whitney Houston? Who's that? I said, realizing that I had never gotten really serious about a woman with blue eyes.

By the 1840s a typical hush-harbor meeting of African Americans had become “an amalgam of African initiation practices and camp meeting Christianity,” which included “bits of Christian doctrine and ritual” with a “focus on African initiation and ritual events.” […] A lined hymn or a “sperchul” provided the opening music. In “linin’,” also called “deaconin’,” an elder would sing two lines of a hymnbook song, perhaps one of Watts’s hymns or an older one, which would be repeated by the group of worshipers in “wailing cadences.”

The robe and slippers were so warm and comfy she just fell asleep in her chair.

I thought I saw him leer in an ugly way at me while the decanters were going round, but as there was no love lost between us, that might easily be.