When the timer goes off, rush down in your towel, taste the pasta and, when it’s ready, drain it, reserving a coffeecupful of water.

Wright learns how wounding it is to wear the mask of a grinning niggerboy in order to keep a job. He examines the life of the Negroes and judges it without charity or idyllic compensation—for he already knows, in his heart and his bones, that to be oppressed means to lose out on human possibilities.

Now she unweaves the web that she hath wrought.

His concern soothed her and she breathed heavily, densely, with a thick phlegmish pity for herself.