White cane

“ For those who are sighted, the white cane shows that blind or visually impaired people have the ability, the desire, and the right to participate in every aspect of our national life. It is also a reminder that, whether as pedestrians or drivers, we should respond with care and courtesy to people using a white cane. And for all of us, the white cane symbolizes the independence every citizen needs and deserves if he or she is to contribute fully to society. ”

“ In this time of extraordinary progress, however, the simple yet profoundly useful white cane remains an indispensable tool and symbol of independence that has afforded countless blind and visually impaired citizens the opportunity to pursue the American Dream. ”

“ The white cane is a powerful symbol of independence and opportunity for visually impaired persons. It is also an essential tool for increasing mobility and productivity for those who are blind as well as those who suffer from severe visual impairment. ”

“ The white cane is a device that helps blind citizens in their daily lives and reminds all Americans of visually handicapped people's desire and increasing ability to live independently. The cane helps its bearers negotiate physical obstacles and thus enables the sightless to travel and work more easily in the public environment. ”

“ To make all Americans more fully aware of the special significance of the white cane and the need for extra care and courtesy when approaching its user, the Congress, by a joint resolution approved October 6, 1964, has authorized the President to proclaim October 15 each year as White Cane Safety Day. ”

“ When thoroughly ripe the cane is of a light golden yellow, streaked here and there with red. The top is dark green, with long narrow leaves depending,—very much like those of the corn stalk,—from the centre of which shoots upwards a silvery stem a couple of feet in height, and from its tip grows a white fringed plume, of a delicate lilac hue. ”

“ SEVENTH STREET is a bastard of Prohibition and the War. A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington. ”

“ Their variety is infinite, from six inches in height to as many feet; pines, junipers, thujas, maples, larch, willows, and, among the flowering trees, pink and white plum, single and double cherries, tiny peach-trees, smothered by their blossoms, pyrus trained in fantastic shapes, all will be there in bewildering choice of beauty. ”

“ Black-skinned, they dance and shout above the tick and trill of white-walled buildings. At night, they open doors to people who come in to stamp their feet and shout. At night, road-shows volley songs into the mass-heart of black people. Songs soak the walls and seep out to the nigger life of alleys and near-beer saloons, of the Poodle Dog and Black Bear cabarets. Afternoons, the house is dark, and the walls are sleeping singers until rehearsal begins. Or until John comes within them. ”

“ There was yet another show which represented the night after the great battle of Lia Yang, when the spirits of the dead soldiers appeared, all flower-clad, with white swords in their hands, with which to salute the sleeping fighters. Every year the showmen find some new subject in order to keep up the people’s interest. Besides these dramatic shows, there are splendid specimen plants; and what I always admired about the large plants in Japan was the perfect foliage, the rather dwarfed growth, and the way in which all the blossoms on the plant open together. ”

“ White paint on the wealthier houses has the chill blue glitter of distant stars. Negro cabins are a purple blur. Broad Street is deserted. Winds stir beneath the corrugated iron canopies and dangle odd bits of rope tied to horse- and mule-gnawed hitching-posts. ”

“ PLUM BLOSSOM In Japan the flower year begins earlier than in Europe, and while the snow is still lying deep on the ground in the northern provinces, in warm and sheltered districts the Ume or plum blossom will clothe the trees with flowers as white as the snow. But in the country round Kyoto or Tokyo it is not until the end of February or the first days of March that the pale pink buds of the plum blossoms will be opening, and there will come a whisper through the air that in a few days the beloved ume-no-hana will be in all its glory. ”

“ White folks are touched and curiously awed. Off to themselves, white and black preachers confer as to how best to rid themselves of the vagrant, usurping fellow. Barlo looks as though he is struggling to continue. People are hushed. One can hear weevils work. Dusk is falling rapidly, and the customary store lights fail to throw their feeble glow across the gray dust and flagging of the Georgia town. Barlo rises to his full height. ”

“ Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fired pine-knot, it illumined the great door and soft showered the Negro shanties aligned along the single street of factory town. The full moon in the great door was an omen. Negro women improvised songs against its spell.
Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks’ kitchen. Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees. Bob Stone, younger son of the people she worked for, loved her. ”

“ He tries, but cannot convince himself of its reality. His gaze drifts down into the vale, across the swamp, up over the solid dusk bank of pines, and rests, bewildered-like, on the court-house tower. It is dull silver in the moonlight. White child that sleeps upon the top of pines. Kabnis’ mind clears. He sees himself yanked beneath that tower. He sees white minds, with indolent assumption, juggle justice and a nigger... Somewhere, far off in the straight line of his sight, is Augusta. ”

“ It reaches a height of thirty feet. At the age of about thirty or forty years, the big cane flowers and produces an abundance of rich nourishing grains for stock and game. After flowering, the old canes die and new plants spring up from the seed. The young shoots are known as mutton cane, because deer and bear and stock grow fat on them.
“This cane,” said Tatanka, after they had eaten their supper, “is like the pipe-stem reeds of the Sioux Country. The Indian boys called them spear-grass, and we threw the reeds at each other when we played war.” ”

“ In the month of March the village is made gay for the reception of these holiday-makers, and undaunted by the bitter winds and vicious scuds of snow which mingle with the falling petals of the ume, they will spend long hours in quiet admiration of the mass of blossom which appears to fill the whole valley with a pink and white haze ”

“ The cabin room is spaced fantastically about it. Whitewashed hearth and chimney, black with sooty saw-teeth. Ceiling, patterned by the fringed globe of the lamp. The walls, unpainted, are seasoned a rosin yellow. And cracks between the boards are black. These cracks are the lips the night winds use for whispering. Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering. Kabnis, against his will, lets his book slip down, and listens to them. The warm whiteness of his bed, the lamp-light, do not protect him from the weird chill of their song:
White-man’s land. ”

“ The air reeks with the stench of scorched tobacco juice. Women, fat chunky Negro women, lean scrawny white women, pull their skirts up above their heads and display the most ludicrous underclothes. The women scoot in all directions from the danger zone. She alone is left to take the baby in her arms. But what a baby! Black, singed, woolly, tobacco-juice baby—ugly as sin. Once held to her breast, miraculous thing: its breath is sweet and its lips can nibble. She loves it frantically. ”

“ Some one ... eoho Jesus ... soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of southern cotton, will steal in and cover it that it need not shiver, and carry it to her where she sleeps: cradled in dream-fluted cane.
104 BOX SEAT 1 HOUSES are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street. Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger. Shake your curled wool-blossoms, nigger. Open your liver lips to the lean, white spring. Stir the root-life of a withered people. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream. ”

“ Esther listlessly forgets that she is near white, and that her father is the richest colored man in town. Black folk who drift in to buy lard and snuff and flour of her, call her a sweet-natured, accommodating girl. She learns their names. She forgets them. She thinks about men. ”

“ His bubbles, too, are curiously tinted purple as Paul watches them. Paul, contrary to what he had thought he would be like, is cool like the dusk, and like the dusk, detached. His dark face is a floating shade in evening’s shadow. He sees Art, curiously. Art is a purple fluid, carbon-charged, that effervesces besides him. He loves Art. But is it not queer, this pale purple facsimile of a red-blooded Norwegian friend of his? Perhaps for some reason, white skins are not supposed to live at night. Surely, enough nights would transform them fantastically, or kill them. And their red passion? ”

“ I find it difficult to share the almost universal admiration that it awakens when in flower, as its beauty is much marred by the tenacious habit of its dead blossoms, which cling to life to the bitter end, and [129] spoil all the freshness of the newly developed blossoms. The balls of blossom, in shape reminding one of huge guelder roses, start by being a greenish-white, which gradually turns to a deep dull pink, and in death to a most unsightly brown. Astrapæa viscaria attains to the size of a large tree, and in April bears a burden of pink blossoms, also in round balls ”

“ She is learning to make distinctions between the business and the social worlds. “Good business comes from remembering that the white folks dont divide the niggers, Esther. Be just as black as any man who has a silver dollar.” ”

“ Houses, and dorm sitting-rooms are places where white faces seclude themselves at night. There is a reason...
Art sat on the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously.
Paul: I’ve got to get the kid to play that stuff for me in the daytime. Might be different. More himself. More nigger. Different? There is. Curious, though.
The girls come in. Art stops playing, and almost immediately takes up a petty quarrel, where he had last left it, with Helen.
Bona, black-hair curled staccato, sharply contrasting with Helen’s puffy yellow, holds Paul’s hand. ”

“ Her cheeks are too flat and dead for a girl of nine. Esther looks like a little white child, starched, frilled, as she walks slowly from her home towards her father’s grocery store. She is about to turn in Broad from Maple Street. White and black men loafing on the corner hold no interest for her. Then a strange thing happens. A clean-muscled, magnificent, black-skinned Negro, whom she had heard her father mention as King Barlo, suddenly drops to his knees on a spot called the Spittoon. White men, unaware of him, continue squirting tobacco juice in his direction. ”

“ If it were dusk, then they’d wait for the search-light of the evening train which you could see miles up the track before it flared across the Dixie Pike, close to her home. Wherever they looked, you’d follow them and then waver back. Like her face, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes. Flowed into them with the soft listless cadence of Georgia’s South. A young Negro, once, was looking at her, spellbound, from the road. A white man passing in a buggy had to flick him with his whip if he was to get by without running him over. I first saw her on her porch. ”

“ Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks’ mouths. She wouldnt tell. Poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman, said the black folks’ mouths. White folks and black folks built her cabin, fed her and her growing baby, prayed secretly to God who’d put His cross upon her and cast her out.
9
When the first was born, the white folks said they’d have no more to do with her. And black folks, they too joined hands to cast her out... The pines whispered to Jesus.. ”

“ Its great clusters of snow-white blossoms come in masses in December, and again in April and May. Safrano, Souvenir d’un Ami, Georges Nabonnand, Souvenir de la Malmaison, and Adam, are among the old favourites, though some of the newer kinds of that most beautiful class of roses—Hybrid Teas—seem to take kindly to the climate. It is useless to attempt to grow any Hybrid Perpetuals: they may bloom fairly well the first year, but never again. ”

“ Layman: Thats right. Thats true, sho. Shinin is th only business what pays in these hard times.
He takes a nip, and passes the bottle to Kabnis. Kabnis is in the middle of a long swig when a rap sounds on the door. He almost spills the bottle, but manages to pass it to Halsey just as the door swings open and Hanby enters. He is a well-dressed, smooth, rich, black-skinned Negro who thinks there is no one quite so suave and polished as himself. To members of his own race, he affects the manners of a wealthy white planter. ”

“ Or, when he is up North, he lets it be known that his ideas are those of the best New England tradition. To white men he bows, without ever completely humbling himself. Tradesmen in the town tolerate him because he spends his money with them. He delivers his words with a full consciousness of his moral superiority.
Hanby: Hum. Erer, Professor Kabnis, to186 come straight to the point: the progress of the Negro race is jeopardized whenever the personal habits and examples set by its guides and mentors fall below the acknowledged and hard-won standard of its average member. ”