Less well known but perhaps even more interesting than Stephenson is Court Asher, the second gentleman from Indiana. Asher is a more convincing bigot than Stephenson, one more homegrown and more Hoosier than the puffed-up grand dragon, […]

I stood outside the group, partly from a dislike of being crowded, but mostly because I tend to be kind of hot-natured, which means I have a certain affinity with cold weather.

...and since one told one's intimate friend all that one knew, — and often a great deal that one didn't know,— the tale-bearing, and news, and so on, of one god's-sib to another began itself to be called god's-sib, or gossip, until now, when all manner of scandal and newsmongery has come to be universally called gossip

Around the poolroom I defended the guys I felt were my real brothers, the colored musicians who made music that sent me, not a lot of beat-up old hamfats who sang and played a commercial excuse for the real thing.