Little Black Book

[Custodio Groves]

Myfather, who was prepared to keep the cat, did not know that I lied when I said that a friend was going to take her in. I do not know why I said that. My mother was away, a new circumstance that we did not talk about, and I think I recognized that my father, who gave us a $20 bill each week, for lunch and bus fare and sundries, and who bought us maxipads and pimple soap, did not really want to keep the cat, so I wanted to free him of that burden of another thing to care for.

And so my older sister and a friend and I went on that exact street, the scene of a previous abandonment, and I opened the door and pushed out the little cat. We drove off, but we could still hear her crying. She had jumped into the underside of the car, an act that signaled her very helplessness, her desire to stay with us. She clung to us in the only way her little baby self knew how. And because I wanted to exude a tough-girl personality, I myself got out of the car and pried her off.

She had been a mere handful of preciousness. That much merely, and I had not allowed her to become more. She remains merely as green eyes, little animal feet, tiny pink toe pads, needle thin claws, the rosebud tongue, the wet pearl nose, thin iridescent ear flesh, the lightness of herself when she balanced her feet on my skin.

Jenny Boully is the author of several books, including The Book of Endings and Beginnings: Essays and of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon: a book of failures . She lives in Chicago with her family and edits pamphLIT.

A little shimmer, a little sparkle, and a lot of confidence is as elegant as the rising of a shimmering ball of light filling the magnificent crowd with exuberance and anticipation for new beginnings.

Yes, I'm a newbe and I just created my first interactive form using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended. Everything is working well, except that when users open it with Adobe Reader, a little black box with a white cross appears at the end of some of (but not all of) the fields. I'm not sure, but I believe it means the field size or length has changed. (I know that without the little box showing up.)

What began as an artist's dream in the basement of her gray stone is now the Little Black Pearl Art and Design Center located in the Kenwood/Oakland neighborhood. Little Black Pearl is a thriving nonprofit serving youth in the Kenwood/Oakland, Woodlawn, and Bronzeville neighborhoods on Chicago\u2019s south side. Firmly rooted in the black community, as the population has changed, so has Little Black Pearl by working with an increasingly diverse youth population and adding curriculum and services for adults and families.

Today Little Black Pearl is a 40,000 sq. ft., state-of-the-art facility in the heart of the community. This cultural arts center provides opportunities in art, culture and entrepreneurship to youth, adults and families across Chicago. In 2011 LBP expanded its vision of marrying art and education by establishing Little Black Pearl Art and Design Academy.

The story begins in the present, as we meet Dr. Bayard Kendrick Full. Once a prestigious medical doctor, Full was barred from medical practice for scamming patients, and now lives in a slum, drunk and destitute. Surprised by a neighborhood dog, he drops his latest bottle of booze, shattering part of it, and hardly notices or cares when a young girl passes by and curiously cuts her hand on one of the glass fragments.

In the present, after a rough night of drinking, Dr. Full wakes up to find a mysterious little black bag sitting in the middle of his room. He opens it and finds scalpels and syringes and devices that he has never seen before, and can hardly understand.

Little Black Book is great fun to perform. It's about strong rhythm and a strong beat; it's a little bit like you're getting knocked over the head in a great way. You rarely find a work that has this kind of intensity throughout the whole piece. We're always beaming and smiling on stage by the end."

When the Creighton Ridge Fire of 1978 swept through the Cazadero area, it left little in its path. Quickly burning through more than 12,000 acres, it scorched the 500-acre Little Black Mountain property in mere minutes, leveling the homestead of its owners, the Thieriot Family. Only the stone chimney was left as a reminder.

With an elevation ranging to 1,960 feet, Little Black Mountain offers expansive views of the coast, the Geysers and Austin Creek Recreation Area. The property contains the headwaters of St. Elmo Creek, Pole Mountain Creek and Kidd Creek, all of which eventually contribute to the Russian River, and hosts coastal oak woodland, Douglas fir forest, riparian forest, annual/perennial grasslands, mixed chaparral and small stands of coast redwood. The mosaic of vegetation, springs and perennial water, complex geology, numerous habitat types and remote location all contribute to the unique biological diversity of Little Black Mountain Preserve.

Anyway, these wasps build little barrel-shaped mud nests that they fill with paralyzed spiders, and then lay their eggs in. Even though they are quite small wasps, it looks like they are perfectly willing to tackle spiders as large or larger than they are (see, for example, the picture on this Wikipedia page about them).

Just got a nasty sting by one of these yesterday. Today still very painful, and large hive at the site. Witch Hazel cools it momentarily. Bactine cools it momentarily. But still painful and swollen. We have these in southern Ontario, Canada.

Live in Wisconsin and finally decided to look these guys up. Get about 8-10 in the house every summer. Small, usually less than 1/2 inch, Like a big black ant. VERY AGGRESSIVE. If you swipe and miss, they will attack and typically come back for more. The stick is nothing compared to a Yellow-jacket or scorpion though. I would say a bad Fire Ant bite. Yes, I have been stung by all those critters. Scorpion seems to take the cake.. No spider bites yet.

Was stung by what I believed to be one of these. Was pressure washing & reached into a bush.. I got hit hard on the back of the hand. 12 hours later it started to itch & swell.. 36 hours later & still swollen & a little itching. I was located on the Florida panhandle at the time.. painful

The Story of Little Black Sambo is famous among the baby boomers as a book that many of them enjoyed as children and are now ashamed to have enjoyed because it's overtly racist. I read it expecting a cavalcade of stereotypes, like a slow-talking magic man making Little Black Sambo sing and dance for his dinner, but the story wasn't quite that racist, at least in that way. Instead, it is a story about a black family who inexplicably lives in India, and how the son outsmarts some tigers. The illustrations are hugely racist, as are the characters' names, but the actual plot is relatively benign, except for a ferociously misguided mixing of cultures that shouldn't even exist in fantasy.

The history of the illustrations is the touchiest subject surrounding the book. Bannerman drew some doozies for the original incarnation, and subsequent illustrations were even worse, with a mammy-type mother and lazy father, though the father's only part in the story involves him coming back from work, so obviously the original story wasn't racist enough for some of the illustrators. There's also a current version with some culturally sensitive art, and a couple of re-writes of the story that completely work around its sticky history. What I don't quite understand is the dedication to the story in the first place. There are plenty of children's books to fondly remember, and the climax of this one is some tigers forming a rat king with their tails and then spinning around so fast they turn into butter. That's pretty fucked up. It seems to me that there are far better stories out there to dedicate time and energy to re-illustrate and re-create. Though, if offered, I would definitely eat tiger butter.

Obviously the illustrations aren't the only upsetting part of the book, as its title includes a racial slur. Little Black Sambo's parent's names are Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo, so their names didn't escape Big White Bannerman's racial insensitivities unscathed. In all, it's a book I'm glad my grandparents opted to let fall out of bedtime story rotation, and I think it would be best if everyone followed their lead.

Perry, I think you are absolutely rightabout the unconscious bias, and that this is the most perniciouskind. We are all almost certainly biased and prejudiced about variousthings that only some later generation will be able to see, no matterhow hard we try to be fair. BUT, and it seems to me that this is thehard question, does this mean we are to condemn the story of LBS tooblivion or to simply recognize the biases that underlie the story interms of the time in which it was written? As you say, we hope wehave moved beyond Bannerman's world. Are we to throw out LBS and ifso, what about the rest of the world's literature which offendssomeone and furthermore continues to perpetuate stereoptyical viewsof men, women, Catholics, Jews, children, the handicapped, andeveryone else who was "other" to the writers and readers of thisliterature?

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