4
" At any rate, though he never succeeded in laughing at her, as she had done (and continued to do) at him, he fulfilled at least half of what he had predicted he would do when they were married; he beat her. The trouble was, she fought back. And ably, too: for she would snatch up any weapon that was handy, a table lamp, the nail scissors, one of her sharp-heeled shoes, an open box of dusting powder, and once her rubber douche bag. With Amy thus accoutered, husband and wife were about evenly matched. This "
― Shelby Foote , Love in a Dry Season
5
" In Paris (though he had just come four thousand miles from the river where it was born, though Bessie Smith herself had sung at a Negro dance ten miles from Briartree while they were packing for their trip abroad, and though Duff Conway, the greatest horn man of his time—for whose scratched and worn recordings Jeff was to pay as high as fifty and sixty dollars apiece—had been born and raised in Bristol, son of the cook in the Barcroft house on Lamar Street) Jeff discovered jazz. He fell among the cultists, the essayists on the ‘new’ American rhythms, including the one of whom Eddie Condon, when asked for an opinion, later said, “Would I go over there and tell him how to jump on a grape? "
― Shelby Foote , Love in a Dry Season
8
" Saturday and Sunday nights the long gray car would be parked among Fords and Chevrolets, as if it had littered or spawned on the gravel quay beside the club. Inside, the five-man Negro band pumped jazz—Button Up Your Overcoat and I’ll Get By and That’s My Weakness Now, interspersed with numbers that had been living before and would be living after: San and Tiger Rag and High Society—while the planters and bankers, the doctors and lawyers, the cotton men and merchants made a show of accompanying each other’s wives through the intricacies of the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Barney Google, or else backed off and watched one of the women take a solo break, improvising, bobbing and weaving, wetting her thumbs and rolling her eyes, ritualistic, clinging desperately to the tail end of the jazz age—so desperately, so frantically indeed, that a person looking back upon that time might almost believe they had foreseen the depression and Roosevelt and another war and were dancing thus, Cassandra-like, in a frenzy of despair. Jeff "
― Shelby Foote , Love in a Dry Season
9
" Jeff and Amy were part of this, though never in the sense that the natives were. They were not indigenous: they were outlanders, ‘foreigners,’ distinguished by a sort of upcountry cosmopolitan glaze which permitted them to mingle but not merge. Even their drinking habits set them apart. Deltans drank only corn and Coca-Cola; gin was perfume, scotch had a burnt-stick taste. They would watch with wry expressions while Amy blended her weird concoctions, pink ladies and Collinses and whiskey sours, and those who tried one, finally persuaded, would sip and shudder and set the glass aside: “Thanks”—mildly outraged, smirking—“I’ll stick to burrbon. "
― Shelby Foote , Love in a Dry Season
12
" The woman was in her middle twenties and she wore a sort of tennis dress that shouted Money almost as loudly as the car did, sleeveless and V neck, of a semi-transparent material, chiffon or crêpe-de-Chine or maybe georgette, which allowed the pink of her nipples to show through. She not only wore no brassiere, she obviously wore no undergarment of any description. There was nothing of modesty about her. Not that she was flaunting herself; that was what was so outlandish about it (for this was the late Twenties; plenty of women were dressing almost as scantily); she appeared not even to know the watchers were there. Her hair was brown with streaks of sunburnt yellow, bobbed just a little longer than ponjola, and her skin was tanned to the smooth, soft tint of café au lait. She moved slowly, after the manner of the inherently lazy, not so much as if she had no energy, but as if she were conserving it for something she really cared about—bed, most men would say, for there was a strong suggestion of such about her, like an aura. Her mouth was lipsticked savagely, no prim cupid’s bow, and there was a faint saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She "
― Shelby Foote , Love in a Dry Season
14
" But as they walked home together through the leaf-plastered streets, under that eerie refulgence, her father seemed to have divined her plans. This was in his manner, not his words: they were halfway home before he spoke. “Amanda,” he said. He paused. “I want you to realize the consequences before you do something youll be sorry for.” He did not look at her, and she too kept her eyes to the front. “You know that when I say a thing I mean it—I mean it to the hilt. So tell your young man this, Amanda. Tell him that the day you marry without my consent I’ll cut you off without a dime. Without so much as one thin dime, Amanda. I’ll cut you off, disown you, and what is more I’ll never regret it. I’ll never so much as think your name again.” Up to now he had spoken slowly, pausing between phrases. But now the words came fast, like fencing thrusts. “Tell your young man that, Amanda, and see what he says.” Major "
― Shelby Foote , Love in a Dry Season
