Blues for Mister Charlie Quotes

Ken: How much does your wife charge?

Meridian: Now you got it. You really got it now. That’s them. Keep walking, Arthur. Keep walking!

Tom: You get your ass off these streets from around here, boy, or we going to do us some cutting—we’re going to cut that big, black thing off of you, you hear?

Lorenzo: Mother Henry, I got a lot of respect for you and all that, and for Meridian too, but that white man’s God is white. It’s that damn white God that’s been lynching us and burning us and castrating us and raping our women and robbing us of everything that makes a man a man for all these hundreds of years. Now, why we sitting around here, in His house?

Juanita: And then you wouldn’t be any better than they are.

Lorenzo: I don’t want to be better than they are, why should I be better than they are? And better at what? Better at being a doormat, better at being a corpse?

Parnell: You may think that a colored boy who gets ruined in the North and then comes home to try to pull himself together deserves to die—I don’t.

Richard: My mother fell down the steps of that damn white hotel? My mother was pushed—you remember yourself how them white bastards was always sniffing around my mother, always around her—because she was pretty and black!

Richard: Every one of them’s got some piss-assed, faggoty white boy on a string somewhere. They go home and marry him, dig, when they can’t make it with me no more—but when they want some loving, funky, down-home, bring-it-on-here-and-put-it-on-the-table style—

Juanita: They sound very sad. It must be very sad for you, too.

Meridian: Of course, if you go back far enough, you get to a point before Christ, if you see what I mean, B.C.—and at that point, I’ve been thinking, black people weren’t raised to turn the other cheek, and in the hope of heaven. No, then they didn’t have to take low. Before Christ. They walked around just as good as anybody else, and when they died, they didn’t go to heaven, they went to join their ancestors.

Parnell: He’s a poor white man. The poor whites have been just as victimized in this part of the world as the blacks have ever been!

Parnell: Meridian—what you ask—I don’t know if I can do it for you.

Meridian: I don’t want you to do it for me. I want you to do it for you.

Ellis: Mrs. Britten, if you was to be raped by a orang-outang out of the jungle or a stallion, couldn’t do you no worse than a nigger. You wouldn’t be no more good for nobody. I’ve seen it

[…]

That’s why we men have got to be so vigilant.

Lillian: I wouldn’t filthy my hands with that Communist sheet!

Parnell: Ah? But the father of your faith, the cornerstone of that church of which you are so precious an adornment, was a communist, possibly the first.

Parnell: It means that if I have a hundred dollars, and I’m black, and you have a hundred dollars, and you’re white, I should be able to get as much value for my hundred dollars—my black hundred dollars—as you get for your white hundred dollars. It also means that I should have an equal opportunity to earn that hundred dollars—

Jo: It’s not different—how can you say that? White men ain’t got no more business fooling around with black women than—

Lyle: Girl, will you stop getting yourself into an uproar? Men is different from women—they ain’t as delicate.

Parnell: Nobody in the world knew about her inside, what she was like, and how she dreamed, but me. And nobody in the world knew about me inside, what I wanted, and how I dreamed, but her.

Richard: Maybe your wife could run home and get some change. You got some change at home, I know. Don’t you?

Lyle: I don’t stand for nobody to talk about my wife.

Juanita: I used to watch you roaring through this town like a St. George thirsty for dragons. And I wanted to let you know you haven’t got to do all that; dragons aren’t hard to find, they’re everywhere. And nobody wants you to be St. George. We just want you to be Parnell.

Lorenzo: They been asking me about photographs they say he was carrying and they been asking me about a gun I never saw. No. It wasn’t like that. He was a beautiful cat, and they killed him.

Juanita: I am not responsible for your imagination.

Meridian: I don’t think that the alleged object was my son’s type at all!

The State: And you are a minister?

Meridian: I think I may be beginning to become one.

Lyle: You ain’t no better than me!

Parnell: I am aware of that. God knows I have been made aware of that—for the first time in my life.