"snowball"

[Wilson Gray]

No, I don't thing so. I've never even heard the expression, truth be
told. I know *of* it from articles that I read back in the day in
black magazines like Sepia, Our world, and Ebony/Jet. In the bad old
days, these publications were members of the National Enquirer school,
in order to compete with Life, Look, Collier's, Saturday Even Post,
and other white-oriented, but much-better-printed-and-distributed
publications.

Hence, the black Big Three countered with the most lurid examples and
stories of racism, Jim Crow, and segregation - or of plain, ordinary,
black-on-black crime - that they could find. E.g. Ebony might do a
major piece on slave-built, plantation "big-house" museums the blacks
were not allowed to enter, Jet would feature the crazed individual who
beheaded his girlfriend with a butcher knife, Sepia would feature
lurid photos of the Saint Louis race riot (over the opening of
"public" swimming pools to the colored) that the Post and the Globe
chose to ignore, and Our World would feature the uppity colored field
hand who wound up with his black ass whipped, his nuts cut off, "KKK"
carved into his chest, and yet lived to tell the story.

As a consequence, I was made aware of Southern customs unknown in a
relatively-Northern city like Saint Louis, even though it's located in
a former slave state.

I still find myself tripping when I see the names of towns in the
South once noted only for lynchings mentioned totally neutrally in the
NYT, such as Monroe, LA, now known only as the home of a branch of
Louisiana State University, or Waco, TX, now known only for being a
town in Texas.

My birthplace, Marshall, TX, was the scene of three lynchings. But I
know about them only from reading. The only thing that I've heard is
that the lynching depicted in The Great Debaters," set in Marshall, is
completely fictional. My 92-year-old aunt said so, so I believe it.

-Wilson

-Wilson

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 4:57 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "snowball"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9/25/2008 04:19 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>I grew up in the bad old days of Jim Crow,
>>remember? I'm now a "snowball," as used to(?) be said by whites, a
>>grey-haired old black man.
>
> Wilson, that appellation makes me wonder. Presumably such a snowball
> is black on the inside (underneath the grey hair)?  My association
> then is with a snowball hiding a rock -- something thrown only by
> thuggish youths.  Was any such association present?
>
> Joel
>
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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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