Quotable Fri Mar 14 2008
Quotable Friday
Every Friday is Quotable Friday on the book club blog, where we highlight a notable passage from a book with a Chicago connection. This week's quotable is from Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller:
"As soon as Mark shut the door to his room, Emily sat down heavily at the foot of his rumpled bed and said, 'Oh, Daddy, it's John. John's dead.' Her face twisted, and tears immediately began sliding down it, as though she'd been waiting until this moment to allow herself her full measure of grief.
"'What do you mean?' John was Eva's husband, the girls' stepfather. Theo's father.
"'He's dead, Daddy.' Her hands came to her face now and covered her opened mouth. She inhaled sharply through her fingers, and then closed her eyes. 'He got hit…by a car. A car hit him.'
"Mark pictured it. He pictured it wrong, as it turned out, but he saw John then—his large body, bloody, slumped behind the wheel of his ruined car. He saw him dead, though he didn't believe it."
- Alice
Bigger Thomas is a young black man in 1940s Chicago who accidentally kills Mary, the daughter of the wealthy, white Dalton family, for whom he works as a chauffeur. Bigger's attempts to preserve his innocence go horribly awry when the public and the press decide his guilt even before he is caught and tried.
