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Elbow Room

128 statements
24 feature instances
6 referencing feature instances

Elbow Room	type	TVTItem
Elbow Room	label	Elbow Room
Elbow Room	page	ElbowRoom
Elbow Room	comment	Elbow Room is a 1977 book by James Alan McPherson.It is a collection of 12 short stories, all dealing with the lives of black Americans in the years immediately after desegregation. There is a running theme about the cultural differences between blacks raised in the North and blacks who grew up in the South and moved north with the Great Migration. The stories include: "Why I Like Country Music": A man reminisces about his schoolboy crush. "The Story of a Dead Man": A serious, scholarly man remembers his reckless criminal of a cousin. "The Silver Bullet": Two different criminal gangs fight over who will extort a local bar. "The Faithful": A barber refuses to cut Afros, and as a consequence his barbershop is failing. "Problems of Art": An older black woman, facing a license suspension after refusing a DUI test, insists that a white lawyer must represent her at her hearing. "The Story of a Scar": A man in a hospital waiting room can't resist asking the woman sitting with him how she got the ghastly scar on her face. The answer surprises him. "I Am an American": A black American on vacation in London gets mixed up with a robbery at his shabby hotel. "Widows and Orphans": A young college professor attends a charity event featuring a speech by his ex-girlfriend. "A Loaf of Bread": A racist grocer is caught overcharging the customers at his store in a black neighborhood. "Just Enough for the City": A man enjoys inviting missionaries into his home so he can stump them with theological questions. "A Sense of Story": A judge must decide the fate of a black man on trial in his courtroom for murder. "Elbow Room": An interracial couple (white husband, black wife) have a baby, while contemplating how they can fit into each other's worlds.
Elbow Room	fetched	2023-10-29T04:46:06Z
Elbow Room	parsed	2023-10-29T04:46:06Z
Elbow Room	isPartOf	DBTropes
Elbow Room / int_126ce03c	type	I Was Quite a Looker
Elbow Room / int_126ce03c	comment	I Was Quite a Looker: "I was pretty once," says the woman in "The Story of a Scar", as she recalls the time before she suffered not just the disfiguring facial scar, but considerable weight gain.
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Elbow Room / int_15ff68cf	type	Cultural Rebel
Elbow Room / int_15ff68cf	comment	Cultural Rebel: The narrator of "Why I Like Country Music", a black man who grew up in South Carolina, is a country music fan. His wife, born and raised in the North, is appalled by his taste. It turns out that his fondness for country music is wrapped up in fond memories of square dancing and a grade-school crush.
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Elbow Room / int_18d15922	type	Title Drop
Elbow Room / int_18d15922	comment	Title Drop: When Willis tries to hold up the bar in "The Silver Bullet", he asks what Jones the bartender has in the cash register and Jones says "a silver bullet." (It's a shotgun.) The title drop for the whole collection comes in the final story "Elbow Room". Virginia, a black woman who has married a white man and is about to deliver a bi-racial baby, talks about making her way in white society as a black woman.
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Elbow Room / int_1e1afc1b	type	Framing Device
Elbow Room / int_1e1afc1b	comment	"Why I Like Country Music" is told in present tense but only for the Framing Device, introducing the narrator's memories.
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Elbow Room	hasFeature	Elbow Room / int_1e1afc1b
Elbow Room / int_2e39af52	type	Girlish Pigtails
Elbow Room / int_2e39af52	comment	Girlish Pigtails: Decades later, the narrator of "Why I Like Country Music" fondly remembers the "two long black braids" of his schoolboy crush Gwyneth and how they were "plaited across the top of her head."
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Elbow Room / int_3a893c13	type	Spell My Name with a Blank
Elbow Room / int_3a893c13	comment	Spell My Name with a Blank: The American tourist visiting London in "I Am an American" was sent to look up Mr. X, on the recommendation of his good friends Y and Z.
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Elbow Room / int_48d9e12d	type	Funetik Aksent
Elbow Room / int_48d9e12d	comment	Funetik Aksent: The German missionaries that the narrator keeps sparring with in "Just Enough for the City." They say things like "Der simple problem is dat vee do not luff one anudder."
Elbow Room / int_48d9e12d	featureApplicability	1.0
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Elbow Room / int_661d7909	type	Maligned Mixed Marriage
Elbow Room / int_661d7909	comment	Maligned Mixed Marriage: In "Elbow Room", Paul, a white guy from Kansas, marries Virginia, a black woman from Tennessee. Paul's racist father tries hard to talk him out of the marriage, and then refuses to see or speak to his daughter-in-law for quite some time.
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Elbow Room / int_66eb63b1	type	Brandishment Bluff
Elbow Room / int_66eb63b1	comment	Brandishment Bluff: Willis, who would like to join a criminal gang but is too much of a bumbling coward, puts a fist in his coat pocket and pretends to be holding a gun while attempting to stick up a bar. The man behind the counter isn't fooled and blows him off. ("The Silver Bullet")
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Elbow Room / int_6b2b3b59	type	The Reveal
Elbow Room / int_6b2b3b59	comment	The Reveal: "Problems of Art" ends with the lawyer, who had been carrying on throughout the DUI hearing in the belief that his client was an innocent teetotaler, being told she was drunk on whiskey.
Elbow Room / int_6b2b3b59	featureApplicability	1.0
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Elbow Room / int_84df9a79	type	Second-Face Smoke
Elbow Room / int_84df9a79	comment	Second-Face Smoke: In "The Story of a Scar", when the narrator asks the woman he's talking to how she got her scar. She blows "a healthy stream of smoke" into his face in "a mean action, deliberately irreverent and cold," before asking the narrator why he's there in the doctor's office with a busted nose.
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Elbow Room / int_884e513b	type	Medium Awareness
Elbow Room / int_884e513b	comment	Medium Awareness: Closing story "Elbow Room" is filled throughout with comments, mostly critical, from an "editor" who doesn't like the narrator's disregard for order and form in the story. That is then followed by dialogue exchanges between the narrator and the editor, in which the editor further criticizes the narrator's lack of clarity and recommends that some pieces be deleted, while the narrator defends his choices.
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Elbow Room / int_98d3f973	type	Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe
Elbow Room / int_98d3f973	comment	Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Billy Renfro, the narrator's rascally cousin in "The Story of a Dead Man", gets stuck with child support as a teenager despite insisting that he's not the baby's father.
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Elbow Room / int_a6ec25e4	type	Protection Racket
Elbow Room / int_a6ec25e4	comment	Protection Racket: In "The Silver Bullet" R.V. Felton tries to shake down a local bar, pretending all the while that it's for community development.
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Elbow Room / int_b3599d6c	type	Totally Not a Criminal Front
Elbow Room / int_b3599d6c	comment	Totally Not a Criminal Front: In "The Silver Bullet", R.V. Felton's protection gang pretends to be a "non-profit community-based grassroots organization" that collects revenue from local businesses for community development. They're a protection gang.
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Elbow Room	hasFeature	Elbow Room / int_b3599d6c
Elbow Room / int_bc5ddda5	type	Thematic Series
Elbow Room / int_bc5ddda5	comment	Thematic Series: Twelve short stories that don't share continuity but are all about the lives of black Americans in the 1960s and 1970s.
Elbow Room / int_bc5ddda5	featureApplicability	1.0
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Elbow Room	hasFeature	Elbow Room / int_bc5ddda5
Elbow Room / int_c41114f6	type	Year X
Elbow Room / int_c41114f6	comment	Year X: The setting of the murder trial in "A Sense of Story" is left vague, with the narration stating that Robert Charles shot Frank Johnson on June 12, 197—.
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Elbow Room / int_ce9da072	type	Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic
Elbow Room / int_ce9da072	comment	Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: The narrator of "The Story of a Scar" talks like this: "I would expect the man to have been destroyed by the pressures placed on him. And, although you are my sister and a woman who has already suffered greatly, I must condemn you and your roughneck friends for this destruction of a man's ambitions." This is done for comic effect, as the woman he is speaking to is uneducated and speaks with a much more lower-class dialect.
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Elbow Room / int_ea6abe17	type	Every Scar Has a Story
Elbow Room / int_ea6abe17	comment	Every Scar Has a Story: "The Story of a Scar" features a lady in a hospital waiting room telling someone else how she got the awful scar across her face. She was knifed by her lover, who was superficially educated and polite but turned out to be an extremely possessive and jealous man.
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Elbow Room / int_ebe5d89c	type	Disco Dan
Elbow Room / int_ebe5d89c	comment	Disco Dan: Butler from "The Faithful" simply refuses to cut or trim Afro hair and as a result his clients are abandoning him. He's pretty mean about it, too; when a small boy gives him a dollar to get his hair trimmed into an Afro he gives the boy a schoolboy cut anyway.
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Elbow Room / int_f1d3f0c9	type	Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness
Elbow Room / int_f1d3f0c9	comment	Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: R.V. Felton in "The Silver Bullet" dresses up his demands for protection money in the flowery language of a community organizer.
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Elbow Room / int_fb3c0a6	type	Firing in the Air a Lot
Elbow Room / int_fb3c0a6	comment	Firing in the Air a Lot: Robert Charles's lawyer in "A Sense of Story" tries to suggest this, namely, that Charles shot his boss by accident while firing a gun to celebrate his son's graduation from high school. (The fact that Charles's boss was shot six times mitigates against this.)
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Elbow Room / int_fcbb72d9	type	Present Tense Narrative
Elbow Room / int_fcbb72d9	comment	Present Tense Narrative "Why I Like Country Music" is told in present tense but only for the Framing Device, introducing the narrator's memories. "The Faithful" is told in present tense throughout.
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Elbow Room / int_name	type	ItemName
Elbow Room / int_name	comment
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Elbow Room	hasFeature	Elbow Room / int_name
Elbow Room / int_name	itemName	Elbow Room

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Elbow Room	hasFeature	African-American Media / int_a396dfd1
Elbow Room	hasFeature	Cultural Rebel / int_a396dfd1
Elbow Room	hasFeature	Disco Dan / int_a396dfd1
Elbow Room	hasFeature	Every Scar Has a Story / int_a396dfd1
Elbow Room	hasFeature	Medium Awareness / int_a396dfd1
Elbow Room	hasFeature	Totally Not a Criminal Front / int_a396dfd1

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