Do you know ‘the dozens’?
In the mid 1950s, as an undergrad at the U. of Chicago, I had two black friends. One rich one poor. The rich one was the son of a taxi cab company owner who taught me about ‘the dozens’ and the other was an anti-racism activist who was supported by the students at Roosevelt College.
The rich one told me about a common black practice of men facing off against each other, before an audience, to master trading insults. Most started with ‘Yo mama.’.
One was “Yo mama is so fat when huggin’ her you have to take a piece of chalk in your hand to mark where you began.” He told me many of these. The dozens seem to have come from Ghana.
One ‘Yo mama’ had become a jazz classic ascribed to Hoagy Carmichael, Huggin and Chalkin.
He also told me about cursing contests. The object was to curse as long as possible without repeating. The one I remember was ‘You ain’t nothing but a lying dillydapper, your heart pumps shit and you breathe through your asshole…..
I later learned that my grandfather Henry J. Phillips had been a famous cursor in San Francisco Union Square in the period after WWI. He had once cursed for 30 minutes without repeating. He had a dental office on Union Square.
The poor friend took me with him to a white barbershop on 63rd where he asked for a haircut. The barber called the police. It was my job to be present to keep the police from beating up my friend on the way to the police car and to bail him out. The knowledge that this fellow was a friend of mine led to the most successful and important employment discrimination lawsuit in American history. Described in two blogs. Here and here.