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fallynephemeron · 6 years ago

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Owl’s Character Development Tag Game

Pick a character from your wip, tell us the role they play in your story (hero, villain etc.), and give a brief visual description. Then answer the questions below!

I’m taking @emdop up on their invitation to participate. So here goes. I have the urge to do Xavier. I haven’t loved on him specifically in awhile and that means he’s not getting nearly enough attention.

Xavier Alexander Maxwell. His closest friends call him Xave. He is one of the main protagonists of Betwixt. The magic boy set to save the universe. Maybe. Is it Fate?... or is it Destiny? Either way it’s a fucking nightmare and he doesn’t want any part of it. Faeries are freakin scary man. It really doesn’t help anything when he finally learns he IS one. Well, half of one. And a faerie that’s been trapped for it’s entire existence is not a friendly thing and Xave’s faerie half is no exception.

appearance: About 5′6, very pearly pale shimmery skin, people think he wears shimmer powder. Well, he does, but that’s not why his skin looks like that. He usually wears very feminine makeup. He’s actually quite annoyed that youtubers have been getting famous with HIS looks lately. Xavier’s character was created August 5th 2013 and he predates all that and he’d like the world to know he came first. Yes, i’ve been carrying this character around with me all this time, and I’ve only grown more attached to him. I’m not changing him even though he’s not as unique as he once was. His look is HIM. Black hair in a bit of a pompadour, heavy eye makeup depending on his mood, perfectly applied lipstick, and a sweet mischievous smile. He wears a lot of black, leather, pastel grunge goth. He’s in love with Doc Marten’s boots, and his signature look is black denim short shorts over black patterned tights. Fashion, makeup and clothes are really important to him. His most striking feature are his green eyes from his faerie construct father that change tonality and saturation when his moods change.

Tell us, in one sentence, what your character’s ultimate goal is.

Xavier just wants to be loved. True pure love, without conditions, without expectations or a high price. Someone that isn’t shocked at his past, that doesn’t recoil from his needs.

The Fae have other plans. They don’t give a shit about his love life.

The Zaccarda family also have other plans, though they’re more than happy to use his emotions and desperate need for love in a manipulative game against him.

what actor would could you envision playing your character in a movie?

I don’t know about actor, but I happened to run into pics of 2010 Bill Kaulitz from the band Tokio Hotel and just about screamed. Then I got obsessed watching interviews he did in German from that same year, and the personality and mannerisms are so similar to what I’ve envisioned in my head, even not being able to understand a word he was saying. Though Xavier is quite a bit shorter than Bill.

What is their theme song?

Boys Don’t Cry by The Cure.

Which character trope do they fit the best?

hmmm, I’m not sure if I can answer this. I’m sure he has a trope that I’m just not thinking of. But nothing comes to mind.

Are they physically fit? What sport would they play?

I’d say so, he’s very lean. Sex is cardio and strength training right?

What is their spirit animal?

Cute baby animals.

How about their Hogwarts house?

Hufflepuff all the way baby.

What is their greatest character flaw? How does it affect their journey?

His fear of rejection. He can’t hang around to see how things play out. He just cuts and runs before anything can resolve. The tiniest indication that things aren’t going well, and he just takes off. Literally, just running down the street.

The disconnect between his two halves. His faerie half and his human half want and need very different things. This causes an incredible amount of conflict.

What scene with them are you looking forward to writing the most?

lol none. They’re all awful. So Much Angst And I haven’t planned very far ahead as far as specific scenes yet, so I don’t have anything in mind.

Have they undergone any emotional trauma? How does it affect them/their choices?

There is so much trauma there it is difficult to unpack. He’s been abandoned or neglected by everyone he’s ever cared about. The faeries that lost him, his human mother who was too mentally and emotionally unstable to raise him and ended up walking off into the woods, never to be seen again when he was 5. His adopted human father that was disgusted by everything he was. The betrayal of his first love. The even worse betrayal of the man that he thought loved him. He was groomed as part of a child trafficking ring from ages 13 to 16. And then unceremoniously dumped back on the street when he was deemed too old. He’s seen it all. Since then there has been a steady trail of failed boyfriends and disaster encounters.

There is a bitter angry side to him, but the side of himself he most often shows to the world is sweet, demure, adorable and full of smiles and laughter. Jaded sarcasm never did him any favors, so his survival instincts went in the opposite direction. This betrays him sometimes, and his dark nihilistic moods can strike out of nowhere and be near impossible to combat.

Do they use magic? What type is it and why is this the magic you chose for them?

Xavier has limited but powerful magical ability related to the kind of Fae he was created from. This amounts to a mishmash of nymph/siren/incubus type abilities pertaining specifically to persuasion, attraction, arousal, and sex. The effects of these abilities are limited. They won’t work on just anyone, there has to be some level of attraction there in the first place. He can’t make someone that hates him want to be with him, unless it’s some kind of love/hate thing. Basically he can only amplify what is already there.

At this point he is very much unaware that he has these abilities, though they’ve been there since he hit puberty.

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I don’t have many people I can tag, I don’t know many other writeblrs, but I tag @angrymagicgirlmarsette and anyone else that has a character they’d like to spill about please feel free to consider yourself tagged!

#writeblr #tag game #betwixt #xavier alexander maxwell

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hollowistheworld · 7 years ago

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Strings

When Ace’s red string had first become visible Dadan had caught him with her fabric scissors, trying to get it off his wrist. She’d made a few attempts to explain that the string wasn’t real, that nothing could cut it, that nothing and no one besides Ace and his soulmate could even touch it, before giving up and wresting the scissors away.

“Why would you want to cut it anyway?” she had asked once they’d both calmed down a little. “It’s to lead you to your soulmate, Ace. Who doesn’t want that?”

Ace had glowered at her, and she’d thrown her hands up and walked away to have a cigarette on the porch.

Ace’s parents had been soulmates, and now they were dead. If they hadn’t had that stupid red string tying them together they likely would never have met, Ace wouldn’t exist, and they’d both still be alive. A lot of people seemed to think the world would be better off that way - maybe not with Roger in it, but certainly without Ace - and Ace didn’t have a counterargument.

And he didn’t want to meet whoever was on the other end of the string and discover that they were of a mind with those cops, schoolmates, and criminals who thought Roger should have kept himself out of the gene pool and done everybody a favor.

He had, gradually, learned to stop seeing the string. It still looped around his left wrist and then trailed off somewhere out of sight, but he could ignore it most of the time. It had a horrid tendency to draw attention to itself on Ace’s bad days, reminding him that there was someone on the other end of it, probably excitedly waiting to meet him and almost certainly doomed to be bitterly disappointed.

Worst of all was the way no one else seemed to understand it. Dadan, Sabo, and Luffy all accepted that Ace hated the string around his wrist and didn’t want to talk about it, but they didn’t get it. Sabo was interested in his, though thankfully not obsessed. Luffy had to be regularly talked out of going hunting for his, following the thread for who knew how long with no concern for things like food and shelter or the fact that he was nine.

They grew up, they traded in their small town for a city and a shitty apartment. Sabo met Koala, completely by accident, not even realizing he could see her string - the other half of his - until he was halfway through buying a stack of textbooks from her. Luffy tracked his down to a hospital and a frazzled and young E.R. doctor who appeared so startled by the encounter that it seemed like he hadn’t even realized he had a soulmate.

And Ace continued to ignore his, hoping that his soulmate was doing the same.

“You just ignore it?” Thatch repeated, aghast.

Ace didn’t know what he’d been thinking, talking about this with Thatch, the Most Romantic Man in the World. “Yeah. I’d get rid of it if I could, but it’s been established that that isn’t really an option.”

Thatch shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I’ve seen you and your boyfriend. I’ll keep missing it.”

Thatch scowled at him and petulantly reached across the table to pull Ace’s coffee away from him. Ace made a noise of protest. “You are as bad as my brother.”

“Because I don’t want to meet my soulmate or because I think you and Izo need to chill?” He took his coffee back, grabbing it a little too quickly and making some of the drink splash out onto the table.

“Both. You and Marco would get along great; you’re both hard-headed cynics.”

“Well, I’m glad someone else is. I need another sane person.”

Thatch gave him a considering look. “I can introduce you if you want. He’s coming by today anyway; he left his watch at our dad’s place and he’ll apparently just die if he doesn’t get it back.”

“So he likes to be on time for work more than you do?”

“Are you kidding? He’s a grad student, I’m not sure if he even still believes in time. I think he just likes it for the aesthetic.”

Ace didn’t think Thatch had any right to be saying the word aesthetic in that tone; he was wearing an ascot and had his hair in a pompadour.

Thatch’s phone went off. “Ah, great timing. He’s out front. Do you want to meet your fellow stick in the mud or not?”

“Sure. We’ll team up to counteract your boundless optimism.” It wasn’t as though he had anything else to do, unless the alarm went off. Fire stations were far from the most exciting places in the world when there was no fire and hadn’t been for some time.

Thatch’s brother had a square face, blond hair in an undercut, and bags under his eyes, as any good graduate student should.

Thatch held up Marco’s watch but didn’t hand it over. “Marco, this is Ace. He’s a romance cynic too.”

“Everyone’s a cynic compared to you,” Marco pointed out, making a grab for his watch. Thatch was taller and held it out of reach with a grin.

Marco looked at Ace with an exasperated expression. “I’m sorry you have to put up with him on a daily basis.”

“Oh, he’s not that bad,” Ace said, smiling a little. That was very similar to what Sabo had said to Thatch the first time they met, and to what he had said to Koala. It was a necessary part of being a sibling. “I just made the mistake of letting him bring up his boyfriend.”

Marco groaned theatrically. “Just wait. He makes me be the test audience for his love poems.”

“Well, I can’t give Izo a poem with typos, can I?” Thatch, bored now that Marco wasn’t paying attention to him, pressed the watch into Marco’s hand. “I wouldn’t ask Ace though. He can’t spell worth a damn.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Ace said dryly.

“You have no idea,” Marco told him, fastening the watch over the thin red string around his left wrist. “I know more about Izo’s eyes than I could ever want to know about anyone’s.”

Ace blinked, his brain catching up to his eyes. He could see Marco’s string.

He looked down at his own wrist and, for the first time in years upon years, he let his eyes follow the string.

It stretched out between him and Marco, barely four feet long, nowhere near touching the ground, linking their hands together.

Ace stared. Marco didn’t appear to have noticed yet. If Ace bolted now, maybe he could get away without having to deal with this revelation. Or, Thatch had said that Marco was a cynic too. If he noticed, maybe he and Ace could just laugh it off and choose to do nothing about it, sparing Ace from having to see the look of disappointment or disgust he had been dreading most of his life. The fact that Ace would be a terrible soulmate would not be immediately apparent, so as long as he and Marco didn’t get to know each other too well it wouldn’t be a problem.

Hopefully.

Ace had stopped listening to Marco and Thatch’s conversation, but he noticed when Marco cut off abruptly. He was staring at Ace’s wrist, just as intensely as Ace had been staring at his.

Thatch stopped too, looking at his brother with confusion.

Marco shook his head, tearing his eyes away and putting on an expression that suggested he hadn’t seen anything at all. He didn’t look at Ace, and Ace followed his lead. If Marco wanted to pretend that he hadn’t seen anything, wanted this to be forgotten, Ace was all too happy to play along.

“Thanks for bringing my watch back,” he told Thatch. “I should get to school.”

“I thought you had the morning off?”

“I, uh, I’ve got a paper to finish. I’ll see you later.”

Thatch sighed. “Fine. See you later.” He walked away, glancing back at them once. Ace tried to tell himself to follow, but his feet didn’t seem inclined to move.

The moment Thatch was out of sight Marco spun to direct his full attention at Ace. “He cannot know about this.” He held up his wrist, displaying the string. “He’d never let it go, you know that, right?”

Ace nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“He’s already trying to set us up; this would only make it worse.”

“Oh, no, I definitely - Wait, what?”

Marco nodded. “I could have just gone by our dad’s to get my watch back. I have a key, and he lives closer to me than the station is. He’s been trying to have me meet you for months. He’s gotten it into his head that we’d be a perfect couple and the last thing we need is him thinking the universe agrees with him.”

Ace realized he was fiddling with the string and he forced himself to let go and let his hand fall by his side. “Good thing he didn’t notice then, huh? He… he said you don’t really believe in soulmates?”

Marco shrugged, but Ace didn’t miss the way he was watching Ace, gauging his reaction. “It’s not so much that I don’t believe - it’s hard to watch Thatch and Izo and think it’s entirely bullshit - but I think… it’s kind of overrated. Taken for granted, you know? Having a string tying our wrists together is no guarantee that you and I are going to run off and live happily ever after. My biological parents were soulmates. Didn’t end well for them.” He eyed Ace for a moment, then continued, “And you’re a skeptic too, aren’t you?”

Ace nodded. He didn’t elaborate. The complicated tangle of thoughts he had about soulmates seemed like pretty heavy conversation to have during a first meeting, in front of the fire station, and he doubted he could really put it all into words anyway.

“So, we’ll…” Marco trailed off. He was looking at the string that hung between them, trying to pretend that he wasn’t. “We’ll just…”

“Pretend this never happened?” Ace was already working on doing just that.

“The soulmate part, sure. If you want to. But do you…” Marco was looking at Ace now, and Ace wasn’t sure how to interpret his expression. “Well, Thatch would probably back off if we did try going out.”

Ace stared at him. “What?”

Marco was smiling, sheepishly, and he was turning red, running his fingers through his short hair. “I mean, one dinner wouldn’t be the end of the world, right?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in this thing.”

“Oh, this has nothing to do with this stupid string. You’re just… Well, Thatch knows me pretty well, and he thinks we’d be a good couple. I’d never admit it to him, but I trust his judgment. Enough to give it a shot, anyway. And you’re… Trust me, I’d be asking you out even without this string.”

Ace’s face was hot, and Marco looked amused enough to suggest that it had gone red to match.

“Here, I’ll give you my number,” Marco said. “You can just… send me a text, if you decide you want to.”

Ace allowed Marco to enter his number into Ace’s phone, feeling somewhat in shock. He had a tendency to reject invitations for legitimate dates as a knee-jerk reaction for much the same reason he had never wanted to meet his soulmate. But Marco had caught him sufficiently off guard to make him forget how to speak.

Marco got back in his car and drove away and Ace stumbled inside, staring at his phone.

He sat down at the table where he and Thatch had been drinking coffee earlier. Thatch was in the kitchen, out of sight but Ace could hear him humming to himself.

Ace stared at his phone.

If you liked, please consider buying me a coffee.

#portgas d. ace #marco the phoenix #MarcoAce #one piece #op fanfic #one piece fanfiction #my writing #ace will probably take him up on the date eventually but only after like four days of staring at his phone and thinking about it #thatch is going to lose his shit when he finds out

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fromthedeskoftheminister · 8 years ago

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Rise of a Region

Summary: A Friendly between three Quidditch teams becomes all the more interesting when a mysterious spectator joins the games.

Tags: Mysterious disappearances mentioned, suspected death mentioned, Whitebeard Pirates, Straw Hat Pirates, Revolutionaries, Quidditch AU, College AU, Modern World AU, Gen Fic, mild cursing, Entirely UnBetaed

AN: It is a time when tumblr is dead and Ive been sitting on this ficlit for a while. US Quidditch Cup 10 starts this weekend and Im going to be watching, so I figure its probably a decent time to post this. I’ll reblog it again before games start in the morning, but I want to post before I forget. Before I begin, Yes, Muggle Quidditch is a thing. Yes it is international. Australia won last year’s world cup. Yes, Brooms are used. Yes it is a full contact sport. No, we do not fly. The Snitch is a tennis ball in a sock velcroed to a neutral 3rd parties rear. It is only worth 30 points. Catching it, separating the sock from the person, ends the game. And I think thats all. If you have any sort of question about the story or quidditch, my inbox is open

Rise of A Region

The field was a nice one, Marco absently thought as he surveyed the grounds from his vantage point on the hill just behind the soccer goalposts. Turf field, regulation size brooms, plenty of extra balls and a set of what looked like a set Peterson hoops were set up on one half of the soccer field he was overlooking. Random joyous yelling drifted up to him as people greeted each other and he let the sounds wash over him. He was going to sit here and enjoy the sunshine in peace and relative quiet before the rest of the team arrived and he had to go manage things, make introductions and generally figure out the plan of action.

The spring sun was bright, warming the day to a rather comfortable temperature that was just shy of being too hot. It was negated by a very gentle breeze pushing the barest wisp of a cloud lazily across the brilliant blue sky. Marco set his hands behind him and returned his lazy gaze to the people on the field below. They had just started to set up their equipment and Marco checked the time. He had an hour or so before the friendlies were supposed to start but if he knew his team, it would in reality be more like 2. So what was he going to do to pass the time? Marco was half temped to copy the guy he had spotted while searching for a dry spot to sit and just take a nap.

While it sounded nice in theory, he knew it would be a bad idea. He wanted to be at his best for these matches. Their region was new as were the two teams that had invited them here today, but they had already gained something of a rep. Frankly, Marco decided, readjusting how he was sitting to see the field a bit more clearly he would be better served watching their practice and warm up in an attempt to figure out the team’s strengths and weaknesses.

He wasn’t entirely sure how long he was watching for before the squishing sound of a canvas shoe stepping into a particularly viscous muddy patch alerted him to the fact that he had company. The arm that draped itself over his shoulder accompanied by a rather ridiculous red pompadour alerted him to the fact that Thatch had finally woken up and realized that they had arrived at their location. Due to their prolonged friendship he was probably one of the only people that would take such liberties. They watched in silence as the group of people below, which had only grown in size since Marco had started watching, completed a rather complex scoring drill.

“You’ve got maybe 5 minutes before the rest of the group starts arriving. ” he said with a yawn.

Marco raised an eyebrow at that. “You mean they’re actually going to be on time today?”

Thatch managed to look offended “Hey! We totally get places on time!”

Marco snorted, clearly amused. “Only because I’ve been purposely telling the group the wrong start time of tournaments for at least a year or so. Today’s the first time since that disaster that was our first tournament that I didn’t.”

Thatch gaped at him then rolled his eyes. “Of course you have. I can’t believe I forgot how devious you can be.”

“So, how late?” Marco chuckled.

Thatch grinned as well. “Last car should be here in 30 minutes at the latest.”

“Right.” Marco said shrugging Thatch’s arm from his shoulders as he smoothly rose from his seat. “I should probably go let them know then. And introduce myself while I’m at it. I don’t think I’ve actually ever met Sabo in person.” He turned to offer Thatch a hand up, but his friend had already hoisted himself to his feet.

“Might want to hold up a second. I see Haruta’s car.” Thatch said and Marco nodded in acquiescence. They didn’t have to wait long. The car had scarcely come to a stop before Haruta tumbled out full of their usual boundless energy and scampered over.

“Hey guys!” They cried out cheerfully as they attempted to scramble up Thatch’s back, clearly attempting to get a piggyback. “Where are the others?”

“Not here yet.” Thatch said

“Whoohoo!” Haruta yelled “Its not us who’s last this time!”

“Impossible things have been known to happen.” Marco said dryly as Jiru, Izou, and Jozu joined them on the hill. Haruta made a face when they caught the teasing tone directed their way.

“Yeah yeah. Get lost one time…” They grumbled good-naturedly and Thatch snorted from beneath them as they settled themselves on his back.

“Once? Try like ten or fifteen and then you might, just might be in the ball park” Marco teased.

Haruta stuck out their tongue in response before exclaiming, “Lets go!” Apparently spurred on by the other’s enthusiasm, Thatch took off down the hill like a shot with Haruta whooping like a maniac on his back. Jiru, the only certified EMT of their group took off a second later yelling semi-jokingly at the pair that they’d better not hurt themselves. Marco rolled his eyes at the antics of his teammates before heading down towards the pitch himself at a much more sedate pace.

Izou matched his stride and after a moment inquired “So?”

Marco shrugged. He knew exactly what the other was asking. “Not sure yet. I’ve heard that The Strawhats have a stronger chaser lineup with fast breaks while the Revolutionaries tend to favor gaining bludger control and taking their time. We should be able to beat them with ease but seeing as the two teams have been practicing together the entire time, I don’t exactly know who’s on which team. This would also be a bit easier if I actually knew what Sabo looked like as well.”

“You still don’t know?” Izou asked incredulously.

Marco simply shrugged. How was he supposed to know what the other man looked like? He wasn’t on Facebook all that much and Sabo’s profile picture there was simply an icon of a Tophat. The other captain had emailed him instead of using a chat feature and in doing the set up for this friendly they simply had never gotten around to meeting one another face to face.

“Ah, I can help with that.” A new voice said cutting into the conversation. The source was somewhere near their feet and Marco looked down to meet a pair of curious silver eyes peering up at him from underneath a vibrantly orange cowboy hat.

“Really?” Izou asked, sounding skeptical. Despite the warmth of the day, the other man was bundled up rather seriously.

“Yeah. You said you were looking for Sabo right?” The stranger said as they pulled themselves to their feet. He adjusted his hat to get a better view of the field revealing a face full of freckles atop a deep tan. Without bothering to wait for an answer the other man continued. “Ah, found him. He’s the blonde one over there,” the stranger said making a vague gesture as he stooped down to grab a green zebra stripped bag with a rather intricately designed spade over one pocket.

“Well, that’s not terribly helpful,” Marco said, glancing in the direction that the stranger had gestured to before turning back to the other man. “There are currently several blonds ‘over there.’ Can you be a bit more specific?”

“Sure.” The stranger said. “He’s the only blond with facial scars. Here, why don’t I just introduce you?

Marco shrugged then offered out a hand. “Sounds good to me. I’m Marco by the way.”

“Izou.” Izou offered with a wave of his hand. The creased brow between his friend’s eyebrows was rather telling. It meant that Izou was trying to remember something, though at the moment it probably came off as unfriendly. It didn’t seem to bother the cheerful stranger who returned the introductions with a smirk.

“Nice t’ meetcha. I’m Ace.” Ace said shaking Marco’s hand before the trio resumed their walk to the pitch. “Who do you play for?”

“Eh? Oh, the Whitebeards.”

Ace looked rather impressed by that statement. “For real? That’s the shit man. Thought you guys weren’t a part of this region though?”

“We are now.” Marco said with a smile. “With the Strawhats and the Revolutionaries joining up, the board finally decided there were enough teams in the area to qualify for a region of our own.”

“Sweet.” Ace said. “Though I hope you don’t think you guys’ll be able to just walk all over these two teams, Mr. Quidditch World Cup Champions.”

Marco simply shrugged and Ace laughed loudly, drawing stares from all over the pitch with rather amusing effects as a couple of people suddenly became recipients of bludgers to the face. Another person, apparently startled by the laughter threw a quaffle a little too high and it sailed over the edge of the passing circle headed right towards them. Ace snatched it out of the air and had returned the pass to another person in the circle. That seemed to break whatever spell had come over the majority of the players except for two people in particular. A small tan lanky boy wearing a strawhat exchanged some sort of look with a blond young man with a series of scars scattered over his left side, the most prominent one over his left eye. Ace gave a small wave and apparently that was all that was needed to cause the pair to run towards them, no at Ace, full tilt.

Ace’s eyes widened and he quickly took the bag off of his shoulder and held it out to Marco who looked at him with undisguised curiosity. “Can you do me a favor and hold this?” Ace asked, the words coming out in a rush.

“Sure.” Marco had scarcely taken the bag before Ace continued

“You might also want to take a couple of steps to the side.”

“Why?” Marco asked but the question was rendered moot as the answer came barreling past as twin blond and black blurs tackled Ace bringing him down with a lot of noise. Marco turned to Izou who was still standing beside him. “Are you as confused as I am?”

“Yes.” Izou said. “Though I finally figured out why the kid seems familiar.”

“Oh?”

“That’s Ace.”

“Im aware that’s Ace. He told us his name Izou.”

“I wasn’t done thank you. That’s Ace of Spades.”

Marco blinked. “As in the Merc team that made it to the final four of the Quidditch World Cup Championships 3 years ago? The team that was rumored to be able to give us a run for our money but ended up withdrawing due to injuries?”

“Exactly.” Izou said. “I wonder what he’s doing here. I thought all of the Spades had retired from Quidditch after that.”

“Most of us did. The Spades as a Quidditch team no longer exists.” Ace said rejoining the pair, arms over the shoulders of the two people who had just tackled him. Strangely enough, the younger of the two the kid with the straw hat had tears running down his face while beaming like Christmas had come early. The blond under Ace’s other arm didn’t have any tears but had a rather similar smile on his face. Marco’s curiosity was driving him crazy but he pushed it away. He didn’t know any of these people well enough to ask about the strange series of events he had just witnessed. “And to answer your question, Im just here to visit these weirdo and play some Quidditch. Sabo, Luffy, meet Marco and Izou of the Whitebeards.”

“Nice to finally put a faces to the names.” Marco commented, hands in his pockets.

“Indeed.” Sabo said, ducking out of Ace’s hold. “Ya ready to get these games started?”

Marco looked around, and his eyes lit upon a familiar group of people that were just standing atop the hill he and Izou had just walked down. “Seeing as the rest of my team just arrived, I’ll have to say yes.”

“Great.” Sabo said. “Lets get this show on the road then.”

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nana-lew-rp · 5 years ago

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New Year’s Eve|| Youniversity Advent Day 31

Damien had invited Shawna out to an event and told her to dress nice. She wore a flowing red dress and wore a simple ponytail with a few strands hanging down her temples. She sighed in the AirBnB mirror that he had rented and came up behind her, “What are you so worried about? It’s New Years, there’s no worries on New Years!” he beamed, placing hands on her shoulders. His gray hair combed into a pompadour and the side of his hair freshly shaven. He was wearing a black dress shirt with some jeans, finished with dark grey dress shoes and a single red rose pinned to his shirt pocket. Shawna swooned at his presence, laughing with a goofy breath behind it.

He was right, this was an occasion to be excited for and here she was fighting her anxiety. Arin had worn her down and she didn’t know how to tell him yet that their games were killing her mental and emotional state over time. Over the school year, she had split her time, cleanly, between the two. She would meet with Damien for tutoring sessions near test times and the weekends religiously when they weren’t texting each other or calling on the phone. She would look forward to him stopping by her locker before lunch and making her laugh. He didn’t allow her to be down, and she lightened his day more than he could ever tell her. Arin was a good friend when he felt like it, but he just had a darker side that reminded her of her own dark side that her ex had deepened before, and she found residence in it. Him coming to school feeling fine even though his lip was busted and swollen or a random scratch mark under his eye from the abuse she’d dole to him upon request. It went from Shawna being able to speak for the month, to not saying a single word for a week at a time based on the session. She was always tired. When he wasn’t giving her the emotional pain of indulging in her unhealthy whims of being ignored and forcing her voice away from her, she looked to him to handle her sexually and clung to the contact when she was at her worst. She pleads for him to touch her and demean her in bathrooms or when she would come over to his house, and by the time she left, she was hurt and strung out from his contact. When Damien had approached her on the last day of school before break with a train ticket and a rose, nervously asking if she would be his date on New Years at his family friend’s event Shawna felt something she hadn’t felt in years. Of course, she couldn’t talk that day and was feeling extra unwell thanks in part to Arin but she nodded frantically and jumped up and hugged him as her response.

Now she was standing in the mirror in a dress, face with light makeup and deep red lips, beautiful black pumps, and the decade’s end staring her in the face. He was graduating soon and she would become a junior. He’d be going away to college, but these past few months they’d been spending together, even with the background of tutoring, have been magical. It often made both of them wonder where it came from, they both didn’t feel like they deserved it. Damien usually sitting at home alone with his cat and video games, dreaming of the one day he’d feel good enough to attract a princess of his own, or at least when one would take him seriously. His chest hurt when he thought about those things, it caused migraines, he’d get so tired, and feel so alone. It was torture to have such intense headaches at anytime and no one believed him, but it felt even worse when he was labelled as an outcast and unable to speak to people because of the anxiety that caused it. He had grown afraid of what would trigger it all, the pulsing in his chest, the throbs in his head until he met Shawna. He wasn’t afraid to fail, and his head hurt less and less. They would smile for the first time that day and it felt like a weight had been lifted. No other girl even bothered, he had been rendered not to care if they would.

“Did you take your meds? Can you take them with alcohol?” Shawna asked automatically, covering up, flinching from his touch by turning around when Damien he attempted to move his hands from her shoulders to the small of her back.

“Uhh..yeah..not like they work that well..W-What about you?” he asked, retracting and nervously throwing his hands in his pockets throwing his shoulders up and tensing his body. Shawna saw him and realized he’s having a hard time too, and that this was their first real date in who knows how long. It was awkward and hesitant. They were both trying to power through.

“Y-Yeah..I did since I got here. Actually trying to enjoy this evening with you, and not get through it..It might get late...” Shawna said, placing her trembling hands on his chest, watching him relax and hearing him sigh, it makes bite her lip.

“Sa-same here..” Damien smiled, biting his own lip and shuffling back a little, “Uhh! W-We should -g-get downstairs..Y-you look absolutely-”

“Gorgeous?..Thanks and you’re not a bad piece of-”

“Arm candy? Back atcha!”

They walked the hall carefully, holding sweaty their hands tightly as they descended the mansion stairs, Damien grabbing a couple glasses of champagne. Shawna took the one he offered and sipped it shyly. They looked like all of the other adults here even though they were far younger. They had already had a huge dinner, and so the party was to round off the night.

They blocked out the world and danced without a care. The songs were fun until the time crept closer to midnight. Damien and Shawna escaped to the den tucked away in the house, hearing the slow soft piano music from the door. They hadn’t had much to say they were drunk, but their heavy buzz had pressed them together as they softly rocked against the light of the fireplace with Shawna’s face in his shoulder and his arms wrapped around her back just so.

“D-Damien..?”

“Hm?”

“I’m having an amazing time..”

“M-Me too..You know, I usually don’t go to these..I’m usually at home..”

“Yeah..I usually stay home on New Years..”

“S-So..what made you say yes?”

“I uh..I really like you, but I didn’t wanna get all the crap for talking to a junior..I hate bad attention..”

“Oh..I was just..scared I guess..no offence, but uhh..when you answered my tutoring ad..I thought you wouldn’t need me?..”

“..Oh, like it was a prank? Or-”

“Asking for a friend?”

They stopped and sputtered, giggling, then sighing catching each other’s eyes in the warm glow of the fireplace.

“Sorry..” Shawna breathed, realising how close she was to his face from losing her footing in her clunky shoes.

“It’s..fine..it’s fine..You’re..really pretty..”

“You smell amazing..”

“Oh my god..”

“Hey, uh..I have something to tell you..”

“Yea..su-sure..a-anything..”

“C-can you spin and dip first?..”

“Uhh..okay..*one spin and dip later* L-like that?..”

“Uh huh..so...Arin has been purposely terrorizing me and keeping me in...like..a negative space with a cycle..of like..mental and emotional abuse, and I let him improperly make me heal from it with..uh..unconventional sexual favor...”

“..Wow..huh..” he breathed, feeling his head tighten, “W-Why would you do that?”

“I had a bad ex..and I just..I dunno anything else..I’m scared to be hurt..”

“So you constantly remain in a state of pain?..You don’t trust it...Neither do I..”

“Wow..”

“But..I promise..you’re worth more than that..your voice is lovely and you’re so sweet and smart..”

“Ditto..”

(5)

“Arin shouldn’t do that to you..I’m sorry your ex hurt you like this..”

“I’m sorry you’re alone...”

(4)

“I don’t wanna be alone anymore..”

“Ditto..”

(3)

“I-I-Isn’t Arin your boyfriend?..”

“No..I’m single”

(2)

“Ditto..”

“Not anymore.”

(1!)

Happy New Year!

#youniversityadvent #shawna #damien

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newssplashy · 6 years ago

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WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Conan O’Brien, the longest tenured late-night TV host, has had them all in his 25 years on the air. Oscar winners. Hall of Famers. Bowie, Springsteen, McCartney.

But there’s one person who keeps saying no — someone whose work has been a near-obsession for the host for some time.

“At a certain point, I have the power to book a lot of people,” O’Brien said over dinner at Lucques, a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant here. “I’ve been around long enough. There’s a point where you feel like you’ve met everyone. Everyone. And then there’s Robert Caro.”

For years, O’Brien has tried to book the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Power Broker” and the multivolume epic “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” And for years, Caro has said no.

O’Brien, 55, started to realize his love for the biographer-historian was perhaps unrequited some eight years ago.

At the time, he had recently made the move to TBS after 17 years as a late-night host at NBC — a run that had come to an end with his brief stint behind the desk of “The Tonight Show.” Newly ensconced at “Conan” in the lower-stakes environs of basic cable, he had the freedom to give serious airtime to guests who would have gotten five-minute segments during his network days.

“We’re talking about authors and I’m thinking, ‘Let’s get Robert Caro on — I’ll do two segments with him,'” O’Brien said. “The request went out. It was the equivalent of putting a penny in a well and never hearing the splash.”

Later invitations also resulted in polite refusals.

“The Path to Power,” the first installment of Caro’s biography of Johnson, was published in 1982 when O’Brien was a student at Harvard. He received the book as a Christmas present from his father and soon fell under its spell, as did his roommate, Eric Reiff. They shared their new enthusiasm during a trip away from campus.

“Think of two guys in college going on a road trip,” O’Brien said. “You think about how we get a bunch of beer, we go to Fort Lauderdale, we get hammered. No. We go to a quiet beach in Rhode Island and we’re lying there and yelling at each other back and forth about Lyndon Johnson. ‘It was his father! His father had been disappointed!’ ‘But what about Pappy O’Daniel?'”

The later works in the epic series, which have been published at a rate of roughly once a decade, have more than lived up to the promise of the first in O’Brien’s view. Caro, 82, has said he is closing in on completing the fifth and final volume and the pompadoured comic is among those eagerly awaiting its publication.

“The Lyndon Johnson books by Caro, it’s our Harry Potter,” O’Brien said. “If there were over-large ears and fake gallbladder scars that we could wear instead of wizard hats while waiting in line to get the book, we would do it.”

After having been rejected numerous times, O’Brien came up with a plan to land his prey: a relatively sober streaming interview program called “Serious Jibber Jabber.” Guests have included best-selling nonfiction author Michael Lewis, historian Evan Thomas and data journalist Nate Silver.

“I pretty much made this thing as a bear trap to catch Robert Caro,” O’Brien said. “I keep getting other people who are great. But no Robert Caro.”

The host sent word that he would be willing to interview the author in his hometown, New York City. No dice, Caro replied through an intermediary. O’Brien then asked him to dinner, without cameras. Maybe next time.

A onetime writer for “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” O’Brien is one of the brainiest people in late night, even if he favors a loose, absurdist brand of comedy that has little in common with the topical style of Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers and Samantha Bee.

O’Brien arrived at the restaurant for our interview carrying a sheaf of notes filled with dates and facts tracing his obsession. It included the time he attended a Caro reading at the Barnes & Noble in New York City around the release of “Master of the Senate,” Volume 3 in the LBJ series.

“I’m just checking,” O’Brien said, flipping through his notes, when asked what year he saw Caro. “I want to make sure I have as many answers as I can for you.”

It was 2002. O’Brien did not introduce himself.

“I don’t want to bother Caro and go up to him and say, ‘Of course, you must know me from the Masturbating Bear and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who will poop on you,'” he said, referring to comedy bits that were staples of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” the NBC show he hosted from 1993 to 2009.

Caro’s penchant for leaving nothing out — the still-growing LBJ series runs to more than 3,000 pages — is a quality that has wearied his detractors while inspiring special devotion among fans like O’Brien.

“One of the things that makes him one of the greatest biographers of all time is he’ll write about Lyndon Johnson, but when he encounters another character who’s interesting — Coke Stevenson — he will drop everything and go down deep, incredibly deep, into, ‘Who is this man really?'” he said. “He’ll find all this deep rich ore, which, once you know it, it’ll make the whole story that much more powerful. Whereas other people would dispense with those characters in a paragraph or two.”

O’Brien was insistent that Caro’s team has been nothing but polite in sending its regrets. In fact, a few years ago, O’Brien received a signed copy of “The Path to Power” with the inscription: “To Conan O’Brien. From A Fan — Robert A. Caro.”

The gift only confused matters.

“It just cracks me up,” O’Brien said. “It’s like the White Whale writing Ahab a note, saying, ‘Hey, man. We’ve got to get together. I’m a fan!'”

Caro has appeared on other programs over the years, including “The Colbert Report,” “CBS This Morning” and “The Daily Show” in its Jon Stewart iteration. When asked for this article why he had yet to appear on “Conan,” the author said in a statement: “'Conan’ — You mean it was O’Brien? I thought it was The Barbarian.”

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman at Knopf, Caro’s publisher, said of O’Brien’s many entreaties, “Suffice to say, his people have been in touch a few times (email, phone, Conan standing outside the building), and we remain cautiously optimistic about Caro making an appearance on the show before the decade is out.”

The refusals have done nothing to lessen the host’s affection for the author. “The biggest thing I want to stress is that my inability to get him to sit with me only makes me respect him more,” O’Brien said.

In his morbid fantasies, he imagines Caro appearing on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” where the guests often play games with the host.

“I know that someday I’m going to turn on Fallon and see Caro playing Pictionary,” he said. “And I’m just going to be enraged. He’s going to get everyone cheering, and Cardi B’s there, high-fiving him. And I’m just going to be enraged.”

As he continues his quest, O’Brien said he will draw on what he has learned from Caro’s epic series. “Like Johnson, I have an incredible drive and a complicated relationship with my father,” he said. “I’ll stop at nothing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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kidsviral-blog · 7 years ago

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Joe Dorsey's Big Fight: How An Unknown Boxer Knocked Out Segregation In Louisiana

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/joe-dorseys-big-fight-how-an-unknown-boxer-knocked-out-segregation-in-louisiana/

Joe Dorsey's Big Fight: How An Unknown Boxer Knocked Out Segregation In Louisiana

In 1955, an African-American boxer in New Orleans named Joe Dorsey sued the state of Louisiana for the right to fight against white opponents. What started out as a chance to advance his career wound up changing sports and culture in the state forever.

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In July 1955, inside a small dressing room in the New Orleans Coliseum, Joe Dorsey was sitting by himself, waiting to punch somebody.

New Orleans was a fanatical boxing town. The champions were local stars with style and verve. Heavy-fisted Joe Brown used his winnings to buy himself expensive suits and rounds of drinks for packed jazz clubs on Saturday nights. Ralph Dupas, known as “Native Dancer” for his frantic footwork, was a swarthy 20-year-old who looked like a cross between Elvis Presley and James Brown, topped with a pompadour. Dorsey was routinely described in local papers as “rugged,” and the Louisiana Weekly said he had “fists clenched with TNT.” “He was a hell of a puncher,” Alcee P. Honoré, who attended Dorsey’s fights back then, tells me. “He hit you; that could be it for you.”

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Dorsey’s official boxing credentials Courtesy of the Dorsey Family

Light-skinned and handsome, with close-cropped hair and pointed eyebrows, Dorsey became a local boxing hero, lavishly covered in both the black and white newspapers. He thumped every fighter who came in from out of town — Milwaukee, Miami, Philadelphia — before Coliseum crowds of more than 1,800 customers, who bought tickets for $1 or $2. But the eighth-ranked light heavyweight boxer in the U.S. couldn’t make more than $600 a year. He had to take odd jobs, like cleaning up at nightclubs for $45 a week or working at Cut Rate Liquors on Canal Street. “There were times when I didn’t have money to buy food for my family,” Dorsey would say. “I’d have to borrow from my manager or my mother.”

For a long time, Dorsey, who was good with numbers, couldn’t discern what was going wrong. “Maybe because I ain’t got much education, maybe that’s what’s holding me back,” speculated Dorsey, who lived with his family in a five-room frame house, using a stove for heat, on St. Anthony Street in the Seventh Ward. “When you got education you ain’t afraid to talk to people. You feel like you feel secure. I sure wish I had more education.”

Maybe part of his problem was that he wasn’t flashy, like the great Joe Brown, lightweight champion of the world numerous times in the ’50s and ’60s. “He was not a very flamboyant type of guy,” Elmo Adolph, the New Orleans-born boxing expert who refereed tens of thousands of worldwide fights, from Larry Holmes to Reggie Johnson, told me before his death in 2012. “He was somebody that you would enjoy seeing, but unfortunately, a lot of his fights you didn’t see, because of the fact that he wasn’t one of those main main attractions.”

Or maybe his problem was something bigger, something beyond his control: Boxing in New Orleans had been segregated since 1892, when a black boxer named George Dixon beat his Irish challenger Jack Skelly before a massive crowd. Within four days, New Orleans’ Olympic Athletic Club banned interracial boxing for good. By 1950, Louisiana’s State Athletic Commission had followed suit. Throughout his career, Dorsey had been confined to fighting exclusively black opponents, which was not only unjust, but uneconomical. Dorsey was entering his boxing prime at a particularly divisive moment: As the civil rights movement was gaining traction, some Southern politicians were determined to hold onto — and even build upon — racist laws.

In his dressing room that night, on July 22, 1955, waiting to fight Andy Mayfield, Dorsey was nervous. He dealt with the butterflies in his stomach the usual way: He fell asleep. When he woke up, according to the black newspaper Louisiana Weekly, he strode into the ring and knocked out Mayfield with a left to the midsection in the sixth round.

Then he prepared for his next fight: Six days after beating Mayfield, Joe Dorsey filed suit. He initially intended merely to provide more money for his family. But not only would he wind up avenging more than six decades of wronged African-American athletes, he would also lay the groundwork to integrate musicians and performers in one of the most culturally vibrant — but racially divided — places in America.

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Like every Southern politician, Earl K. Long considered himself a man of the people, and proved it with his eccentric, down-home behavior. On the campaign trail to be reelected governor, “Uncle Earl” walked Louisiana’s dirt roads, shaking hands, asking people what they thought about things.

Earl Long was the younger brother of the Kingfish, Gov. Huey P. Long, who had infamously ruled over the state as a benevolent dictator until a crazed assassin shot and killed him in 1935. Whereas the Kingfish formed his policy decrees from his governor’s mansion bunker in Baton Rouge, Earl was a populist who mocked the entire idea of being a politician. During election season, according to Michael Kurtz and Morgan Peoples’ Earl K. Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl, he frequently arrived at campaign events an hour late, passing the time during other candidates’ speeches by picking his nose, scratching his crotch, catching gnats in the air, and crossing and uncrossing his legs. And this was during speeches by members of his own party.

Long had to support segregation in order to win elections in the South. But he undercut these views by standing up for black people as human beings — a radical position at that time. In the late 1940s, he pushed for an equal pay structure for black and white schoolteachers. He made sure black people remained on the state’s voter rolls and campaigned at black churches.

Earl’s opposite number in Louisiana was Willie Rainach, a slick-haired, thin-lipped segregationist in his forties who had run the White Citizens’ Council in rural Claiborne Parish and proudly displayed a Confederate flag on his tie. Earl once was giving an impromptu political speech when he spotted Sen. Rainach in the audience and, in his impenetrable drawl, said, “He’ll probably go up there to Summerfield, get up on his front porch, take off his shoes, wash his feet, look at the moon, and get close to God.” Turning to face Rainach directly, Long added, as A.J. Liebling would recall in his fantastic 1970 new-journalism biography The Earl of Louisiana: “And when you do, you got to recognize that niggers is human beings!” (This prediction never came true: Rainach, a staunch segregationist to the end, committed suicide with a .38-caliber pistol in 1978.)

Yet in the summer of 1956, months into his second term, Uncle Earl signed several segregation bills that Rainach and Louisiana’s Joint Legislative Committee on Segregation pushed across his desk. The governor had no choice. He planned to run, again, down the road, and Earl Long always thought in political terms. “The trend is toward more segregation,” Rainach told reporters, and briefly he was right. Rainach’s dozen segregationist bills were part of the South’s massive resistance to civil rights.

So in late June, Gov. Long picked up his pen. Separate black and white waiting rooms at bus stations and airports? Signed! Give state police the power to enforce segregation in parks? Yes! Undercut the national court order integrating schools for white and black students? That too! Long may have been conflicted, but he handled these signings with typical folksy humor. Referring to Rep. John Garrett, vice chairman of Rainach’s committee, the governor breezily told reporters, “I don’t know how much good these bills will do, but I don’t want Garrett to think I’m courting the colored people.”

Eventually there was one segregation bill left for Long to sign. And this time, he paused. It had passed the Louisiana Senate by a margin of 33-0, and the House followed within a week. The law was to take effect in October, banning “dancing, social functions, entertainments, athletic training, games, sports or contests and other such activities involving personal and social contacts in which the participants or contestants are members of the white and Negro races.”

On July 16, 1956, Earl Long, man of the people, friend to the black voter, sworn enemy of Willie Rainach, signed the law. It would probably wind up in court, he admitted, but what could he do? He was merely bowing to the will of his constituents, who, the governor reported, favored the bill 4 to 1.

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Courtesy of the Dorsey Family

Joseph Dorsey Jr. was born on July 16, 1935, son of a carpenter, Joseph Sr., and a homemaker, Virgin. He grew up in a shotgun house in the Seventh Ward, northeast of the French Quarter, a Creole “city within a city” for working families, as Beverly Jacques Anderson put it in her book Cherished Memories. Dorsey attended the Seventh Ward’s two public elementary schools. He dropped out after his sixth year. “My mother used to say it was ‘cause he was bad,” his daughter, Dorinda Dorsey, 51, recalls.

Thicker and more muscular than other kids, Dorsey realized his talents were more suited for the gym than the classroom. “I never thought I’d be a fighter,” he would tell Jet, the only publication, nationally or locally, to interview Dorsey at length. “I was always the scary type.” By the time he was 11, he was hanging around boxing gyms near the French Quarter, where the assembled fight men noticed he had some talent. They started giving him real fights, which he won. In his wedding photo, Joe Dorsey stands a foot taller than his new wife, Evelyn Dorsey, née Watson. He’s wearing a light sport coat, wide tie, and slacks sagging an inch too long over his dress shoes. Evelyn is smiling radiantly, in an immaculately white blouse-and-skirt combo, with a dainty purse, gloves, hat, and carnation, clutching her husband’s arm. At 16, they look like they’re playing dress-up. Everything in the photo seems a few sizes too big, with one exception — Joe Dorsey’s hands are fully grown.

Dorsey racked up 12 victories in a row from 1953 to 1955, spending his spare time training at Curly’s Gym. This fixture, on Poydras and St. Charles, just outside the French Quarter, drew important boxing figures from all over the city, from cigar-smoking promoters and managers to Willie Pastrano, the future light heavyweight champion.

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William “Brother” Kron, the veteran New Orleans boxing manager, took an interest in the 167-pound Dorsey, setting him up with bigger and bigger fights. In public, he drove his fighters intensely. In private, he spoke softly, building their confidence (and loyalty) by saying things like, “Come on, now, let’s fight like you know how” when he was alone with them in their corners. As he became more successful, and popular, Dorsey would fight mostly at the Coliseum, a wooden 1922 building at the corner of Conti and Roman, near the Quarter, where the stands were built at a sharp angle, so every seat was a good one. In summers, when the oppressive heat seeped in, Coliseum officials hauled in large blocks of ice, covered them with canvas, and allowed fans to take turns sitting on them.

Although he was light-skinned and lived in the Seventh Ward, where some Creoles “passed” as whites, Dorsey was not a Creole. Once the law was passed, which happened to follow his bout against Andy Mayfield in 1955, he was more inclined to fight than hide.

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AP Photo

The law that Gov. Earl Long signed was on the books for about three years. Its immediate impact was on sports.

The long-awaited 1958 prizefight between New Orleans’ hometown light heavyweights, Joe Brown (black) and Ralph Dupas (white), had to be moved to Houston. (Dorsey, who fought in a lower weight class that didn’t attract the huge publicity and the big-time boxing promoters, couldn’t afford to take all his bouts out of state.) That year was the second year LSU’s football team was scheduled to play the University of Wisconsin during the regular season in Louisiana. They were two of the top college teams in the country, and the game might have determined who played in the national championship. However, Earl Hill and Sidney Williams, the Badgers’ star wide receiver and quarterback, were black. Due to the law, LSU officials had to contact Wisconsin and tell its coaches to leave Hill and Williams at home.

“Of course, we wanted to beat them — to show the people that set the policy up that we could play football as well as they could,” Williams tells me by phone from Kalamazoo, Mich., where he is a retired patent lawyer. “We wanted to kick their ass.” The Badgers never got the chance. Wisconsin officials courageously refused LSU’s request, as they had the year before, so the scheduled game never took place. “Canceled due to racism,” read the headline of the Wisconsin Magazine of History five decades later.

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An article on the Dupas case from Ebony. Courtesy Johnson Publishing Company

In New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, pompadoured boxer Ralph Dupas, the “Native Dancer,” attended white Francis T. Nicholls High School, named for a Confederate brigadier general and post-Civil War governor. (In the early ’60s, in response to school desegregation in New Orleans, Nicholls students would hang Confederate flags and a KKK banner and sing a song they invented called “Glory, Glory Segregation.”) But Dupas had a dark complexion. In 1957, as he was rising in the boxing ranks, a retired, white birth registrar, Lucretia Gravolet, emerged from Pointe à la Hache to insist he was not a Dupas but a Duplessis. Gravolet claimed herself to have registered Dupas — as a black man. Given the new law, Dupas had to hire lawyers and sued the city to prove that he was white. The boxer won, but the case took its toll on his family. “It really hurt us, you know,” Peter Dupas, the late Ralph’s brother, tells me, still reluctant to be interviewed after all these years. “We got that straightened out so Ralph could start fighting here. It was terrible.”

The law’s repercussions would stretch far beyond New Orleans, affecting even the great Louis Armstrong, the hometown hero who had long since graduated to international stardom. “I just wonder what them politicians got on their mind,” responded Satchmo, who was barnstorming the world with a band of white and black jazz musicians in the ’50s. “They got the nerve to have my picture hanging on the wall of some of the finest clubs in New Orleans, but still I can’t play there. I recorded with the Dukes of Dixieland in Chicago the same record they’re playing on New Orleans jukeboxes, but we couldn’t play there in person. Don’t forget to quote me as saying, ‘I don’t care if I never go to New Orleans again.’”

Some of the great musicians from that time barely remember any kind of segregation law, since the indignities of Jim Crow were merely part of their routines back then. “When you live with segregation 24/7, there are things that occur consistently that you don’t like. You’d be in a state of outrage all the time,” veteran New Orleans jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton and Branford, says. “A lot of what happens is, kind of, you anticipate, and you become numb to some of it.”

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Dorsey had become close with Ernest “Butch” Curry, a sports editor for the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper that distributed its Louisiana edition through an underground network of churches in New Orleans. Curry’s office was on Dryades, not far from the Quarter, and a civil rights lawyer named Louis Berry worked in an office building down the street. Curry and Berry brought Dorsey into a group of anti-segregation activists who had been meeting secretly at restaurants in black neighborhoods.

In the sparse second-floor office above the dining room at Dooky Chase’s, some of the most renowned civil rights lawyers in New Orleans history shuffled in and out while chef Leah Chase, the owner’s wife, kept the red beans and rice flowing. In this small but important group of men were Dorsey’s Seventh Ward neighbor, A.P. Tureaud, who would fight just about every civil rights case in the 1950s and 1960s, integrating schools and buses throughout Louisiana, and Berry, a Howard University-trained lawyer. They took on integration fights as if divvying up territory — you take the schools, you take the buses, you take sports. “I’m a good fighter, but I can’t make any money,” Dorsey told the men. “But I could make money if I could fight these white boys.”

Berry and Israel M. Augustine, who would later become the first black district judge in Louisiana, agreed to take his case, with Berry as the lead attorney. The first hurdle was the $350 fee for filing suit in New Orleans federal court. With help from Curry and his sportswriting colleagues, Dorsey and Berry solicited donations by installing cigar boxes in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs in black neighborhoods. One uptown barber, Joe Daly, gave $300, as Evelyn L. Wilson reported in her comprehensive 1993 profile of Berry in the Southern University Law Review.

So on July 28, 1955, Dorsey, with the help of Berry and Augustine, sued the Louisiana State Athletic Commission. White newspapers such as the New Orleans Times-Picayune initially buried the news on Page 3, but black newspapers ran glowing photos of handsome Joe Dorsey, his pretty wife, and their four beaming children. The Louisiana Weekly regularly published a photo of Dorsey with his dukes up, staring straight into the camera, his brow intensely wrinkled, as if he were on the brink of punching out racism in all of Louisiana.

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The Louisiana Weekly, December 5, 1958

Dorsey’s attorneys had to expand the suit a year later, in 1956, after Gov. Long signed the law. Now they weren’t just suing the athletic commission, they were suing the entire state of Louisiana. And the state fought back ferociously. At the time, officials in Southern states didn’t like it when the federal government told them what to do, especially when it came to civil rights. “I’m going to enforce the laws made by the legislature of this state,” vowed Jack Gremillion, Gov. Long’s handpicked attorney general, a Democrat who, ironically, would soon provide crucial support in the South for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. The state argued “the police power defense,” as Wilson described it in the Southern University Law Review. If Joe Dorsey were to knock out a white boxer, if Wisconsin’s Sydney Williams were to throw a touchdown pass against all-white LSU, the fans would erupt into riots, or so the state of Louisiana predicted.

But the formidable Gremillion ran into a wall of a judge. John Minor Wisdom, who’d graduated first in his Tulane University class, a World War II lieutenant colonel who received the Legion of Merit, had been a liberal Republican who helped Dwight Eisenhower win the presidential nomination. Ike paid Wisdom back for his loyalty in 1957 by appointing him to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans. The timing was important: three years after the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, which desegregated American schools everywhere. Following Brown’s lead, Wisdom and his fellow judges spent the next decade dismantling segregation throughout the South, in voting, schools, jails, playgrounds, restaurants, and bars. In November 1958, the three-judge U.S. District Court, on which Wisdom served, sided with Dorsey. The court called the law “unconstitutional on its face” and chastised Louisiana for attempting to declare itself a sovereign state, independent of federal civil rights protections. “Even if riotous conditions did result from mixed boxing exhibitions,” the court wrote, “we doubt if this statute would be sustained by the Federal Supreme Court.” Less than six months later, the Supreme Court affirmed.

Dorsey, the quiet boxer who could barely scrape together enough money to raise his children, was a hero. “Joe Dorsey as a name is just ordinary, only a step removed from the tens of thousands of John Joneses and Bill Browns and Tom Smiths on the American scene,” the Washington Afro-American opined, in 1959, under the headline “Because of Dorsey.” “Yet this obscure light heavyweight from New Orleans, Louisiana, has earned the gratitude of athletes everywhere through his fighting heart.”

Joe Dorsey’s victory immediately gave white and black people in Louisiana the legal right to play sports and music together. And then he faded away. That may have been because the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t comment in its decision, which meant Dorsey’s case didn’t get as much national media hype as other desegregation verdicts of the time. It may have been because Dorsey resolutely refused to promote himself, and he was rarely quoted in news articles about the case. And Jim Crow did not go away.

It took a lot of civil rights victories, big and small, over a long period of time, for that to happen. Louisiana State University’s football team didn’t sign or put black players on the field — running back Lora Hinton and cornerback Mike Williams, respectively — until 1971 and 1972. In 1961, at the new Playboy Club in the Quarter, Al Belletto, the veteran jazz bandleader, replaced his white bass player with hotshot Richard Payne, a black man he considered the best in the city. To cover his ass, Belletto called his Playboy superiors and explained his decision, as he recalls by phone. There was a pause. His boss asked, “You want the guy?” Belletto responded, “He’s the guy.” The boss said, “You get him.” The boss told him not to worry, because at Playboy, they had far better lawyers than the state of Louisiana could ever possibly have.

For years, Belletto’s mixed-race big band played in the third-floor penthouse at the Playboy Club. The musicians ignored the bunnies as best they could.

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Underwood Archives/UIG / Rex/REX USA

Desegregation came too late for Joe Dorsey. Six months after he won his civil rights case in the Supreme Court, his boxing career abruptly stopped. The next six years of his life, as far as sports are concerned, are a blank. “[Louisiana boxing officials] killed him by not giving him any creditable bouts. They passed the word. If he couldn’t get no fights, he couldn’t train — he would just die out,” remembers the Rev. Samson “Skip” Alexander, a veteran New Orleans civil rights activist, historian, and photographer who knew Dorsey and his family. “That was a different time. You had to watch what you said, and you couldn’t speak out and have an attitude of wanting things to change. If you had that kind of attitude, they passed the word on you.”

In the ’60s, Dorsey supported Evelyn, four young boys, and a baby daughter, Dorinda, as he found work as riverboat banana handler, a liquor-store porter, and, finally, on the docks. During his six years away from boxing, other fighters grew stronger, including Herschel Jacobs of White Plains, N.Y., who had a personal philosophy of never letting anybody hit him with the same blow twice.

On March 21, 1966, when he was 30, Dorsey began his comeback. A decade earlier, white and black musicians had been arrested and hauled into court merely for playing jazz with each other on the same stage during an informal jam session at what would become Preservation Hall; now Lou Messina, the boxing promoter, lived with his white family in an all-black neighborhood across the street from Municipal Auditorium, outside the French Quarter, and nobody had any trouble.

“I don’t remember New Orleans having the [same] racial tensions as the rest of the South,” recalls the late Messina’s son, Louis, who is now a veteran concert promoter for AEG Live. By this time, attitudes were beginning to change — black fighters could fight black or white fighters. Dorsey laid out free-swinging Bobby Simmons of Philadelphia in four rounds at the Municipal. Later, Dorsey gave the same treatment in five rounds to Texas’ Benny Bowser. Both were black. Then Lou Messina gave Joe Dorsey a night of his own, telling reporters it was “long overdue appreciation.” Messina set Dorsey up with hulking white Arizonian Johnny Featherman. Dorsey crushed him, although the fight hit a curious snag in the third round, according to the local papers, when Dorsey hit Featherman so hard he fell to one knee, but Dorsey slipped in an extra punch, prompting the ref to stop the fight rather than pronouncing a knockout. The crowd of mostly black Dorsey fans booed lustily, and Dorsey eventually won on a TKO.

On Oct. 17, 1966, however, Dorsey was struggling to stay on his feet. An hour and 10 minutes into his prizefight against young Herschel Jacobs, 26, even the crowd of 1,900 at the Municipal Auditorium could see Dorsey’s rugged fists of TNT were not as effective as usual. It wasn’t as if Dorsey wasn’t in shape. He prided himself on his workouts, jumping rope and pounding bags endlessly at Whitey’s Gym, spending hours beating on the best young boxers he and his manager could find. And Jacobs didn’t have a physical edge. Dorsey came in on the scales at 175 and a quarter pounds. Jacobs hit 176. Both were light heavyweights, built like upside-down triangles, wide and thick in the chest and skinny and muscular everywhere else. (Evelyn Dorsey, who always sat in the front row of Joe Dorsey’s fights, in a pretty dress, next to his sister, had the responsibility of altering the fighter’s shirts so they could properly accommodate his chest.) Dorsey had the better record, 22-4-1, and his manager insisted he had never been knocked down. Jacobs was 20-12-2, his manager attributing the losses and ties to being “jobbed” at opponents’ rings with rinky-dink hometown refs. Both were working men: By this point Dorsey was a longshoreman, while Jacobs worked construction, “exercising all day long, but you’re getting paid for it.”

For their fight in October, Jacobs had been favored slightly. He had the better moves, but in the early rounds, according to Louisiana Weekly, Dorsey landed the best punches. He came out flailing in the fourth, pushing Jacobs into a corner, and kept up the momentum in the fifth with strong combinations. Jacobs wasn’t fazed. His manager, Kid Sharkey, had been pushing him absurdly hard, and the fighter had a regimen of getting up every morning at 5 a.m. to run 5 miles, taking a bus to his construction job, working all day, taking another bus to the gym, and training against top fighters, including light heavyweight champion Jose Torres, all evening.

At the end of the ninth round, Herschel Jacobs’ right fist came out of nowhere as the bell rang, connecting with Dorsey’s jaw and knocking “The Fighting Longshoreman” on his butt. Dorsey tried to recover in the 10th, but Jacobs had broken him. Jacobs’ final blow was a left hook, flying in from what seemed like half the ring, hitting Dorsey cleanly on his right jaw. Dorsey went limp, hit the rope, then hit the floor.

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One of the challenging paradoxes of researching Dorsey’s life is that while he was such an important civil rights figure in Louisiana, information about him is available only in scraps, an old feature in Jet here, some sports-section paragraphs in the Times-Picayune or the Louisiana Weekly there, bits and pieces picked up in old New Orleans city directories. Dorsey died of cancer in 2004. His wife, Evelyn, has Alzheimer’s disease and can no longer give interviews. (They divorced late in life.) Two of their sons are dead, one is serving time in a Louisiana prison, and Dwight, a longtime chef who now installs air conditioning, didn’t want to be interviewed. The Dorseys also adopted two younger sons.

That leaves Dorinda, a systems analyst for the Department of Agriculture in New Orleans. She is quiet and stoic, the way most people who knew Joe describe him. But she can be coaxed into giggly remembrances of her parents. She talks in short sentences, and rarely says more than she has to. “Normally, he was training,” she says. “I remember him drinking a big cup of raw eggs. He’d train. He could jump rope — twist and turn the rope. He worked out — punching bags and all that.”

She has darker memories too. Dorsey may have been a civil rights hero, but he sometimes turned those big hands on his family. “I think he hit me once because of something I did,” Dorinda says, laughing nervously. “My mama used to whup me all the time.” During a tour of her family’s old Seventh Ward neighborhood in her Nissan Altima, Dorinda recalls Cyril Kelly, a Texas fighter her father beat in the ring at least twice, coming over in the ’70s to insist that he used to beat her dad in the ring. (Most of the official records are documented in the Times-Picayune archive and collected via BoxRec.) This turned out not to be true, but Dorsey, true to dignified character, didn’t bother to humiliate his old friend by correcting him in front of his daughter.

After losing to Herschel Jacobs, Joe Dorsey tried one more comeback fight in 1969, and lost. The boxing career he began at age 11 was, truly, over. As a longshoreman, he supervised a gang that would ride in trucks up and down the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to the Port of Baton Rouge. For a long time, black workers had to do the dirty work. White workers ran the lift machines, and worked on the decks of the ships. Black people worked “in the hole,” using their backs and arms and legs to hoist bags of cotton and other heavy cargo off the ships.

To make matters worse, Angola state prison inmates, after serving their sentences, gravitated to the gangs on the docks and had no problem beating up their co-workers and stealing their money on the job. Dorsey’s colleague on the docks, boxing fan Alcee P. Honoré, says Dorsey had to teach a lesson or two with his fists. That usually did it. “He wasn’t anybody you wanted to mess with,” Honoré tells me.

Joseph Dorsey’s legal battles integrated sports and music in New Orleans and Louisiana. Dorinda wasn’t alive when they happened, but she keeps a plastic container of yellowed articles in her home in New Orleans, pulling it out for any visitors expressing an interest. She’s thinking about donating them to the Amistad Research Center at the local Tulane University, but hasn’t yet brought herself to do so. Dorsey’s nieces and nephews brought the articles to their elementary school classes for years, boasting of the important man in their heritage.

“He didn’t talk about it,” Dorinda tells me. “A lot of people didn’t know about it. But his family does.”

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