"Your mother play dice with the midnight mice."

epub or mobi

I learned how to talk in the street, not from reading about Dick and Jane going to the zoo and all that simple shit. The teacher would test our vocabulary each week, but we knew the vocabulary we needed. They'd give us arithmetic to exercise our minds. Hell, we exercised our minds by playing the Dozens.

I fucked your mama 

Till she went blind. 

Her breath smells bad, 

But she sure can grind.

I fucked your mama 

For a solid hour. 

Baby came out 

Screaming, Black Power ...

And the teacher expected me to sit up in class and study poetry after I could run down shit like that. If anybody needed to study poetry, she needed to study mine. We played the Dozens for recreation, like white folks played Scrabble.

Buddy Bolden, who is often credited with leading the first true jazz band, was apparently an aficionado of the form. A fan named Dude Bottley recalled that Bolden and his regular sidemen, trombonist Frankie Dusen and guitarist Lorenzo Staulz, "had the reputation of being the nastiest talking men in the history of New Orleans, and that also included the Red Light District."

When they arrived on the bandstand they greeted each other with such nasty talk as, "Is your mother still in the District catchin' tricks?" "They say your sister had a baby for a dog." "Don't worry about the rent, I saw your mother under the shack with the landlord." These three men could go on insulting you for hours if you played "the dozens."