2014年12月英语四级真题及答案第三套(9)

one of them showed up at a dance or a party. The rhythms would be off. The music would sound not quite right. Everybody would leave early.

[HI Before 1955, most white people were just shadowy presences in our world, vague figures of power like remote bosses at the mill or clerks at the bank. There were exceptions, of course, the white people who would come into our world in routine, everyday ways we all understood. Mr. Mail Man, Mr. Insurance Man, Mr.

White-and-Chocolate Milk Man, Mr. Landlord Man, Mr. Police Man: we called white people by their trade, like characters in a mystery play. Mr. Insurance Man would come by every other week to collect payments on college or death policies, sometimes

50 cents or less.

[I] "It's no disgrace to be colored," the black entertainer Bert Williams famously observed early in the century, "but it is awfully inconvenient." For most of my childhood, we couldn't eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn't use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores. Mama insisted that we dress up when we went to shop. She was carefully dressed when she went to clothing stores, and wore white pads called shields under her arms so her dress or blouse would show no sweat. "We'd like to try this on," she'd say carefully, uttering her words precisely and properly. "We don't buy clothes we can't try on," she'd say when they declined, and we'd walk out in Mama's dignified ( 有尊严的) manner. She preferred to shop where we had an account and where everyone knew who she was.

[J] At the Cut-Rate Drug Store, no one colored was allowed to sit down at the counter or tables, with one exception: my father. I don't know for certain why Carl Dadisman, the owner, wouldn't stop Daddy from sitting down. But I believe it was in part because Daddy was so light-colored, and in part because, during his shift at the phone company, he picked up orders for food and coffee for the operators. Colored people were supposed to stand at the counter, get their food to go, and leave. Even when Young Doc Bess would set up the basketball team with free Cokes after one of many victories, the colored players had to stand around and drink out of paper cups while the white players and cheerleaders sat down in comfortable chairs and drank out of glasses. [K] I couldn't have been much older than five or six as I sat with my father at the