БИЛЕТ №133. Mind the text “Home” by E. Hughes and with the help of the questions describe the events in 10-15 sentences. 1. Why did Roy Williams return to Hopkinsville? 2 Did Roy visit many countries with his orchestra? 3. Whom did he notice in the first row at his home-coming concert at the Negro church? 4. Why did the white people begin to kick him one night? This is a story about a young Negro musician, who returns to the USA after the years that he had spent abroad learning to play the violin and giving concerts in different European cities. The action of the story takes place in 1932 in the USA. This was the time of the world economic crisis. Roy Williams had come home from abroad to visit his mother and sister and brothers who still remained in his native town, Hopkinsville. Roy had been away seven or eight years, travelling all over the world. He came back very well dressed, but very thin. He wasn't well. It was this illness that made Roy come home. He had a feeling that he was going to die, and he wanted to see his mother again. Most of his old friends in New York, musicians and actors, were hungry and out of work. When they saw Roy dressed so well, they asked him for money. Roy's home-coming concert at the Negro church was a success. While he was playing Brahms on a violin from Vienna in a Negro church in Hopkinsville, Missouri, for listeners who were poor white people and even poorer Negroes, the sick young man thought of his old dream. This dream could not come true now. It was a dream of a great stage in a large concert hall where thousands of people looked up at him as they listened to his music. Suddenly he noticed a thin white woman in a cheap coat and red hat, who was looking at him from the first row. When the concert was over, she came up to Roy and shook hands with him. She said she was a teacher of music, of piano and violin, but she had no pupils like Roy, that never in the town of Hopkinsville had anyone else played so beautifully. One day she invited him to play music at her school. Roy played. She accompanied him on the piano. The pupils went home that afternoon and told their parents that a dressed-up nigger had come to school with a violin and played a lot of funny music which nobody but Miss Reese liked. One night Roy walked out of the house for the last time. In the street it was very quiet. Roy was passing lots of people now in the bright lights of Main Street, but he saw none of them. Suddenly a thin woman in a cheap coat and red hat, a white woman, greeted him. Roy opened his mouth to answer when he saw the woman's face suddenly grow pale with horror. Before he could turn round to see what her eyes had seen, he felt a heavy fist strike his face. There was a flash of lightning in his head as he fell down. Miss Reese screamed. White young men with red necks, open shirts and fists ready to strike had seen a Negro talking to a white woman – insulting a White Woman – attacking a White Woman! They knocked Roy down. They trampled on his hat and cane and gloves, and all of them tried to pick him up – so that someone else could have the pleasure of knocking him down again. The young Negro whose name was Roy Williams began to choke from the blood in his mouth.. He saw only the moonlight, and his ears were filled with a thousand notes, like a Beethoven sonata
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