Their only contact with black people is to employ them as servants, and those servants go home at night to parts of the city the Bridges would not dream of visiting. The Depression hardly affects the Bridges or their neighbors. Connell is set, but Mrs Bridge’s life elapses without a mention of any of these goings-on.įor Mrs Bridge lives in a wealthy suburb of Kansas City, inhabited by respectable and well-off families, most of whom vote Republican in a United States recently carried in a landslide victory by Roosevelt and the Democrats. It is at this time and in this place that the novel Mrs Bridge (1959) by Evan S. A most attractive place it seems in retrospect, of 24-hour drinking and gambling, to the accompaniment of wonderful music provided by young, prodigiously talented and mostly black instrumentalists and singers a wide-open city ruled over by a corrupt mayor, Boss Pendergast, whose main duty seems to have been to keep the good times rolling. As a fan of early jazz, I’ve read a great deal about Kansas City as it was in the 1930s.
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