F Scott Fitzgerald

Tales of the Jazz Age F Scott Fitzgerald

Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feelthat it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily allduring Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans wellbelow the Mason-Dixon line. Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy ropefrom his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleansman a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the MardiGras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this historylies somewhere between the two-a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily forforty thousand years in southern Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers andmuttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyoneelse has forgotten long ago