Jungle Fever (1991)

Ossie Davis: The Good Reverend Doctor Purify

Photos 

Quotes 

• The Good Reverend Doctor Purify : Have you lost your natural mind, as well as your soul?

• The Good Reverend Doctor Purify : White man say to his woman, Baby, you are the flower of white, southern womanhood. Too holy and pure to be touched by any man, including me. I'm gonna put you up on a pedestal, for the whole world to fall down and worship you. And if any nigger so much as look at you, I'll lynch his ass. She believed him, thought she really was holy and pure like the virgin Mary. She let him put her up on that pedestal. Meanwhile, the husband, no sooner than the sun went down, down to slave quarters, grabbing up every piece of black poontang he could lay his hands on, then running to the gin mill to brag about it. And that's how our blood got diluted. Mullatoes, quadroons, octoroons. Now I'm sure that most of those high and mighty white ladies felt abandoned, but they were so proud to be white, and therefore superior, they kept their mouths shut, and their legs locked tight. But in the midnight hour, laying there, alone, on the hot bed of lust, I'm sure they must have thought would it would be like to have one of them big, black bucks their husbands were so desperately afraid of.

  The Good Reverend Doctor Purify : [to Angie]  I feel sorry for you. Here it is the 90s, still trying to make up for what you missed out on. But I don't blame you.

  The Good Reverend Doctor Purify : [to Flipper]  As for the black man, like my own son, Flipper, who ought to know better, had a loving wife and daughter, still got to fish in the white man's cesspool, I have nothing but contempt. Excuse me.

  The Good Reverend Doctor Purify : [stands up]  I don't eat with whoremongers.

  [the Good Reverend Doctor walks away from the dinner table]