A Whisper To A Scream in Book I. Tony, erstwhile fan of James Brown, goes on to play Billy Preston. Later, Dinah Shore and Brook Benton are mentioned. At the Millers at Christmas, they listen to Nat King Cole's White Christmas and Mahalia Jackson's Silent Night. Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey are also playing in the bar. Julia is playing Miles Davis. Arthur mentions Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, James Cleveland, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Marian Anderson, and Johannes Brahms. Guy owns records by Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, Django Reinhardt, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ida Cox, and Fats Waller. Later, he mentions Josephine Baker, Charles Trenet, Edith Piaf, and Yves Montand. In her house, Julia is said to have the Bible, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. Later, Martha mentions Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Enoch Arden and Irwin Shaw's The Girls in Their Summer Dresses is also mentioned. In Book Five, Henry James and Agatha Christie are mentioned. Frank Sinatra's "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)|One for the Road" is mentioned. Sister Dorothy Green is compared to Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind. Later, John Wayne is mentioned. Julia and Arthur go to the movies and see Sunset Boulevard starring William Holden and Gloria Swanson. On Hall's comeback from Korea, Yul Brynner is mentioned. The Wiz is mentioned at the outset of Book Five. Allusions to actual history The Emancipation Proclamation is mentioned with regards to Mrs Bessie. Hall criticises the American government for sending blacks to the Korean War. Benjamin Franklin and Crispus Attucks are mentioned. Marcus Garvey and the Jim Crow laws are mentioned. Later, J. Edgar Hoover, Francisco Franco and South Africa under apartheid are mentioned. Later, Arthur mentions Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and later the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and John Brown. In Atlanta, the John Birch Society, the White Citizens' Council and James Eastland are mentioned. Guy says he was a French soldier in the Algerian War. Literary significance and criticism It has been suggested that the novel links the trope of the internalisation of history to what W. E. B. Du Bois defined as the African American's "longing to attain self-conscious manhood". It has been suggested that Crunch subscribes to the idea propounded by Auguste Ambroise Tardieu and Cesare Lombroso that homosexuality was inscribed upon a homosexual's