It's the bookshelf that makes him notice the window.

(--goodbye to light)

He knows there wasn't a bookshelf. Not until he had the books to put on it. (Three of them-- Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Malcolm X again. It's not quite in balance.)

And now, he realizes--he recalls--that there was not a window when he first took up residence ( Read more... )

The room is no different than any number of cheap rented rooms he's been in over the last few months; there's an iron bed, just the width and length of a man and just as thick as a newspaper, and there's nothing on the floor or walls, and no windows ( Read more... )

It's not Washington who decides him.

(I am their mediator, sir, not their fool.

He's heard that pride in his own voice: If anyone touches my car he will answer to Coalhouse Walker, Jr. Well, he'd been wrong about that. And so, he believes, is Mr. Washington.)

It's not their mediator. But it's something he says, touching a nerve: You dare to ( Read more... )

He sees in the paper that he's been denounced by Booker T. Washington; one of his heroes, once.

For the sum of my life I have lived in hope we may all be Christian brothers, the statement runs. And I have worked to convince every white-skinned man that he need not fear our race. I deplore Mr. Walker's actions, and the irreparable harm he has done ( Read more... )

The men around him are young, younger even than him. They are hungry, in a way that goes past the meals they've missed and into their souls, as if they want to eat him, to take his fire, his power.

He's killed; he's killed white men. They're all dressed like him. What they did to you, one of them says, shaking his head. What they took from you. ( Read more... )

Someone half-leads, half-carries him into his apartment; whoever it is leaves him on the couch, and quietly withdraws. He thinks, in his drunkenness, it might have been a white man.

As he wakes up, still unsteady on his feet, drunk eases seamlessly and queasily into hungover, and he draws the curtains tight in every window. As the day lengthens it ( Read more... )