He watched the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinoday. He sees America as a crazy house.
He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live.
He sees children starving and women w sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted.
He sees war ing. He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although its as plain as the shining sun—the dont-knows have lived with that lie so long they just t see it.』
The red corded vein in Jakes forehead swelled angrily. He grasped the scuttle on the hearth and rattled an avalanche of coal on the fire. His foot had goo sleep, aamped it
so hard that the floor shook.
I been all over this place. I walk around. I talk. I try to explain to them. But what good does it do? Lod!』
He gazed into the fire, and a flush from the ale a deepehe color of his face. The sleepy tingling in his foot spread up his leg. He drowsed and saw the colors of the fire, the tints of green and blue and burning yellow. Youre the only one, he said dreamily. "The only one.』
He was a stranger no longer. By now he knew every street, every alley, every fen all the sprawling slums of the town.
He still worked at the Sunny Dixie. During the fall the show moved from one vat lot to another, staying always within the fringes of the city limit, until at last it had encircled the town. The locations were ged but the settings were alike—a strip of wasteland bordered by rows of rotted shacks, and somewhere near a mill, a cotton gin, or a bottling plant. The crowd was the same, for the most part factory workers and Negroes. The show was gaudy with colored lights in the evening. The wooden horses of the flying-jinny revolved in the circle to the meical music. The swings whirled, the rail around the penny throwing game was always crowded.
From the two booths were sold drinks and bloody brown hamburgersand cotton dy.
He had been hired as a maist, but gradually the range of his duties widened. His coarse, bawling voice called out through the noise, and tinually he was loung-ing from one pla the show grounds to another. Sweat stood out on his forehead and often his mustache was soaked with beer. On Saturday his job was to keep the people in order. His squat, hard body pushed through the crowd with savage energy. Only his eyes did not share the violence of the rest of him, Wide gazih his massive scowling forehead, they had a withdrawn and distracted appearance.
He reached home between twelve and one in the m. The house where he lived was squared into four rooms and the rent was a dollar fifty per person. There rivy in the bad a hydrant ooop. In his room the walls and floor had a wet, sour smell. Sooty, cheap lace curtains hung at the
window. He kept his good suit in his bag and hung his overalls on a nail. The room had and ho electricity. However, a street light shoside the window and made a pale greenish refle inside. He never lighted the oil lamp by his bed unless he wao read. The acrid smell of burning oil in the cold room ed him.
If he stayed at home he restlessly walked the floor. He sat on the edge of the unmade bed and gnawed savagely at the broken, dirty ends of his fingernails. The sharp taste of grime linge