Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.

All this began to change when Taft moved into the White House. His accession to the one mythic office in the American imagination weighed everyone down. His great figure immediately expressed the apotheosis of that style of man. Thereafter fashion would go the other way and only poor people would be stout.

Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

However much money you have gotten from Thaw it is only as much as he wanted to give you. It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them. It is the way things work. Somehow every dollar paid over to you has resulted in his profit. And you will be left with a finite amount of money that you will spend and waste until you are as poor as when you started.

He had his eye on his father’s Arctic journals but would not attempt to read them unless Father no longer cared about them. In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect.

The I.W.W. has won, he said. But what has it won? A few more pennies in wages. Will it now own the mills? No.

It occurred to Father one day that Coalhouse Walker Jr. didn’t know he was a Negro. The more he thought about this the more true it seemed. Walker didn’t act or talk like a colored man. He seemed to be able to transform the customary deferences practiced by his race so that they reflected to his own dignity rather than the recipient’s.

She left imprints in the sand of a street runner, a climber of dark stairs; her track was a flight from the terrors of alleys and the terrible crash of ashcans. She had relieved herself in wooden outhouses behind the tenements. The tails of rodents had curled about her ankles. She knew how to sew with a machine and had observed dogs mating, whores taking on customers in hallways, drunks peeing through the wooden spokes of pushcart wheels. He had never gone without a meal. He had never been cold at night. He ran with his mind. He ran toward something. He was unencumbered by fear and did not know there were beings in the world less curious about it than he. He saw through things and noted the colors people produced and was never surprised by a coincidence. A blue and green planet rolled through his eyes.

In the bright floodlit street the black man was said by the police to have made a dash for freedom. More probably he knew that all he must do in order to end his life was to turn his head abruptly or lower his hands or smile. Inside the Library, Father heard the coordinated volley of a firing squad.