He was worried sick himself about the draft call that he knew was soon to come. Like hundreds of the black ghetto’s young men, he was taking some stuff that, it was said, would make your heart sound defective to the draft board’s doctors. Shorty felt about the war the same way I and most ghetto Negroes did: “Whitey owns everything. He wants us to go and bleed for him? Let him fight.”
I did not know about the thing people were taking. I wonder what it was.
