The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

by Carson McCullers

Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America.

Anyway he knew what it was not. Not. Any more.

You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace. And then some day you going to bust loose and be ruined. Won’t nothing help you then.’

Over there in my suitcase I have books by Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen and such writers as them. I read them over and over, and the more I study the madder I get.

It is not more children we need but more chances for the ones already on the earth. Eugenic Parenthood for the Negro Race was what he would exhort them

‘Somebody begun to find out about this Mr. B. F. Mason and he were arrested. They find out he were from just plain Atlanta and hadn’t never smelled no Washington, D.C., or no President.

‘The Negro race of its own accord climbs up on the cross on every Friday,’ said Doctor Copeland.

He knew, too, that Daisy was teaching the children the cult of meekness. She told them about hell and heaven.

and sometimes when he realized this the black feeling would conquer him and he knew not what he did.

Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness.

But these were incidents. Nothing had really changed.

We Negroes want a chance to be free at last. And freedom is only the right to contribute. We want to serve and to share, to labor and in turn consume that which is due to us. But you are the only white man I have ever encountered who realizes this terrible need of my people.

You see, Mister Singer? I got this music in me all the time. I got to be a real musician. Maybe I don’t know anything now, but I will when I’m twenty. See, Mister Singer? And then I mean to travel in a foreign country where there’s snow.

For we were thinking of freedom. That’s the word like a worm in my brain. Yes? No? How much? How little? The word is a signal for piracy and theft and cunning. We’ll be free and the smartest will then be able to enslave the others. But! But there is anoth...

He became so used to their lips that he understood each word they said. And then after a while he knew what each one of them would say before he began, because the meaning was always the same.

The old days of expansion are gone. The whole system of capitalistic democracy is—rotten and corrupt. There remain only two roads ahead. One: Fascism. Two: reform of the most revolutionary and permanent kind.’

So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been.’ ‘Yeah.’

‘In the face of brutality I was prudent. Before injustice I held my peace. I sacrificed the things in hand for the good of the hypothetical whole. I believed in the tongue instead of the fist. As an armor against oppression I taught patience and faith in the human soul. I know now how wrong I was.

‘My advice to you is this. Do not attempt to stand alone.’ ‘But—’ ‘But, nothing,’ said Doctor Copeland didactically. ‘The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.’

‘But once you enter this it must be all. First and foremost. Your work now and forever. You must give of your whole self without stint, without hope of personal return, without rest or hope of rest.’

She was going to work in a ten-cent store and she did not want to work there. It was like she had been trapped into something. The job wouldn’t be just for the summer—but for a long time, as long as she could see ahead. Once they were used to the money coming in it would be impossible to do without again. That was the way things were.