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IN THE town there were two mutes, and they were always together.
There was something about getting to the very top that gave you a wild feeling and made you want to yell or sing or raise up your arms and fly.
Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing.
When you said you were so sick and tired of dragging him around you had a good mind to throw him in the river, it was the same to him as if you had been loving him.
Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.
‘Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty. Yeah.’ It was good to talk. The sound of his voice gave him pleasure. The tones seemed to echo and hang on the air so that each word sounded twice. He swallowed and moistened his mouth to speak again. He wanted suddenly to return to the mute’s quiet room and tell him of the thoughts that were in his mind. It was a queer thing to want to talk with a deaf-mute. But he was lonesome.
The quiet insolence of the white race was one thing he had tried to keep out of his mind for years. When the resentment would come to him he would cogitate and study. In the streets and around white people he would keep the dignity on his face and always be silent.
It came about on a dark, rainy night several weeks ago. He had just come from a maternity case and was standing in the rain on a corner. He had tried to light a cigarette and one by one the matches in his box fizzled out. He had been standing with the unlighted cigarette in his mouth when the white man stepped up and held for him a lighted match.
Because of the insolence of all the white race he was afraid to lose his dignity in friendliness.
He got up suddenly and turned on the light. He settled himself at the table with his books by Spinoza and William Shakespeare and Karl Marx. When he read the Spinoza aloud to himself the words had a rich, dark sound.
He thought of the white man of whom they had spoken. It would be good if the white man could help him with Augustus Benedict Mady Lewis, the deaf patient. It would be good to write to the white man even if he did not have this reason and these questions to ask.
This didn’t mean the tyrants were free to get this country in such a fix that millions of people are ready to do anything—cheat, lie, or whack off their right arm—just to work for three squares and a flop.
They have made the word freedom a blasphemy.
‘It’s this way, Singer. Being mad is no good. Nothing we can do is any good. That’s the way it seems to me. All we can do is go around telling the truth. And as soon as enough of the don’t-knows have learned the truth then there won’t be any use for fighting. The only thing for us to do is let them know. All that’s needed.
