A Lesson Before Dying: Chapters 20–31

The marble game was barely audible, but the ragball players behind the church were loud and clear, and it took all my concentration to go on with my work.

Behind him, a couple of smoldering logs sent a thin stream of gray smoke and an occasional spark up the chimney.

The river still ran high from all the rain we had had in the past couple of months and from the water that drained into it from the bayous and fields.

We stood there looking at each other a moment, then she came in and took off her coat and galoshes.

So he, too, must run away if he is to hold on to his sanity and have a life of his own. I can see by your face you don’t agree, so I’ll try again.

The prisoners nearest his cell could faintly hear the music he played, but the ones farther away could only hear static, though he searched, day and night, for stronger stations.

“Tell—tell the chirren thank you for the pe-pecans,” he stammered.

The minister and my aunt looked at me, and both seemed angry, as if I had kept them waiting deliberately.

“I brought you some good old gumbo,” Miss Emma said to Jefferson.

“Those out there are no better than we are, Jefferson. They are worse. That’s why they are always looking for a scapegoat, someone else to blame. I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be...."

It would destroy their myth. They would no longer have justification for having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in.

They play by the rules their forefathers created hundreds of years ago. Their forefathers said that we’re only three-fifths human—and they believe it to this day.

I did not wish to tell her about the envy I had seen in the minister’s face.

And these two who were talking now were of that way of thinking. Dumb as hell, but prejudiced as hell.

I was waiting for it to happen, the way a condemned man must wait that last hundredth of a second for the guillotine to fall.

I was waiting for it to happen, the way a condemned man must wait that last hundredth of a second for the guillotine to fall.

He got up from the chair and came toward me. He peered at me intently, his face showing pain and confusion.

His hand still grasped my shoulder, and I needed all my willpower to keep from knocking it off.

He didn’t pay any close attention to the black truck with the gray tarpaulin cover, but he would tell the people later at the Rainbow Club that he did feel a cold chill when the truck went by.

Finally, he told one of the women that Miss Lucy had sent him up there for a spool of coarse white thread.

LaCox was the colored mortician of Bayonne, and he would have the coffin ready.

Somewhere across the field I could hear the sound of a tractor. A white sharecropper must have been plowing the ground, since no colored people were working today.

Behind me was Henri Pichot’s gray and white antebellum house, sitting on its foundation high above the ground.

I stood up and stretched and looked across the highway at the river, so tranquil, its water as blue as the sky.

He spoke slowly as we walked abreast, he looking up ahead, I down at the ground.