Native Son: Book 2

He felt in the quiet presence of his mother, brother, and sister a force, inarticulate and unconscious, making for living without thinking, making for peace and habit, making for a hope that blinded.

Though he felt he was cut off from them forever, he had a strange hankering for their presence.

The world of sound fell abruptly away from him and a vast picture appeared before his eyes, a picture teeming with so much meaning that he could not react to it all at once.

“What money?” he asked in a tone of feigned surprise.

Because he could go now, run off if he wanted to and leave it all behind, he felt a certain sense of power, a power born of a latent capacity to live.

“Yessuh,” Bigger whispered, struggling to control his feelings, hating Jan violently because he knew he was hurting him; wanting to strike Jan with something because Jan’s wide, incredulous stare made him feel hot guilt to the very core of him.

He was feeling as he had felt when he stood over Mary’s bed with the white blur drawing near; an iota more of fear would have sent him plunging again into murder.

Like an enraged beast, the furnace throbbed with heat, suffusing a red glare over everything.

He saw in his mind a picture of the Dalton family distraught and horrified when they found that Mary was kidnapped.

The torrid cracks of the furnace gleamed in the crimson darkness and he heard the throaty undertone of the draft devouring the air.

“Well,” Bigger said, feigning reluctance, “he told me that some day there wouldn’t be no rich folks and no poor folks...”

Bigger’s eyes skimmed the words: “clandestine meetings offered opportunities for abduction,”

Sometimes, in his room or on the sidewalk, the world seemed to him a strange labyrinth even when the streets were straight and the walls were square; a chaos which made him feel that something in him should be able to understand it, divide it, focus it.

Immediately a cordon of five thousand police, augmented by more than three thousand volunteers, was thrown about the Black Belt.

He had an almost mystic feeling that if he were ever cornered something in him would prompt him to act the right way, the right way being the way that would enable him to die without shame.