Violence, Justice, and Morality Theme Analysis

I noted that Mr. DeWitt Albright didn’t pay for the drinks he ordered. Joppy didn’t seem in a hurry to ask for his money though.

Whether he knew it or not, DeWitt Albright had me caught by my own pride. The more I was afraid of him, I was that much more certain to take the job he offered.

All of them and John and half the people in that crowded room had migrated from Houston after the war, and some before that. California was like heaven for the Southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom.

And it was always the evil ones that would kill the good or the stupid. If anyone should have died in that bar it should have been Mouse. If there was any kind of justice he should have been the one.

At the first words I went to my closet. I don’t know what I wanted to do there, maybe pack my bags and leave town. Maybe I just wanted to hide in the closet, I don’t know.

DeWitt Albright had his bottle and his gun right out there in plain view. When he asked me what I had to say I told him; I might have been a little nervous, but I told him anyway. Benny didn’t care about what I had to say. [...] He wasn’t a businessman, he was a plantation boss; a slaver.

While I was down there, on my knees, I noticed something. I bent down and smelled it and then I picked it up and wrapped it in my handkerchief.

The voice only comes to me at the worst times, when everything seems so bad that I want to take my car and drive it into a wall. Then this voice comes to me and gives me the best advice I ever get.

The voice is hard. It never cares if I’m scared or in danger. It just looks at all the facts and tells me what I need to do.

But I didn’t believe that there was justice for Negroes. I thought that there might be some justice for a black man if he had the money to grease it. Money isn’t a sure bet but it’s the closest to God that I’ve ever seen in this world.

But I’ll never forget thinking how those Germans had hurt that poor boy so terribly that he couldn’t even take in anything good. That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe, the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.

“Tell us what we wanna know, Frankie, or I’m’a shoot ya.”

Frank’s jaw set and his left eye half closed. I could see that Daphne meant enough to him that he was ready to die to keep her safe.

“Guilt?” He said the words as if it had no meaning. “You mean like what I did makes you feel bad?”

“That’s right.”

“I tell you what then,” he said. [...] “You let me work on this with you and I let you run the show.”

“Whas that mean?”

“I ain’t gonna do nuthin’ you don’t tell me t’do.”

[...]

“Whatever you say, Easy. Maybe you gonna show me how a poor man can live wit’out blood.”

“I don’t have a gun, Raymond. You know that.”

“You fool enough to go without no piece then you must wanna be dead.” His eyes were glazed and I was sure that he didn’t see me. He saw somebody, though, some demon he carried around in his head.

“Then, at almost closing time, we passed the zebras. No one was around and Daddy was holding my hand. Two zebras were running back and forth. One was trying to avoid the other but the bully had cut off every escape. I yelled for my daddy to stop them because I worried they were going to fight.”

Daphne had grabbed onto my hand, she was so excited. I found myself worried; but I couldn’t really tell what bothered me.

Daphne was on the couch, naked, and the men, DeWitt and Joppy, stood over her. Albright was wearing his linen suit but Joppy was stripped to the waist. His big gut looked obscene hanging over her like that and it took everything I had not to shoot him right then.

“Now am I gonna lie to you, Ruby? Your brother’s dead.”

I had only been in an earthquake once but the feeling was the same: The ground under me seemed to shift. I looked at her to see the truth. But it wasn’t there. Her nose, cheeks, her skin color—they were white. Daphne was a white woman.

“I pulled the trigger, he died. But he killed himself really. [...] I offered him all my money but he just laughed. He had his hands in that little boy’s drawers and he laughed.” Daphne snorted. I don’t know if it was a laugh or a sound of disgust. “And so I killed him.”

“I’m different than you because I’m two people. I’m her and I’m me. I never went to that zoo, she did. She was there and that’s where she lost her father. I had a different father. He came to my house and fell in my bed about as many times as he fell in my mother’s. He did that until one night Frank killed him.”