Fiend

'Pshaw! Double pshaw!' said Doctor Copeland furiously. `I do not believe you have good sense. If I were a man who felt it worth my while to laugh I would surely laugh at that. Never have I had the opportunity to hear of such nonsense firsthand.'

They stared at each other in bitter disappointment and anger. There was the rattle of a wagon in the street outside. Jake swallowed and bit his lips. `Huh!' he said finally. `You're the only one who's crazy. You got everything exactly backward. The only way to solve the Negro problem under capitalism is to geld every one of the fifteen million black men in these states.'

`So that is the kind of idea you harbor beneath your ranting about justice.'

`I didn't say it should be done. I only said you couldn't see the forest for the trees.' Jake spoke with slow and painful care. `The work has to start at the bottom. The old traditions smashed and the new ones created. To forge a whole new pattern for the world. To make man a social creature for the first time, living in an orderly and controlled society where he is not forced to be unjust in order to survive. A social tradition in which - '

Doctor Copeland clapped ironically. `Very good,' he said. `But the cotton must be picked before the cloth is made. You and your crackpot do-nothing theories can - '

`Hush! Who cares whether you and your thousand Negroes straggle up to that stinking cesspool of a place called Washington? What difference does it make? What do a few people matter-a few thousand people, black, white, good or bad? When the whole of our society is built on a foundation of black lies.'

`Everything!' Doctor Copeland panted. `Everything! Everything!'

`Nothing!'

`The soul of the meanest and most evil of us on this earth is worth more in the sight of justice than - '

`Oh, the Hell with it!' Jake said. `Balls!'

'Blasphemer!' screamed Doctor Copeland. `Foul blasphemer!'

Jake shook the iron bars of the bed. The vein in his forehead swelled to the point of bursting and his face was dark with rage. `Short-sighted bigot!'

`White - ' Doctor Copeland's voice failed him. He struggled and no sound would come. At last he was able to bring forth a choked whisper: `Fiend.'

The bright yellow morning was at the window. Doctor Copeland's head fell back on the pillow. His neck twisted at a broken angle, a fleck of bloody foam on his lips. Jake looked at at him once before, sobbing with violence, he rushed headlong from the room.

Carson McCullers, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1940)