Blackguard by Maxwell Bodenheim — Read

The train in which Carl was riding rolled slowly through the outskirts of a southern city and he looked out at the rows of negro cottages and hovels that plaintively cringed underneath the wide foliage of willow and magnolia trees. Most of the cottages were unpainted and grey with the impersonally chaste kiss of time, while the hovels were mere flimsy boxes covered with black tar paper. Sunflowers and morning glories stood amid the weeds and twined about the slanting fences like gaudy virgins dismayed at their sight of a lewdly disordered room and appealing to the sunlight for protection. Negro women in faded sunbonnets and wrappers could sometimes be seen shuffling down the thickly dusty roads and negro children, in weird incoherences of tattered clothes, tumbled around the humble doorsteps. The children were little black madmen unconsciously dodging a huge fist that was concealed beneath the scene. The dust of a late August morning had dropped upon all things, sifting its listless sadness into every crevice and crack, and even the fierce sun could not dispel this invasion.

Every shade of this scene was an accurately friendly answer to Carl's mood and he squandered the brooding light of his eyes upon all of the visual details outside of the train window. The mask of careless bitterness upon his face said its hello to the cowering and sinister apathy of the houses and people, and viciously he longed to leap out of the window and join the unashamed animal rites which these hovels and human beings were parading. Here an alien race was standing amid clouds of evil-smelling squalor and staring at its broken longings and dreams -- staring with a wild hopelessness. This race had lost its own civilization and was clumsily imitating that of the white man, not because of any innate desire, but because it had been forced to blend into its surroundings or perish, and Carl felt that all of his life had also been an animated lie of flesh and speech, devised to aid him in escaping from the contemptuous eyes that vastly hemmed him in. And now, with the feelings of a man who had neatly murdered himself, he was planning to turn the knives of his thoughts and emotions upon other people, not for revenge, but because the marred ghost of himself harshly desired to convince itself that it was still alive. If this ghost had yielded to the subterfuges of kindness and gentleness it would have become too much aware of its own thin remoteness from life, and cruelty alone could induce it to believe that it was still welded to the actualities of existence.