Another Country

The life you think you should want,’ said Eric, ‘is always the life that looks safest.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. An hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded

Somewhere in his heart the black boy hated the white boy because he was white.

‘Sweetheart, suffering doesn’t have a colour. Does it? Can’t we step out of this nightmare?

They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain.

The terrible muscle at the base of his belly began to grow hot and hard.

The silence became strict with abruptly focused attention

The coloured people were having a good time because they sensed that, for whatever reason, this crowd was solidly with them;

He thought of the white policemen and the money they made on black flesh, the money the whole world made.