“Is that what it is?” Rabbit asks. “Maybe we communicate too well.”

“—a structured discussion might be helpful and educational.”

“Me being the one who needs to be educated,” Rabbit says.

“Not necessarily.” The care with which Jill speaks makes Rabbit feel pity; we are too much for her, he thinks. “You’re older than we are and we respect your experience. We all agree, I think, that your problem is that you’ve never been given a chance to formulate your views. Because of the competitive American context, you’ve had to convert everything into action too rapidly. Your life has no reflective content; it’s all instinct, and when your instincts let you down, you have nothing to trust. That’s what makes you cynical. Cynicism, I’ve seen it said somewhere, is tired pragmatism. Pragmatism suited a certain moment here, the frontier moment; it did the work, very wastefully and ruthlessly, but it did it.”

“On behalf of Daniel Boone,” Rabbit says, “I thank you.”

“It’s wrong,” Jill goes on gently, “when you say Americans are exploiters, to forget that the first things they exploit are themselves. You,” she says, lifting her face, her eyes and freckles and nostrils a constellation, “you’ve never given yourself a chance to think, except on techniques, basketball and printing, that served a self-exploitative purpose. You carry an old God with you, and an angry old patriotism. And now an old wife.” He takes breath to protest, but her hand begs him to let her finish. “You accept these things as sacred not out of love or faith but fear; your thought is frozen because the first moment when your instincts failed, you raced to the conclusion that everything is nothing, that zero is the real answer. That is what we Americans think, it’s win or lose, all or nothing, kill or die, because we’ve never created the leisure in which to take thought. But now, you see, we must, because action is no longer enough, action without thought is violence. As we see in Vietnam.”

He at last can speak. “There was violence in Vietnam before we ever heard of the fucking place. You can see by just the way I’m sitting here listening to this crap I’m a pacifist basically.” He points at Skeeter. “He’s the violent son of a bitch.”

“But you see,” Jill says, her voice lulling and nagging, with just a teasing ragged hem showing of the voice she uses in bed, “the reason Skeeter annoys and frightens you is you don’t know a thing about his history, I don’t mean his personal history so much as the history of his race, how he got to where he is. Things that threaten you like riots and welfare have jumped into the newspapers out of nowhere for you. So for tonight we thought we would just talk a little, have a kind of seminar, about Afro-American history.”

“Please, Dad,” Nelson says.

“Jesus. O.K. Hit me. We were beastly to the slaves so why do so few American Negroes want to give up their Cadillacs and, excuse the expression, colored televisions and go back to Africa?”