This poor cunt of a country’s the biggest jampot’s ever come along so let’s eat it, friend. You screw your black labor and we’ll screw our immigrant honky and Mongolian idiot labor and, whoo-hee! Halleluiah, right? So the Freedman’s Bureau was trashed and the military governors were chased back by crackers on horses who were very big on cutting up colored girls with babies inside ’em and Tilden was cheated out of the Presidency in the one bony-fidey swindle election you can find admitted in every honky history book. Look it up, right? And that was the revolution of 1876. Far as the black man goes, that’s the ’76 that hurt, the one a hundred years before was just a bunch of English gents dodging taxes.” Skeeter has put his glasses back on; the glass circles glitter behind a blueness of smoke. His voice has settled for irony again. “So let’s all sing America the Beautiful, right? North and West, robber barons and slums. Down South, one big nigger barbecue. Hitler bless his sweet soul leastways tried to keep the ovens out of sight. Down Dixieway, every magnolia had a rope. Man, they passed laws if a nigger sneezed within three miles of a white ass his balls were chewed off by sawtoothed beagles. Some nigger didn’t hop off the sidewalk and lick up the tobacco juice whenever the town trash spit, he was tucked into a chain gang and peddled to the sheriff’s brother-in-law cheaper than an alligator egg. And if he dared ask for the vote the Fifteenth Amendment had flat-out given him, why, they couldn’t think up ways to skin him slowly enough, they couldn’t invent enough laws to express their dis-approbation, better for a poor black man to go stick his head up Great-aunt Lily’s snatch than try to stick it in a polling booth. Right? Chuck, I got to hand it to you, you had it all ways. The South got slavery back at half the price, it got control of Congress back by counting the black votes that couldn’t be cast, the North got the cotton money it needed for capital, and everybody got the fun of shitting on the black man and then holding their noses. You believe any of this?”

“I believe all of it,” Rabbit says.

“Do you believe, do you believe I’m so mad just telling this if I had a knife right now I’d poke it down your throat and watch you gargle your life away and would love it, oh, would I love it.” Skeeter is weeping. Tears and smoke mix on the skin of his face.

“O.K., O.K.,” Rabbit says.

“Skeeter, don’t cry,” Nelson says.

“Skeeter, it was too rich, I’m going to lose it,” Jill says and stands. “I’m dizzy.”

But Skeeter will talk only to Harry. “What I want to say to you,” he says, “what I want to make ever so clear, Chuck, is you had that chance. You could have gone some better road, right? You took that greedy turn, right? You sold us out, right? You sold yourselves out. Like Lincoln said, you paid in blood, sword for the lash and all that, and you didn’t lift us up, we held out our hands, man, we were like faithful dogs waiting for that bone, but you gave us a kick, you put us down, you put us down.”