Rabbit sits on the silverthread chair to read. “Whence came the daring spirit necessary to grapple with a man who, eight-and-forty hours before, could, with the slightest word, have made me tremble like a leaf in a storm, I do not know; at any rate, I was resolved to fight, and what was better still, I actually was hard at it. The fighting madness had come upon me, and I found my strong fingers firmly attached to the throat of the tyrant, as heedless of consequences, at the moment, as if we stood equals before the law. The very color of the man was forgotten. I felt supple as a cat, and was ready for him at every turn. Every blow of his was parried, though I dealt no blows in return. I was strictly on the defensive, preventing him from injuring me, rather than trying to injure him. I flung him on the ground several times when he meant to have hurled me there. I held him so firmly by the throat that his blood followed my nails. He held me, and I held him.”

“Oh I love it, it grabs me, it kills me,” Skeeter says, and he gets up on one elbow so his body confronts the other man’s. “Do me one more. Just one more bit.”

“I gotta get upstairs.”

“Skip a couple pages, go to the place I marked with double lines.”

“Why doncha read it to yourself?”

“It’s not the same, right? Doin’ it to yourself. Every school kid knows that, it’s not the same. Come on, Chuck. I been pretty good, right? I ain’t caused no trouble, I been a faithful Tom, give the Tom a bone, read it like I say. I’m gonna take off all my clothes, I want to hear it with my pores. Sing it, man. Do it. Begin up a little, where it goes A man without force.” He prompts again, “A man without force,” and is fussing with his belt buckle.

“A man without force,” Rabbit intently reads, “is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted, that it cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long if signs of power do not arise.”

“Yes,” Skeeter says, and the blur of him is scuffling and slithering, and a patch of white flashes from the sofa, above the white of the printed page.

“He can only understand,” Rabbit reads, finding the words huge, each one a black barrel his voice echoes in, “the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself incurred something, or hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant and a cowardly one withal. After resisting him, I felt as I had never felt before.”

“Yes,” Skeeter’s voice calls from the abyss of the unseen beyond the rectangular island of the page.

“It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. I was no longer a servile coward, trembling under the frown of a brother worm of the dust, but my long-cowed spirit was roused to an attitude of independence. I had reached a point at which I was not afraid to die.” Emphasis.