He went forward, walking carefully over the dirt so that his footsteps would not drown out the faint sounds. The farther he went into blackness, the plainer the sounds became. He pushed on; the sounds were coming to him loudly now. Yes, singing! That was it! He stopped and listened with open mouth. Where was it coming from? He felt that he was a little boy hearing a band playing around the corner; yes, he had to run and hear that singing. Then the identity of the singing burst upon him; it was a church service! The singing was so near that he could feel the timbre and pitch of the voices, yet the darkness made it seem as though the voices were coming from within some enclosed crater of the moon. Entranced, he groped on and the waves of melody rose.

Jesus, take me to your blessed home above

And wrap me in the bosom of thy love . . .

The singing was on the other side of the brick wall. That’s a colored folks’ church down in one of them sunken basements. . . . Excited, he wanted to observe the church service without being seen, without being a part of it. His fingers combed the brick wall for an opening, no matter how slight. He was frantic, possessed. He looked to the left, to the right, down to the blackness of the ground, and then upward and was startled to see a bright sliver of light some seven feet above him falling obliquely into the darkness, cutting the air like the long sharp blade of a razor. If I can look through that crack, I can watch ’em. . . . He struck one of his two remaining matches and held the flame above his head and saw several rusty pipes running along the length of the dingy ceiling. Standing on tiptoe with the dying match in his hand, he photographically located in his mind the exact position of the pipes. The match flame sank and he sprang upward; his hands clutched a pipe. He swung his legs to and fro and tossed his body onto the bed of pipes. There was a slight creak and he thought that the whole tier was about to crash; but nothing happened. He edged to the crevice and saw a narrow segment of black men and women, dressed in black robes, singing, holding tattered song books in their black palms. His first impulse was to give vent to a loud laugh, but the laugh choked in his throat. Then he wanted to leap through the quarter-inch of crack, straight into the midst of those foolish people and gather all of them about him, telling them: “Don’t do this to yourselves!”

His emotions subsided and he came to himself. What was he saying? A sense of the life he had left aboveground crushed him with a sense of guilt. Would not God strike him dead for having such thoughts? As he lay upon the bed of pipes, he knew this: His life had somehow snapped in two. But how? When he had sung and prayed with his brothers and sisters in church, he had always felt what they felt; but here in the underground, distantly sundered from them, he saw a defenseless nakedness in their lives that made him disown them. A physical distance had come between them and had conferred upon him a terrifying knowledge. He felt that these people should stand silent, unrepentant, with simple manly pride, and yield no quarter in whimpering. He wanted them to assume a heroic attitude even though he himself had run away from his tormentors, even though he had begged his accusers to believe in his innocence.