Final Passages

Word limit: 600 words.

Passage 1: Mickey Spillane, from I, the Jury 1947

I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me. Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna. The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs. I walked over and put my arms around her.

“Take it easy, kid,” I told her. “Come on over here and lie down.” I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down. She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.

Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom. “In there, Mike,” he said.

In there. The words hit me hard. In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead. The body. Now I could call it that. Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle. Jack, the guy who said he’d give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped an enemy bastard from slitting me in two. He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.

Pat didn’t say a word. He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face. For the first time in my life I felt like crying. “Where did he get it, Pat?”

Passage 2: Jayne Anne Phillips, from a short story about returning home

I’m afraid Walter Cronkite has had it, says Mom. Roger Mudd always does the news now -- how would you like to have a name like that? Walter used to do the conventions and a football game now and then. I mean he would sort of appear, on the sidelines. Didn’t he? But you never see him anymore. Lord. Something is going on.

Mom, I say. Maybe he’s just resting. He must have made a lot of money by now. Maybe he’s tired of talking about elections and mine disasters and the collapse of the franc. Maybe he’s in love with a young girl.

He’s not the type, says my mother. You can tell THAT much. No, she says, I’m afraid it’s cancer.

My mother has her suspicions. She ponders. I have been home with her for two months. I ran out of money and I wasn’t in love, so I have come home to my mother. She is an educational administrator. All winter long after work she watches television and knits afghans.

Come home, she said. Save money.

I can’t possibly do it, I said. Jesus, I’m twenty-three years old.

Don’t be silly, she said. And don’t use profanity.

Passage 3: Ta Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me (2016)

[Note: Coates’ text is conceived of as a “letter” to his son (it runs 150 pages, so more of an extended essay than a “letter”!), explaining, as it were, the facts of life that all young black men should understand. It is also an extended reflection on how the world of black lives works, and to give his explanation of how it has come to be this way, how much the way things now are is often no more than a continuation of the way things used to be.]

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse to stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes our body breakable.