The “white lady” in Denver Moore’s chronicle epitomizes a resounding ‘Bystander Effect’: “The white lady didn’t say nothing, just looked down at her shoes.’Cept for horses chiffin, things got quiet. Like the yella spell before a cyclone. The then boy closest to me slung a grass rope around my neck, like he was ropin a calf. He jerked it tight, cutting my breath.” The “white lady” is cognizant that the speaker is offering her candid assistance, yet she does not intervene to save the speaker from undeserved battering. Perchance, she is petrified that refuting the white assaulters is tantamount to degrading her whiteness.
Denver Moore pronounces his looked-for American dream: “ All them years, there was a freight train that used to roll through Red River Parish on some tracks right out there by Highway 1.Ever day, I’d hear it whistle and moan, and I sued to imagine it callin out about the places it could take me…like New York City or Detroit, where I heard a colored man could get paid, or California, where I heard nearly everybody that breathed was stackin up paper money like flapjacks. One day I just got tired a’ bein poor. So I walked out to Highway 1 , waited for the train to slow down some, and jumped on it. I didn’t get off till the doors opened up again, which happened to be in Fort Worth, Texas.” The train is representative of a medium for the American dream that is exemplified by “New York City and California.” Compensation of laborers in these cities is an ingredient of the American dream which underwrites their financial empowerment. Moore’s weariness is an epiphany which prompts him to forfeit his slave-like existence in order to track the dream. Nevertheless, his illiteracy encumbers him from spontaneously clutching the American dream, for he is deficient of abilities that are preferred in contemporary occupations. His manifestation of the streets accentuates the obscurity of the American dream.
Ron Hall’s remarkable racial cognizance blossoms during his childhood: “Even as a little boy, it bothered me that the colored workers ate lunchmeat on the ground behind the filling station while the white workers gathered like family for hot, home-cooked food. Sometimes I had the urge to do something about it, but I never did. At the end of every workday, Granddaddy paid all the workers the same, three or four dollars a piece, and carried them back to town.” The dissimilar meals allude to the ubiquitous racial inequity which is grounded on skin color. Perceptibly, one’s color determines discriminatory eating arrangements. Granddaddy’s resolve to reimburse his laborers equally corroborates that he somehow grasps the workers’ equivalence. Ron Hall’s longing to intercede in the predominant racial disparity portrays him as an individual who does not sanction the conception of white pre-eminence.
