"Native Son" by Richard Wright, Book 1

There was in his eyes a pensive, brooding amusement, as of a man who had been long confronted and tantalized by a riddle whose answer seemed always just on the verge of escaping him, but prodding him irresistibly on to seek its solution.

“Yessuh, Mr. Morgan,” Bigger said, his eyes filled with mock adulation and respect.

Bigger felt an urgent need to hide his growing and deepening feeling of hysteria; he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it.

These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger—like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force.

Bigger paused and looked round the poolroom with a wild and exasperated expression, his lips tightening with resolution.

This little collection of debutantes represents over four billion dollars of America’s wealth and over fifty of America’s leading families.

“Don’t tell the world what we’re trying to do,” Jack whispered in a mollifying tone.

That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared.

He had not expected anything like this; he had not thought that this world would be so utterly different from his own that it would intimidate him.

“Yessuh,” he whispered; not speaking, really; but hearing his words roll involuntarily from his lips.

He was still feeling his hand strangely; it seemed that the pressure of Jan’s fingers had left an indelible imprint.

Bigger listened to the tone of their voices, to their strange accents, to the exuberant phrases that flowed so freely from their lips.

Momentarily, she roused herself and looked at him with blank eyes.

Her lips, faintly moist in the hazy blue light, were parted and he saw the furtive glints of her white teeth.

As he took his hands from the pillow he heard a long slow sigh go up from the bed into the air of the darkened room, a sigh which afterwards, when he remembered it, seemed final, irrevocable.