“The Negroid hair had been treated so that it covered the skull like a cap, in a single neat-ridged sweep that had the appearance of having been lacquered, the part trimmed out with a razor, so that the head resembled a bronze head, permanent, imperishable. He wore one of those sports costumes called ensembles in the newspaper advertisements, shirt and trousers matching and cut from the same fawn-colored flannel, and they had cost too much and were draped too much, with too many pleats. He half lay on the steel cot in the steel cubicle just outside which an armed guard had stood for twenty hours now, smoking cigarettes and answering in a voice deliberately and consistently not a Southern voice the questions of the spectacled young white man sitting with a broad census taker’s portfolio on the steel stool opposite. “Samuel Worsham Beauchamp. Twenty-six. Born in the country near Jefferson, Mississippi. No family. No—” “Wait.” The census taker wrote rapidly. “That isn’t the name you were ...sen—lived under in Chicago?”MoreLessShow More Show Less
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