Catharsis Under White Fists

Bob finds himself at the mercy of the police and his own self-realization of Jim Crow-era America, shackled literally as the reader is relieved figuratively through this catharsis.  After being beaten and arrested over his presumed rape of Madge, Bob must face a cadre of unsympathetic guards with an unfortunate epiphany: “The whole structure of American thought was against me; American tradition had convicted me a hundred years before” (187).  The structure of American thought at that time was flapping mad over Jim Crow and not endeared to the Negro race, but more importantly, it’s against Bob.  He doesn’t frame it in terms of social injustice, because those gatekeepers tell him to his black and blue body that “in [the South, they’d] have hung [him]” (186).  They control the gate and Bob’s fate at this point, and they sneer death in Bob’s face as personally as they can; he doesn’t have a chance in the minds of these white people and likely no others as well.  A hundred years before, his ancestors were freed to a nation that didn’t want them out of chains, and now that Bob is back in them, he’s as good as a slave again.  Such an example of that grand old American tradition, Bob was guilty the minute he was born a Negro; there’s no defense that’ll change his skin color or those of a thoughtful jury of “peers” who will put him up on the stand and sell him off to the army, prison, or worse.