Word From a Crazy Man

In the scene of the “Golden Day”, our protagonist runs into some trouble, he has taken Mr. Norton to the most despicable bar in town. He found himself unable to convince the bartender Haley to permit him to take whiskey outside of the bar to feed a sick Mr. Norton waiting in the car and is forced to bring him inside.

Mr. Norton is looking quite dead, which only adds up to our characters nervousness of having one of the universities trustees up to a bar full of crazy war veterans. As the scene develops, our protagonist is aided by the mass of crazy vets in order to get whiskey into Mr. Norton but things go astray and a full on fight begins. Consequently, the protagonist is forced to drag Mr. Norton upstairs to the balcony with the help of a “doctor” and lay him down to rest.

When Mr. Norton finally comes to his senses, they have a very interesting talk. In this talk the doctor has some very meaningful but rude things to say to Mr. Norton in order to make him understand the racial differences that are inside a man’s head. He says:” He believes in you as he believes in the beat of his heart. He believes in that great false wisdom taught slave and pragmatism alike, that white is right.” The point made by the doctor is one that I find quite interesting, he is the first person to state out loud what we all know, that due to the things that whites have been making blacks believe they now consider it to be true. The doctor says, “To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievements, a thing and not a man; a child or even less a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man but a God to him.”  With this he is leaving clear how blacks feel toward whites, not only this particular pair, what he is saying is sustained by the thoughts that the protagonist has been having throughout his whole car ride with Mr. Norton about how incredible it was that he would take interest in his life or how they couldn’t treat him like any other man because he was “white and rich”.

This words all came from a man committed to an insane asylum but who claims he isn’t crazy and demonstrates being in control of himself until his sudden outburst. The fact that it takes a crazy man to see the truth and voice it out loud and to an influential white man demonstrates the level of repression that blacks suffer from that it takes craziness for them to understand what is being done to them.