An incident illustrates.
At the college in Louisville where I taught during the depression, a white slum crawled to the western edge of the campus. I could see its dirt, its poverty and disease in any direction I cared to look from my classroom window. In the littered back yards, each with a pit toilet, snotty-nosed children with rickets played and lank-haired women shrilled obscenities at them all day long. I remember seeing a man only once—an ancient, senile man bent with a monstrous hernia. By the time autumn paled into winter the pity I felt for the people in the slum had been safely stacked away among other useless emotional lumber.
One day as I stood by the window thinking of other things, I gradually became aware of movement in the yard directly below me. The college building was as quiet as a church, for it was a Saturday when we had no classes. There would have been no shock in seeing a woman of the neighborhood dressed only in a ragged slip, but a powdery snow had fallen the night before and the day was bitter cold. When I saw the woman, who seemed quite young, she was lurching and staggering in the rear of the yard. A dog must have followed her out of the house, for one stood by the open door watching and flicking its tail dubiously. The woman’s face was stiff and vacant, but in her efforts to walk her body and limbs jerked convulsively in progressive tremors. I could not tell whether she was drunk or sick as she floundered in the snow in the yard. Pity rose in me, but at the same time something else also—a gloating satisfaction that she was white. Sharply and concurrently felt, the two emotions were of equal strength, in perfect balance, and the corporeal I, fixed in a trance at the window, oscillated between them.
When she was within a few steps of the outhouse, the poor woman lurched violently and pitched face downward in the snow. Somehow utterly unable to move, I watched her convulsive struggles for several minutes. The dog came down the yard meanwhile, whining piteously, and walked stiff-legged around the white and almost naked body. The woman made a mess in the snow and then lay still.
Finally I turned irresolutely and went into the corridor. There was the entrance door and near it the telephone. I could have gone out and a few steps would have brought me to the yard where the woman lay and I could have tried to rouse someone or myself taken her into the house. I went to the telephone and called the police.
“There’s a drunken woman lying in the back yard of a house on Eighth Street, seven-hundred block,” I said.
“You say drunk? In her own yard? Then leave her lay.”
“But there doesn’t seem to be anyone there, and she may not be drunk.”
“You said she was drunk,” the voice said. “Now what’s the story?” There was a pause. “And who’re you anyway?”
“She could freeze to death,” I said, and hung up. Thus I washed my hands of it.