"Here they come!" someone shouted, and excited conversation buzzed throughout the room. Julie's voice was never heard. She stared silently at the people near her, then turned to the front of the room to see what they were all watching so avidly.
A straggling line of bedraggled, dirty, unshaven men shuffled into a wire enclosure set along the right wall of the courtroom. Crushed men—weary, lifeless, resigned to a life without hope—they filed into the pen and slumped onto the wooden benches that were placed lengthwise in three rows in the oblong cage. Their shoulders drooped in beaten curves. Their heads were bowed.
The man in front turned around and nudged Julie's knee. His triumphant smile was an obscenity. "Call those men?" He laughed and winked at Stan, then turned back to the front of the court to watch the preliminary proceedings.
An incipient convulsion crawled about in Julie's stomach. Her knee felt cold and clammy where the moon-faced man had touched it. Her skin was prickly and tight. She began to itch.
"Get up, honey," Stan was saying. "Here comes the judge."
She stood, numbly, her eyes riveted on the men in the wire enclosure.
"Julie!" She felt a hand tugging at her arm. "You can sit down now, Julie," Stan said. "Sit down!"
Mechanically, she sat down. Woodenly, she stared at the tableau before her—the judge perched on his elevated throne, the stone-faced attendants at each side of the dais, the wire pen filled with misery. Through the almost tangible excitement and glee of the spectators, the misery reached her, held her.
The court was in session: the people of the City of New York against ... against an assortment of outcasts—drunks, derelicts, cripples, beggars—the "undesirables" that had been rounded up by the police in the past twenty-four hours. The people of the City of New York against a pen full of men whose only crimes, for the most part, were sickness, lack of hope and failure to possess the ID cards which everyone needed and which, somehow, they had been denied.