"How do you figure that?" I asked Jones.
"I don't want to sound like I think I am a brain," Jones said. "I only read some. But these men down here—you might say, couldn't you, that they are maybe men who don't have much of a hold on the world any more?"
"True."
"And the world holds them mighty lightly. They are nothing. Nobody pays them attention. They are outside of everything. They are pretty much outside the world, even. Now you, Ed—you are mostly a part of the normal world. But one time you were all the way on down here, right? So you—"
"I have a feeling for it? Something like that?"
"Something like that. And so down here you are like the others; you can see Stanley. Uptown, you couldn't see him."
"Sounds nuts. But how? Why?"
"That goes back, way back. Stanley and me, we were kids together. Stanley, his people were what down there they call 'trash.' Fourteen, fifteen kids. Who was whose pa, who would know? Or care? And Stanley, he was kind of the runt of the whole litter. Nobody paid him any mind. He never talked much 'cause nobody listened. Got to be a real dopey, dreamy, moody kid. Not ever sick, but sickly. He was more like nothing than any kid I ever did see.
"Me, I lived down the road a piece from Stanley. I don't know why, but he took to following me around. Mostly because everyone else ran him off, I expect. I don't guess I was real good to poor Stanley, but I let him tag along. You would hardly know he was there; no trouble. And he struck me so sort of lost and pitiful, you know? I never had the heart to chase him. After a while, it got to where he even took to trailing along after me to school.
"Now that was a funny thing; kind of got me to wondering. There was a white kid down in that part of the country, running along after a colored boy to a colored school. You would expect that to attract a good deal of attention, wouldn't you? Maybe stir up a big storm in the county. But nobody ever hardly seemed to notice Stanley at all. There wasn't anything ever said about it.