I was learning fast, but not quite fast enough. One day while I was delivering packages in the suburbs, my bicycle tire was punctured. I walked along the hot, dusty road, sweating and leading my bicycle by the handle-bars.
A car slowed at my side. 

“What’s the matter, boy?” a white man called. 

I told him my bicycle was broken and I was walking back to town. 

“That’s too bad,” he said. “ Hop on the running board.” 

He stopped the car. I clutched hard at my bicycle with one hand and clung to the side of the car with the other. 

“All set?” 

“Yes, sir,”  I answered. The car started. 

It was full of young white men. They were drinking. I watched the flask pass from mouth to mouth. 

“Wanna drink, boy?” one asked. 

I laughed as the wind whipped my face. Instinctively obeying the freshly planted precepts of my mother, I said: 

“Oh, no!” 

The words were hardly out of my mouth before I felt something hard and cold smash me between the eyes. It was an empty whisky bottle. I saw stars, and fell backwards from the speeding car into the dust of the road, my feet becoming entangled in the steel spokes of my bicycle. The white men piled out and stood over me. 

“Nigger, ain’ yuh learned no better sense’n tha’ yet?” asked the man who hit me. “Ain’ yuh learned t’ say sir t’ a white man yet?” 

Dazed, I pulled to my feet. My elbows and legs were bleeding. Fists doubled, the white man advanced, kicking my bicycle out of the way. 

“Aw, leave the bastard alone. He’s got enough,” said one. 

They stood looking at me. I rubbed my shins, trying to stop the flow of blood. No doubt they felt a sort of contemptuous pity, for one asked: 

“Yuh wanna ride t’ town now, nigger? Yuh reckon yuh know enough t’ ride now?” 

“I wanna walk,” I said simply.  

Maybe it sounded funny. They laughed. 

“Well, walk, yuh black son-of-a-bitch!” 

When they left they comforted me with: 

“Nigger, yuh sho better be damn glad it wuz us yuh talked t’ tha’ way. Yuh’re a lucky bastard, ‘cause if yuh’d said tha’ t’ somebody else, yuh might’ve been a dead nigger now.” 

– – –

Wright, Richard. The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch. 1937. Black Voices: An Anthology of African-American Literature. Ed. Abraham Chapman. New York: Signet Classics, 2001. 274-75. Print.