Note 25 — Chapter Fifteen
Reading edition
It was about a six-month after the move to the Igrotte house that my brother Dave, a quiet and rather thoughtful child up to then, asked me a question that surprised me with its observation. There had been a labor-strike among the men who were laying the new-paved road between Centralia and Middleton, and one of the so-called scabs had been struck by a rock thrown by a union man. When old Jessup told me of this happening, I was salting out weeds between the bricks of a garden-walk. Helping me at this task, Davey, digging away, looked up to remark, as ants scurried from the path of his trowel, “Ants run their world better for themselves than folks do, Bek. Bees too. Bees and ants all work together. Why are folks always trying to crowd each other out?”
I sometimes wonder if right then and there was not planted into his heart the unconscious resolve that much of his life-effort must be waged against man’s inhumanity to man.
That day he was just a kid, faintly perturbed with his first awareness of injustice....