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that did not know the fiery seeds of words and of tears and of passions, hopes, split here on this one spot of the earth. Belonged to somebody who did not think that these people were able to think. Belonged to somebody who had their names wrote down on his money list, his sucker list. Belonged to somebody who does not know how quick we can get together and just how fast we can fight. Belongs to a man or a woman somewhere that don’t even know that we’re down here alive. It belongs to a disease that is the worst cancer on the face of this country, and that cancer goes hand in hand with Ku Klux, Jim Crow, and the doctrine and the gospel of race hate, and that disease is the system of slavery known as sharecropping.
    Not all of this came into Tike’s brain in these exact same words. No. Not all of it. A feeling came over him like one he’d had when he was a boy, and just about every day or so since then. It is the world’s hardest feeling to say in words, because it is not a feeling of words alone, words only. It is an actual vision. It is a scientific fact, and all of the experts of the brain and of the mind know it very well. It is not a spirithallucination, nor a vision based on superstition, hoodoo, voodoo, witchcraft, hocus-pocus, nor the world of heaven beyond.
    It happened at all times when all Tike’s hopes, wants, cravings, and troubles, accidentally or all on purpose, all came together in one solitary, single thought, usually and quite naturally his one single thought was about the person on earth that he loved most. It had been a dozen girls at the farms and the ranches around. It had come when friends and relatives from towns and from other farms brought their children out for a visit. It had happened when he was thinking about his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters. He had had it a hundred times or more while he was going with Ella May, and he had felt it even plainer, more real, since he had been married to her. The sight of her doing her work about the place would cause him to fall into his vision. When she was away at town or at some of the neighboring farms he thought about her so plain that everything in his world came to him at the same instant. He actually saw a living thread of connection between every thought that he had ever thought, everything that had ever happened to him, and every cell in his brain, every memory, was very plainly connected up one with the other, and another with that, and so on.
    The feeling was, roughly, then, that if all of these separated memories, thoughts, ideas, happenings, were all just the one Tike Hamlin, well, then, all of the things around him—house, barn, the iron water tank, the windmill, little henhouse, the old Ryckzyck shack, thewhole farm, the whole ranch—they were a part of him, the same as an egg from the farm went into his mouth and down his throat and was a part of him.
    Religious people, the brush arbor shouters, the holy rollers on their hay, the spiritualists in their trances, the Christian Scientists hunting for their oneness with all things, they would have given the feeling some kind of name and gone around about the country preaching the thing to others. Tike did not look at his feelings nor the ramblings of his brain, nor the work of his hands, as anything to be bought, sold, or preached or taught to others. Maybe it was a mark against him that he did not spread nor share his knowledge with the folks that had lost their hold on this feeling, but his excuse was that he just did not see nor realize nor believe that they were really lost, and he also believed that if somebody did choose to be lost, lost to their own self, lost to the world about them, then all of the hunting and searching that he could do would not help one ounce to find them.
    He believed and said, “You help a hand to find a job of work that it likes to do, and that hand will find its own self.”
    He closed his eyes. He kissed, then sucked