Page 190

A handwritten racial annotation sits above a compressed lament in which children, steps, distance, truth, lost song, and terrible chance mark a world whose delight has quietly thinned out.

The economy is still the point, but the handwritten word changes the page's pressure. It makes the typed lament feel socially specific rather than only general or nostalgic.

Beneath the handwritten word 'Negro' sits a compressed lament where 'Children on steps / Have lost the fun' and 'Distance and truth / Have lost their song.' The repeated 'Have lost' tolls like an inventory of subtraction, and the isolated phrase 'Terrible chance' hangs as both accident and indictment. The dropped final couplet - 'It was like this // All along' - withdraws any sense of recent loss, suggesting the deprivation was always the condition. The handwritten heading makes the muted grief socially specific rather than merely nostalgic. This reading treats the annotation as transcribed, per the page's scan-review notes.