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The couplet exposes race as a code-switch the speaker performs in both directions.

The title promises solidarity, but the actual lines center on divided speech rather than easy belonging. Talking to a Negro like a white man and to a white man like a Negro suggests someone moving uneasily across racial scripts, never simply speaking from one uncontested place.

'JOINING THE UNION': a two-line rule - 'I talk to a Negro like a white man / And to a white man like a Negro;'

The title promises industrial solidarity, but the couplet delivers a personal code instead - the 'union' is a one-man ethic of address. The rule's mirror symmetry is both its risk and its claim: by speaking to each man as he speaks to the other, the speaker refuses to stratify his voice by race, the book's recurring moral move. The trailing semicolon leaves the rule open, as if more conduct could follow, but the brevity is what keeps it from hardening into instruction. The source's period-era term is preserved as written. This reading remains provisional because the page is a partial manual transcript marked medium confidence and partial legibility.