Page 22
By Jack Joseph Smith
And I said, how about
fighting about a
Gotton down color
in high school, And
said, yea, how can
have got this bad
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
GPT
The page remembers school racism and treats it as something ordinary enough to be discussed, but terrible enough to leave the speaker asking how things got this bad.
It reads like a compressed social memory. The short lines do not analyze the situation in abstract terms; they present it as a lived conversation, where prejudice is folded into daily life and only afterward recognized for how damaged it is.
Claude
Six lines, one scene: asked how to fight about a `Gotton down color / in high school`, the answer is `yea, how can / have got this bad`. A micro-study of how racial fights begin.