The Last Thing You Surrender by Leonard Pitts Jr.

He was a man who had seen his parents tortured and burned to death before his very eyes at his own front door by white people. She had no tears left in her.Īnd Luther, who had never touched a white woman before, who had never so much as brushed against one in a crowd, who had avoided even that incidental contact with a kind of bone-deep terror accessible only to a Negro man in the Deep South who grew up knowing all too well what messing with a white woman could get you, could only stand there, stricken and dumbfounded, as this woman pressed his hand to her cheek. It took Luther a moment to realize that she was crying, because her eyes remained dry, no water glistened on her cheek. Her face contorted into an expression of raw, utter sorrow and she made groaning sounds that did not seem quite human. She held his skin to hers, which was papery and thin, almost translucent. A woman - at least he thought it was a woman - took Luther's hand and lifted it to her cheek. They shook clasped hands toward heaven, they smiled terrible, toothless smiles, they looked up at the Negro soldiers like penitents gazing upon the very throne of God. They were little more than skeletons wearing rags of flesh.Īnd their eyes gleamed with a madness of joy, an insanity of deliverance, at the sight of the colored tankers.

You could look at them and see where tibia met patella, count their ribs by sight. Their mouths were drawn tight against their bony jaws. Their eyes were like small, frightened animals, peering out from the caverns their sockets had become.

It was difficult to believe they were even human. The creatures swarmed the colored tankers. The creatures seemed sexless.ĭazedly, Luther dismounted the tank. And hobbling, shuffling, tottering toward them from every direction, came an assemblage of stick men in filthy black and white striped prison suits. It was a camp of some sort, barracks arranged in neat rows. Luther Hayes, whose parents were murdered before his eyes by a white mob when he was a boy of nine, learns a lesson about humanity's true capacity for cruelty: In this abridged excerpt from 'The Last Thing You Surrender' a novel by columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., elements of the all-black 761st Tank Battalion make a grisly discovery and Pvt.

The Last Thing You Surrender by Leonard Pitts Jr.