One of the most crucial of these choices comes with his experience selling newspapers. The job is highly rewarding: it gives him a chance to earn money and a chance to read adventure stories in the supplement section of the paper. His imagination is on fire; he loves to read. But then comes the awful discovery that the newspaper's publishers are racist. Granny and Addie have been giving him many reasons for thinking himself wicked. He has rejected them all. With this discovery, he judges himself on his own terms. With all the benefits the job gives him, it is morally wrong for him to continue it.
In the summer, he takes a job that he enjoys as an assistant to an insurance salesman. They travel into the Delta country and to plantations where Richard measures himself against the poor, illiterate children there. They look up to him as one who is "city-fied," successful, and admirable. It's a new experience for him to be treated as a model for others. And for once he gets plenty to eat. He wants to continue the job, but his employer dies another in a series of letdowns.
With Richard's grandfather's death, we have a portrait of practically an invisible man in the house. It is as if he assumes substance in Richard's life only when he is dying. He takes on a historical rather than a personal significance, for he served in the Union Army and, disabled, spent the remainder of his life expecting the government to send him the pension he deserved. His brief life history sums up the history of black Americans. Any soldier is a slave. And a black soldier is a slave's slave. Once again Richard is conscious of whites as an abstract force of evil.
