Because of a demand for more rooms in the high-risk areas of the veteran’s hospital, and because of his violent behavior, Shadrack, a twenty-two-year-old black World War I veteran, is released from the facility where he is being treated for shell-shock; today, the diagnosis would probably be post-traumatic stress syndrome. Alone and disoriented, he painfully makes his way back to Medallion and then to the Bottom, his old neighborhood.
Back at home in the Bottom, Shadrack creates National Suicide Day, the third day of every new year, when he marches through the community ringing a cowbell and carrying a hangman’s rope. He tells the Bottom’s residents that only on National Suicide Day should people kill themselves or each other, if that is what they desire. Not surprisingly, the townspeople are suspect of Shadrack’s sanity, but they soon come to accept his antics and his National Suicide Day, which becomes “part of the fabric of life” in the Bottom.
