Henry Roth’s verbal explosion, and his hero’s near-execution at the trolley tracks, marked a violent escalation from such streetcar scenes as Stein’s enactment of sympathy or Antin’s memories of daring trolley-track games among immigrant children. As a setting of a vision, Roth’s choice of the Eighth Street trolley also resembled Toomer’s mystical experience at the 66th Street L station. By contrast, Richard Wright returned to the troubling historical legacy that the means of modern transportation were also prime places of racial segregation and tension, an experience that the Southern colored woman’s life story had recorded. In the racially bifurcated world that Wright confronted in his life and exposed in his writing, violent explosions were always a possibility. Wright made it his life-long task to attack segregation, calling attention to its social and psychological consequences, as he often focused on the transformation of fear into violence or rage.

In a section tellingly entitled “Squirrel Cage” that forms part of Wright’s first novel Lawd Today (completed in 1937), a conversation takes place among four young black men who have migrated from the South to the city of Chicago.