ABSTRACT
THERE was plenty of work in Seattle once the war was in full swing. Good jobs for Negroes, in the shipyards and in many other places where we had not worked before, because white workers had abandoned them for higher-paying war work. But, in my seventeenth year, I felt a complete failure. I didn’t know which way to turn; I felt that I had disgraced my family by becoming a jailbird.
