"Making a new start, starting from fresh in the rain, 'Why should anyone want to hurt my little heart, my feet, my little hands, my skin that I'm wrapt in because God wants me warm and Inside, my toes—why did God make all this so decayable and dieable and harmable and wants to make me realize and scream—why the wild ground and bodies bare and breaks—I quaked when the giver creamed, when my father screamed, my mother dreamed—I started small and ballooned up and now I'm big and a naked child again and only to cry and fear. —Ah—Protect yourself, angel of no harm, you who've never and could never harm and crack another innocent in its shell and thin veiled pain—wrap a robe around you, honeylamb—protect yourself from harm and wait, till Daddy comes again, and Mama throws you warm inside her valley of the moon, loom at the loom of patient time, be happy in the mornings."

Keroauc saw himself as a white guy without a "culture." In his view, his privilege really cramped his style. He espoused a love for jazz and other elements of black culture—clearly, he wanted in on that whole vibe. And he also wanted to take down racism.

For a long time, he dated a black woman named Alene Lee. Together, they hung around jazz clubs and underground poetry readings. Inter-racial relationships were scandalous at the time, and Kerouac may have written about this tryst here as a way to further infuriate the establishment.

If you don't have a life of your own, borrow one from someone else, right? Kerouac's attempts at inter-racial dialogue have been heavily criticized for trivializing and reducing the black experience to jazz music, exotic sexuality, and radical revolutions.

The Beats were white guys who tried to pry open the door of a segregated society, in order to let racial harmony in. But, of course, real revolutions start from within oppressed groups, not outside of them.

The female character here, Mardou Fox, is a stand-in for Alene Lee. Lee and Kerouac had a long-standing affair. In this piece, she is the focus of Kerouac's much-criticized view of black culture. Her name and presence are exotic, full of sex and spice—just the ticket for a bored white dude.

Not only does Kerouac's characterization here place Mardou in a subservient role to his own character, it also her paints her as a particularly vulnerable, anxiety-ridden creature. Ugh. This kind of sexism was typical of how men wrote about women back then, unfortunately.

As we've said, Kerouac really goes out of his way here to position Mardou as stereotypically feminine and as other, as exotic, on account of her being African American. "Honeylamb," "valley of the moon, loom at the loom of patient time,"—both of these phrases use soft, round vowels and typically feminine imagery: looms and lambs.

This is still the fifties y'all. You can't change the guys and dolls overnight.

At least Kerouac made some attempt to expose to idiocy of racial inequality, we guess. Nonetheless, idolizing Black culture, jazz, and the fight for racial equality trivializes the lived experiences of African Americans. And their own power to change their circumstances.