(On The Road, Jack Kerouac, pp.169-170). “At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered me was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley. I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensuous gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs. A gang of colored woman came by, and one of the young ones detached herself from motherlike elders and came to me fast –“Hello Joe!”– and suddenly saw it wasn’t Joe, and ran back, blushing. I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in the violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted ecstatic Negroes of America.”