Chapter XXIV: Forging Shells: the Slaves of the Wheel

No composition could be finer, no movement more expressive, no grouping more perfect, and yet all this was happening every day and all day in an oily, dirty, greasy, smoky shell factory where no artist had ever worked before and the workmen, black men, were turning the big shell, under the big hammer, by the big capstan wheel that held it, and I noted in the shop that the black men saw more in my drawings than the white, yet there’s only one black painter in the country.