No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

"if you think you see no slaves in pennsylvania," replies capt. zhang, his face as smooth as suet, "why, look again. they are not all african, nor do some of them even yet know, — may never know, — that they are slaves. slavery is very old upon these shores, — there is no innocence upon the practice anywhere, neither among the indians nor the spanish nor in the behavior of the rest of christendom, if it come to that."

Shit now is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse inside the whiteman’s warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what the toilet is for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white emblems the very emblem of Odorless and Official death.