I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, available during McCullers's teenage years in the Muscogee County Library in Columbus. Both books were widely reviewed with the aim of reforming the penal code. Especially disturbing in the Spivak book is a series of photographs of black men in their striped uniforms in the cage, the stocks, and on the rack. None looks as though he would be capable of joy in song. And after a moment another voice will join in, soon the whole gang will be singing.
Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy.
The chain gang is the frame of the story, not a closing mysterious appendage. McCullers's elevation of love from Eros to Agape succeeds precisely by way of ironic failure. In the South, at the time she was writing, for black man and white man to produce the harmony that should prevail in a world where Agape is understood, she had to remove the song from the people and place it where it could make a stronger statement. The harmony that comes from and out of the world around us is how McCullers's vision transcends, how it pushes toward Agape. Not yet, McCullers is saying, but the chain gang's music does haunt the heart.