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". . . You just didn't see them—a sense a feeling of their constant presence and nearness: black men and women and children breathing and waiting inside their barred and shuttered homes, not crouching cringing shrinking, not in anger and not quite in fear: just waiting, biding since theirs was an armament which the white mati could not match nor—if he but knew it—even cope with: patience . . . this land was a desert and a witness . . . of the deliberate turning as with one back of the whole dark people on which the very economy of the land itself was founded, not in heat or anger nor even regret but in one irremediable invincible inflexible repudiation, upon not a racial outrage but a human shame."
Intruder in the Dust makes the reader work, it is not easy reading. But the reward is worth the trouble. It can be read as a detective story, a humorous idyl (a kind of second cousin to Huckleberry Finn), an outraged, descriptive exhortation to Southern society, a parable of modern life. It is also a triumphant work of art.