Life & Mortality Quote by Jimmy Breslin

Breslin drops you into the logistics of atrocity with the flat tone of a guy describing a union job, and that’s the trapdoor. “A lot of work” is newsroom-plain, almost shruggy; it turns murder into labor, which is exactly how racist violence survived in the American South: not as a spontaneous eruption, but as an organized, staffed, coordinated undertaking. The line’s sick joke is that a funeral is supposed to be the end of a story. Breslin rewinds it to the real beginning: before the grief, the speeches, the flag pins, there’s the deliberate decision to make a body.

Calling it the “first funeral” tightens the screw. Andrew Goodman, one of the three civil-rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964, was mourned twice: once in the dark by the men who buried the evidence, then again in daylight by a nation forced to look. Breslin’s “at night” isn’t atmospheric noir; it’s procedure. Night means secrecy, complicity, and the comfort of knowing the system will look away.

The nastiest brilliance is the phrase “To begin with.” It mimics the cadence of a how-to guide, as if the writer is walking you through steps for putting on an event. That’s Breslin’s intent: to strip away the pieties that usually surround martyrdom and make you feel the machinery beneath it. The subtext is a rebuke to any reader who wants to treat Goodman’s death as tragic-but-abstract. It was engineered. It was executed. It took work.