The Cop and the Anthem — O. Henry

Think of the man who sleeps every night on the pavement outside a Mumbai railway station. Now imagine that, before the cold months, he decides a spell in jail would be better: a roof, regular meals, and nobody asking him questions. He smashes a shop window, waits for the policeman, all but confesses, and is ignored. O. Henry’s Soapy tries exactly this in New York, fails six times, and is arrested only when he has resolved to become a better man. Why does the law miss the man who is begging to be caught, and catch the man who has done nothing?

In two minutes

In O. Henry’s The Cop and the Anthem, Soapy, a homeless New Yorker, commits one petty offence after another to earn three winter months in the prison on Blackwell’s Island, fails every time because the police and the public judge him by his looks and their own assumptions, and is finally arrested for doing nothing at all, at the very moment a church anthem has made him resolve to reform.

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