Hands

“‘Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes,’ commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass of tangled locks.”

The berry pickers are cruel to the town recluse in the way that only adolescents can be—with an astounding lack of empathy and self-awareness that they think is harmless teasing. Wing Biddlebaum hears their mockery and responds self-consciously with a gesture that calls attention to his aging and his distinct hands. Although he has made every effort to completely insulate himself from the criticism of society, he is unable to avoid attention altogether. This moment introduces the injustice of his persecution by a society built on prejudice.

“Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years.”

This sentence is the first to characterize Wing Biddlebaum’s paranoia about the past catching up with him and thus acts as foreshadowing for the “shadowy doubts” (7) about Adolph Myers that will lead to his dramatic exile. Wing Biddlebaum’s self-imposed exile from the community in Winesburg has a direct relationship with his fear of being “outed.” Despite the length of time between the events of the flashback and the setting of the story, Wing Biddlebaum cannot let go of the past that haunts him.