Part 3 is from the perspective of Booker and is told in third person. The section opens with Booker’s assault on a man he has caught masturbating at a children’s playground on the grounds of the college Booker attends. Booker goes to a lecture. Booker is a graduate student in economics, having abandoned other fields because they failed to examine the true roots of oppression, racism, and white supremacy—money and greed. Booker has planned to write about his grand theory in a book with the title The Cross and the Vault.

Booker’s mind wanders during the lecture. He thinks about his childhood and his bookish family. The only media they had was a radio, records, and the newspaper, so Booker feels out of step with his media-obsessed peers. Every Saturday, after a week of thin meals, Mrs. Stabern would cook up a feast and all the children would line up to tell their father what they had learned that week and share their problems for the family to solve. The only gap in this ritual was the months when the eldest Stabern sibling, Adam, was missing. Adam’s body, stowed in a culvert, turned up that spring, and Booker had gone with his father to identify the remains.