White Jacket

White Jacket is a garment before it is a name: duck canvas, no money for anything better, the lining stuffed with rags, the outside painted again and again in the hope it will turn the rain, which it never does. It swells instead, and drinks the sea, and turns its owner into the one white shape on a ship where every other man wears dark blue: marked, mistrusted, conspicuous exactly when he wants to vanish.