Diana, alone of the family, found life on the mountain bleakly unhappy. She possessed a frightened, dusky beauty. Adolescence had changed her from a gawky immaturity to a lush roundness, large-lipped and full-figured, and yet with the well moulded face and the soft brown texture of skin that are occasionally found in a mixture of blood. From some Aryan ancestor she had inherited features the reverse of negroid; and she revealed nothing of the unpleasant pertness often developed in the twilight realm where black and white intermingle.
The liberating touch of education had been just potent enough to dissatisfy her with the old, and too weak to furnish a self-sufficient substitute. The world of books she had begun to explore at Tuskegee; there was no one in the family group who could go with her in the talk or the dreamings that this led to. The haphazard home life, the thick enunciation, worse at meal times, these were the things she had begun to get away from; she could not reconcile herself to the old slough of "nigger" life.
The church gave her some outlet. She joined the various Ladies' Aids, took over an advanced Sunday School class, wheedled different ones of her night-restless brothers to escort her to the Zion sociables, the chitterling suppers, the frequent revivals. But here an obstacle lay in the women of the congregation. No newfangled notions for them, thank you. They considered her careful accent, her ideas borrowed from more progressive members of her race, an affront to Lilydale's time-hallowed way of doing things; she was shouldered into the background. The few educated negro men, Wyatt the druggist, Tom Strickland, who owned the five-story building in the city, the young lawyer who lived in Lilydale, were married, or were disagreeable. They found in her only a desire for expanding culture, not its achievement; they did not seek her out.
The isolation frequently overcame her. Nauseated by the glut of the slipshod home living, she would pull open one of her text books ... often to sit and cry, unable to read a line.
"You're gettin' peaked, Diany," Stella worried. "Huc-come you ain't so pert as when you come back?... You got a good job."
"I'm all right, mother."
One night she overheard the older boys fussing at Babe. "You too little, kid. Ef a cop started chasin' you, yo' short legs wouldn't do no good."
"Ah kin run faster 'n you, Ed. An' 'Banjo' said Ah could come along," he whined. "Maw, tell Ed 'n' Will 'n' Jim not to leave me behin'."
"Where are you boys going?" asked Diana.
Ed fidgeted sourly. "Aw, nowhar."