Many a night he lay awake until daybreak, measuring the slow minutes with the ceaseless iteration of that useless prayer: Only to be white! O God, for one little year of being white!
Fruitless hours of prayers and curses!
Carter went North. He went to New York. But the North, which affects to promise so much to the negro, in a large, loose, general way, does not perform in the same degree. There was only one thing which Carter would have thanked any one for performing; it was the one thing that could never be performed—he wanted to be made white. Sometimes, indeed, from the depths of his despair, he cried out that he wanted to be altogether black; but in his soul he did not really want that.
Nevertheless, at several different periods he yielded to temptation and “went over to the whites.” In the South he could not have done this without discovery, in spite of the color of his skin. But in the Northern cities, with their enormous numbers of aliens, all more or less strange to the American eye, Carter found no great difficulty in passing as white. He “looked a little foreign” to the casual glance; that was all.
But if there was no great difficulty in it, there was no great satisfaction in it, either. In fact, it only made him the more bitter. Others might think him a white man, but he knew that he was a nigger.
The incident which sent him back South, resolved to be a nigger, and to live and die among the niggers, might not have affected another in his condition just as it did Carter. But to him it showed conclusively that his destiny was not a matter of environment so much as a question of himself.
He fell in love. The girl was a waitress in a cheap restaurant near the barber shop where Carter worked. She was herself a product of the East Side, struggling upward from the slums; partly Italian, with some Oriental strain in her that had given the least perceptible obliqueness to her eyes—one of those rare hybrid products which give the thinker pause and make him wonder what the word “American” will signify a century from now; a creature with very red lips and very black eyebrows; she seemed to know more than she really did; she had a kind of naïve charm, a sort of allurement, without actual beauty; and her name had been Anglicized into Mary.
And she loved Carter. This being, doomed from the cradle to despair, had his moment of romance. But even in his intoxication there was no hope; his elation was embittered and perplexed. He was tempted not to tell the girl that he was a nigger. But if he married her, and did not tell her, perhaps the first child would tell her. It might look more of a nigger than he did.
But if he told her, would she marry a nigger? He decided he would tell her. Perhaps his conscience had less to do with this decision than the fatalism of his temperament.
So he made his revelation one Sunday evening, as they walked along the boardwalk from Coney Island to Brighton. To him, it was a tremendous moment. For days he had been revolving in his mind the phrases he would use; he had been rehearsing his plea; in his imagination he saw something spectacular, something histrionic, in his confession.