The days were so full that Hazel had not much time to think of the Southland to which she was going; but at odd minutes she questioned what it might be like. She had traveled no further from Boston than neighboring seashore resorts, and until her father’s death she had seen little of any but refined people, white or colored.
“Charity,” she said, Friday night, “I’ve been saying good-bye to the McGinnis’s baby. He is so dear and dimpled and rosy. Are there many white babies South?”
“Sure,” answered Charity. “But don’t you have nothing to do with white folks. There’s two kinds of white folks down there: those that hates you and those that calls you ‘a cute little nigger.’ My mother says that ain’t so, for she knows the first families of Virginia, but I ain’t acquainted with ’em.”
“My father used to tell about white people near his home who were nice,” said Hazel reflectively.
“Poor white trash, I guess. There ain’t any first families in Alabama.”
That night, before they went to bed, Hazel questioned her mother about the white folks.
“Won’t they like me?” she said. “Will they call out ‘Nigger,’ the way the boys on Shawmut Avenue do to Charity?”
“I don’t know, dear, I don’t know. Granny can help you about that, not I. But I would not bother with them, Hazel. They go their way and you go yours. On the steamer, in the train, at the church and at school—everywhere you will be separated. Their world will not be your world. Leave them alone.”
“I will remember,” Hazel said softly.
The kind world that she had known seemed slipping away from her. She held her mother’s hand tight.