He sputtered, he became unintelligible. He was going to make the other man eat his words. He denied that any respectable Southerner had ever begotten a mulatto child. Poor whites, perhaps. White trash! A white gentleman would never touch a colored woman.
“Well,” said the advertising man, with the least bit of a twinkle, “I hadn’t the least idea that I was insulting you. But what is your idea of the phenomenon?”
The youth glowered. The choleric old gentleman thrust in his oar.
“Why! Why! I observed that it was quite common for young gentlemen to ‘touch’ black women. In fact, I got the idea that it was one of your Southern traditions. Why, look here, young man, I’ve talked to twenty overseers if I’ve talked to one, and they all told me the same thing. They certainly extended true Southern hospitality to me.” He went into details. “Why, damn it, they admitted doing it themselves, not with any feeling of making a confession, either. One overseer said he always went to another plantation so as not to spoil the morale of his help!
“Now, I don’t give a whoop what you do. Black, brown, red. It’s none of my business. But what I do hate is this damn hypocrisy, all this bunk about your splendid manhood and high morality. Doggone it, I’ll bet you can’t show me a single white man south of the Mason-Dixon line—”
The young man flung his cigarette on the floor and walked out of the smoking car, muttering that if the Northerner weren’t old enough to be his grandfather he’d mop the car up with him.
Hamilton rose. “Here’s one, right here!” he said, looking the choleric gentleman in the eye.
“An exception, all right. But without getting mad about it and without putting on a high and mighty pose, tell me truthfully, aren’t you an exception? Take your own set!”
Hamilton wavered. The standards in Corinth had not been very high. Perhaps the set he knew was not a fair group. In general, it had not been considered particularly immoral. It had been the attitude of Greek or Roman gentlemen to their slaves.
“Well,” he said, “perhaps the white man is to blame. To be frank, I guess we are. Yes, it is a serious situation, and that’s exactly what we must combat.” He wished that the Jewish drummer were out of the car. It was a fine opening to talk Tribe. He could tell what the Tribe was going to do to raise moral standards and prevent the mingling of white blood with black by rigid enforcement of the code. Why were Jews excluded from membership, anyway?