At noon he saw for the first time in two years a little patch covered with scrubby green plants, just bursting into fluffy white blossoms. In one corner of the field a shack, weather-beaten, gray, unpainted, with a sagging door and broken windows. A Negro mammy in the doorway, a half-dozen pickaninnies playing at her feet, all in rags. Out in the field a white-haired Negro, bent under the load of a crate piled high with cotton, tottering toward the shack. The heads and backs of other Negroes bending over their cotton.
It was only a patch. It was too far north for the heavier yields of cotton. Yet, it was cotton!
It kept growing warmer. Hamilton’s coat became too heavy. He wished that he had taken his cotton uniform with him. He noticed how the vegetation kept growing thicker as they proceeded southward. Now the forests through which they passed were so thick that one could not see into them. Vines and creepers, heavy moss, thick shrubs, high grass, all knit the forest into a single being. The grass grew up to the tracks and even between them.
The towns too were different—smaller, slower, dingier. It was a different world, a more picturesque world, and a more primitive one. He noticed, with a new insight into such things, how much of the towns was wooden—stores, factories, public buildings, and, of course, homes. Even the sidewalks. Also there were more wagons drawn by horse or mule. The streets looked crooked and unpaved. The structures unpainted. Men stood around or moved slowly—at the stations, on the streets. And everywhere there were Negroes. Negroes moving trucks at the depots. Negroes lazily driving their teams along the roads. Negroes on the streets. Negroes on the farms and plantations. Negroes even behind the counters of stores. He had never before realized how black the South was, how many less white men than in the North. Previously most of his life away from home had been spent at school, a world where black men seldom intruded. But now they seemed like a tide of color, like a forest pressing down upon the little towns and villages, slowly choking them with their prolific vegetation.
He thought of Williams and of the Paris salons that had been thrown open to him and to other colored soldiers who had fought under the same flag as the white men. He watched the ragged black patiently toiling under the Southern sun. He wondered whether they would be content to remain thus. An idea struck him. He examined the individual figures more closely. Yes! He had noticed something familiar about the shirts that some of the laborers wore. They were the olive drab of the army. And there was a husky in olive drab breeches and army shoes.
It was five o’clock. Hamilton looked through his time table again. He had wired his father to meet him at a suburb one station north of Corinth. It was about the same distance from home as the main station, but he wished to avoid anything approaching a public reception. He had entered the service as a student officer. He was coming back a captain. Some of the home guards might not understand how automatic promotion was. They might greet him with a band or something equally nonsensical. He wished to come home quietly. He wished to rest. He wished—he did not know—yes, Margaret. He wished to see her again. He wished to have the wedding as soon as possible and settle down to his new life.
The train was screeching to a halt and through the window he saw them waiting for him—his father, a little paler than when he had seen him in New York, it seemed; his mother, clutching his arm, and trying not to cry—it was the same way she looked when she had bade him good-bye, only she, too, seemed a little older, and then Margaret, flushed and radiant, in a bright yellow silk sweater.
The next minute he was down the steps and into his mother’s arms. Yes, she was older, but not very much, and still beautiful—with her white hair and girlish complexion, her gentle blue eyes, her refined features. Hamilton remembered the time that a schoolmate had mistaken his mother and his only sister, Virginia Ruth, for sisters. Virginia Ruth was married to a New Orleans banker and had children of her own now. But no one would any longer mistake the two for sisters. One cheated time for a while, for a few years; but, in the end, time won.
Hamilton could think of nothing to say, but “Mother, how are you?”
Of the hundred questions that crowded in her brain, all that she could ask was: “Robert, isn’t your uniform too warm?” The gulf between them was suddenly bridged and they laughed.