“But wasn’t the real estate man right after all?” Hamilton asked timidly after the laughter had subsided. “Wasn’t it good advice?”
“Good advice? Why, if it weren’t for Abrams and his kind Telfair Avenue would still be an exclusive residence district. Yes, sir. Everybody else sold and moved out, but I stuck to my property until they built up all around it. When they tried to get my place I put up a stiff price. I didn’t want ’em to come there in the first place with their apartment houses and, if they wanted it bad enough I thought they could pay for it. But the shrewd rascals wouldn’t buy. They went ahead with their plans. Well, sir, when I moved I offered the land at their price, but they wouldn’t take it. No, sir, wouldn’t take it. We had some words, and I told Abrams what I thought of him and the Jerusalem he was bringing to Corinth.”
The older Pinkney went into a detailed and often vituperative account of his real estate dealings, the upshot of which was that the “damned Jew” wouldn’t buy, the Pinkney property was sold piecemeal to other dealers for a song, sold in turn to some other “damned Jew” and a large apartment building erected.
Someone else capped the story with an account of how a Jewish merchant was enlarging his department store, the few original merchants whose fathers or grandfathers had founded their businesses having been slowly forced out of business by competition.
“You’ve been away so long, young sir,” said Mr. Pinkney, “that you don’t realise what’s been happening here. But we’ve got something to remedy that. Yes, sir, remedy it. It’s the good old remedy of tar applied externally with a lot of feathers. It cured the carpetbaggers after the War and it’ll cure the niggers and foreigners now. Maybe Howard has told you something about it. My son has been up against un-Americanism here while you were fighting the enemy over in France. And he’s one of the leaders in reviving the Trick Track Tribe.”
Mr. Forsythe, Margaret’s father, a gray, small man of uncertain gestures and opinions, darted him a swift look. He had greeted Hamilton previously with a subdued warmth, which had puzzled his prospective son-in-law.
“Is it?” he was going to say ‘safe,’ thought better of it, “that is, does he know?”
“Oh, yes, he’ll be one of us. We’re all Trick Tracks here, aren’t we? Jarvis has given Robert an application card. Ordinarily we wouldn’t use the name, but Robert’s all right. Yes, sir. We all know where he stands.”
Reassured, Mr. Forsythe spoke about Mill Town, a suburb which had sprung up during the war for the housing of workers in Corinth factories.
“You don’t appreciate this, young man,” he began. “When our supply of labor ran low meeting war orders, we tried an experiment, brought a few foreign laborers from Baltimore through an agency. Now we’re sorry we did it. We paid them high wages and they settled down with their families. There’s quite a colony of them now. They’re a vicious lot. They wouldn’t stand for a cut of wages after the armistice, because, they said, prices hadn’t come down yet. And they actually had the audacity to insist on our continuing to recognise the union.”