Young Pinkney threw out a life preserver.
“There’s something in what Robert has said. I find that you can get more out of a Negro if you treat him considerately. For instance, in one of our lumber mills we found that the Negroes work best when they are allowed to sing. For a time we made them work quietly, but we found by a series of tests that they actually did more work when permitted to sing, so we reinstituted the custom and our output rose nearly 10 per cent.”
“Nobody in the South really mistreats the coon,” put in Jarvis, shaking his head. “In the North, maybe, where they don’t understand his nature. But not in the South.”
Mrs. Hamilton looked appealingly at him. Margaret still stared at the floor, but Hamilton could no more stop himself than he could that night in Paris.
“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean at all. Only a brute treats human beings cruelly. I don’t mean to say you—we—that most of us do that. But I do mean to say that perhaps we haven’t given him a fair chance. We don’t let him vote, and we complain that he’s not a loyal citizen. We don’t provide equal educational facilities for him with the white child, and we complain that he’s ignorant. We don’t give him a fair trial in our courts and we accuse him of being a criminal. We crowd him off our sidewalks, we make him sit in Jim Crow cars, we treat him like a dog, and we complain that he’s less than the highest type of human being—and in Paris, the cream of European society shaking hands with a colored man and listening to him sing.”
There was a sound of clearing throats. Margaret turned her eyes from one side of the circle to the other, but there was no escape. The Hamiltons looked self-consciously at each other.
“Well, those Parisians,” began Mr. Forsythe in a small voice, as if his impending relationship with Robert made it incumbent upon him to say something that would relieve the tension; but young Pinkney, with a swift glance toward Margaret, took up the cudgels for white supremacy and the South.
“The French,” he began in his confidential manner, as though the French were the Smiths who lived in the next block, “the French, as you know, Robert, hardly ever see a Negro. He’s a novelty to them. The Frenchman invites him to his receptions just as—as a New York society woman might have an ape at a dinner. He sees only the Negro in a million with a gift for poetry or writing—and he’s never full-blooded. He has not seen the masses.” His voice suddenly became intense. “He hasn’t lived where there are three blacks for every white and breeding faster every year; where his whole white civilization is trembling on a foundation of lazy, ignorant, dirty, diseased, unruly niggers.
“You say, give them the vote. Give it to them, and they’ll fill every office in the state in time and make and enforce the laws that govern white men. For it’s only a matter of time when they’ll be outnumbering us in every locality throughout the South, only a matter of more time when they’ll be controlling politics throughout the country.
“Let them sit on the benches of our courts, and they’ll dispossess us of our property and our rights. Give them higher education, and they’ll become dissatisfied with their lot and revolt. Take away your Jim Crow cars, let them into the hotels and restaurants, and they’ll enter the club and the home. Bring them into the home, give them social equality, wipe cut the anti-marriage laws, and they’ll drag the white race down to their stinking level. Cruel are we?—unjust? Remember there’s only one crime for which a nigger is ever lynched in the South.