And now, Central City again. It was good to get back. Four—eight—sixteen years had he spent in preparation. Now he was all ready to get to work at his profession. For a time he’d have to do general practising. Had to make money. Then he’d specialize in surgery—major surgery. Soon’s he got enough money ahead, he’d build a sanitarium. Make of it as modern a hospital as he could afford. He’d draw on all of South Georgia for his patients. Nearest one now is Atlanta. All South Georgia—most of Florida—even from Alabama. Ten years from now he’d have a place known and patronized by all the coloured people in the South. Something like the Mayo Brothers up in Rochester, Minnesota!
“Pretty nifty, eh, Ken?”
Kenneth, aroused suddenly from his retrospection and day-dreams, jumped at the unexpected voice behind him. It was his younger brother, Bob. He laughed a little shamefacedly at his having been startled. Without waiting for a reply, Bob entered the room and sat on the edge of the table facing Kenneth.
“Yep! Things are shaping up rather nicely. Everything’s here now but the patients. And those’ll be coming along pretty soon, I believe,” replied Kenneth confidently. He went on talking enthusiastically of the castles in the air he had been building when Bob entered the room—of the hospital he was going to erect—how he planned attending the State Medical Convention every year to form contracts with other coloured doctors of Georgia—how he was intending to visit during the coming year all the coloured physicians within a radius of a hundred miles of Central City to enlist their support. He discussed the question of a name for the hospital. How would Harper’s Sanitarium sound? Or would the Central City Infirmary be better? Or the Hospital of South Georgia?
On and on Kenneth rambled, talking half to Bob, half in audible continuation of his reverie before Bob had entered. But Bob wasn’t listening to him. On his face was the usual half-moody, half-discontented expression which Kenneth knew so well. Bob was looking down the dusty expanse of the road which bore rather poorly the imposing title of State Street. The house was located at the corner of Lee and State Streets. It was set back about fifty feet from the streets, and the yard outside showed the work of one who loved flowers. There was an expanse of smooth lawn, dotted here and there with flowering beds of pansies, of nasturtiums. There were several abundantly laden rose-bushes and two of “cape jessamine” that filled the air with an intoxicating, almost cloying sweetness.
Though it was a balmy October afternoon, the air languorous and caressing, Bob shared none of the atmosphere’s lazy contentment. All this riot of colours and odours served in no manner to remove from his face the dissatisfied look that covered it. He listened to Kenneth’s rhapsodies of what he intended accomplishing with what was almost a grimace of distaste. He was taller than Kenneth, of slighter build, but of the same rich colouring of skin and with the same hair and features.
In spite of these physical resemblances between the two brothers, there was a more intangible difference which clearly distinguished the two. Kenneth was more phlegmatic, more of a philosophic turn of mind, more content with his lot, able to forget himself in his work, and when that was finished, in his books. Bob, on the other hand, was of a highly sensitized nature, more analytical of mind, more easily roused to passion and anger. This tendency had been developed since the death of his father just before he completed his freshman year at Atlanta. The death had necessitated his leaving school and returning to Central City to act as administrator of his father’s estate. His experiences in accomplishing this task had not been pleasant ones. He had been forced to deal with the tricksters that infested the town. He had come in contact with all the chicanery, the petty thievery, the padded accounts, that only petty minds can devise. The utter impotence he had felt in having no legal redress as a Negro had embittered him. Joe Harper, their father, had been exceedingly careful in keeping account of all bills owed and due him. Yet Bob had been forced to pay a number of bills of which he could find no record in his father’s neatly kept papers. These had aggregated somewhere between three and four thousand dollars. Various white merchants of the town claimed that Joe Harper, his father, owed them. Bob knew they were lying. Yet he could do nothing. No court in South Georgia would have listened to his side of the story or paid more than perfunctory attention to him. It was a case of a white man’s word against a Negro’s, and a verdict against the Negro was sure even before the case was opened.
Kenneth, on the other hand, had been a favourite of their quiet, almost taciturn father. Always filled with ambition for his children, Joe Harper had furnished Kenneth, as liberally as he could afford, the money necessary for him to get the medical education he wanted. He had not been a rich man but he had been comfortably fixed financially. Starting out as a carpenter doing odd jobs around Central City, he had gradually expanded his activities to the building of small houses and later to larger homes and business buildings. Most of the two-story buildings that lined Lee Street in the business section of Central City had been built by him. White and coloured alike knew that when Joe Harper took a contract, it would be done right. Aided by a frugal and economical wife, he had purchased real estate and, though the profits had been slow and small, had managed with his wife to accumulate during their thirty-five years of married life between twenty and twenty-five thousand dollars which he left at his death to his wife and three children.
Kenneth had been furnished with the best that his father could afford, while Bob, some ten years younger than his brother, had had to wait until Kenneth finished school before he could begin his course. Bob felt no jealousy of his favoured brother, yet the experiences that had been his in Central City while Kenneth was away had tended towards a bitterness which frequently found expression on his face. He was the natural rebel, revolt was a part of his creed. Kenneth was the natural pacifist—he never bothered trouble until trouble bothered him. Even then, if he could avoid it, he always did. It was not strange, therefore, that he should have come home believing implicitly that his father was right when he had said Kenneth could get along without trouble in Central City as long as he attended to his own business.
Kenneth talked on and on, unfolding the plans he had made for the extending of the influence of his hospital throughout the South. Bob, occupied with his own thoughts, heard but little of it. Suddenly he interrupted Kenneth with a sharply put question.