Kenneth sat quiet. While she had been pouring forth her tirade, he had thought of several logical arguments he could have advanced. But she had given him no chance to utter them. Now they seemed weak and useless. He was resentful—what did women know about the practical problems and difficulties of life, anyway? His anger was not abated by the realization that Jane felt that he had been trying to avoid his responsibility to himself and to his people—that he had been a coward. And yet she was right in a general way in what she had said. Masking as well as he could the chagrin he felt at her words, he told her of the trouble Tucker and Tracy and Swann and the other share-croppers were having, and gave her further details of the meeting at Reverend Wilson’s.
She sensed the wound to his pride that she had inflicted. She did not regret doing what she had done—on the long ride home she had determined that she would tell him those very things as soon as she could find opportunity—but, with a woman’s natural tenderness, she regretted the necessity of hurting him. She put her hand over his for an instant, touched at his dejected manner.
“I’m sorry, Ken, if I hurt you, but I did it because you are too fine a man, and you’ve got too good an education, to try to dodge an issue as plain as yours. Why, Kenneth, you’ve had it mighty soft—just think of the thousands of coloured boys all over the South who are too poor to get even a high-school training. You’ve never had to get down and dig for what you’ve got—perhaps it would have been better if you had. It’s men with your brains and education that have got to take the leadership. You’ve got to make good! That’s just the reason they try to make it hard for men like you—they know that if you ever get going, their treating the Negro as they have has got to stop! They’re darned scared of educated Negroes with brains—that’s why they make it hard for you!”
Kenneth threw out his hands, palms upward, and shrugged his shoulders.
“I suppose I agree with you in theory, Jane, but what are the practical ways of doing the things you say I ought to do? How, for example, can I help Tracy and Tucker and all the rest of the farmers who’re being robbed of all they earn every year?”
“Don’t get angry now just because I touched your masculine vanity. I know about the share-cropping system in a general way. Tell me the facts that were brought out at the meeting.”
Kenneth told her in detail the things Hiram Tucker and the others had said. She sat in thought for a minute, her chin cupped in the palm of her hand, her elbow resting on the arm of the chair, as she rocked back and forth. Kenneth sat watching her in what was almost sardonic amusement. He had been wrestling with this same problem ever since Thursday night and was no nearer a solution than he had been then. It would be amusing in a few minutes, after all her high-flown thoughts and elaborate generalities about bucking the race question, when she would be forced to admit that when it came to solving one of the practical problems of the whole question her generalizing would be of no avail. He was aroused by a question thrown at him suddenly by Jane.
“Do these folks have to buy their supplies from the landlord?”
“Not that I know of,” he replied. “They buy from the landlord, or the merchant designated by the landlord, because they haven’t the money or the credit to trade anywhere else.”
There followed another pause while the rocking began again.