“When are you to meet again at Reverend Wilson’s?” she asked.
He told her.
“Well, I tell you what we’ll do. You go home and think over all the ways we can put this idea into practice. I’ll do the same thing. And then we’ll talk it over again to-morrow night. On Wednesday you go down to see Judge Stevenson and see if he will draw up the papers so it’ll be legal and binding and everything else. Then on Thursday night you can present this as your own idea, and I’ll bet you anything you say, they’ll take it up and you’ll be the one chosen to lead the whole movement.”
After some discussion of details, Kenneth left. The more he thought of Jane’s idea, the more it appealed to him. At any rate, she had suggested more in half an hour than he had been able to think of in four days. Hadn’t the co-operative societies been the backbone of the movement to get rid of the Czar in Russia? If the Russian peasants, who certainly weren’t as educated as the Negro in America, had made a success of the idea, the Negro in the South ought to do it. By Jove, they could do it! Idea after idea sprang to his mind, after the seed had been sown by Jane, until he had visions of a vast cooperative society not only buying but selling the millions of dollars’ worth of products raised by the nine million Negroes of the South. And that wasn’t all! These societies would be formed with each member paying monthly dues, like the fraternal organizations. When enough money was in the treasury, they would employ the very best lawyers money could get to take one of those cases where a Negro had not been able to get a fair settlement with his landlord, and make a test case of it. What if they did lose in the local court? They’d take it to the State Supreme Court! What if they did lose even there? They’d take it clear up to the United States Supreme Court! They were sure to win there. Kenneth walked home with his head whirling with the project’s possibilities. He saw a new day coming when a man in the South would no longer be exploited and robbed just because he was black. And when that came, lynching and everything else like it would go too. He felt already like Matthew and Andrew and Peter and John and the other disciples when they started out to bring the good news to the whole world. For wasn’t he a latter-day disciple bringing a new solution and a new hope to his people?
It was not until Kenneth had gone to bed that he realized that though he had been with Jane all the evening, he had had not one minute when he could have spoken of love to her. Musing thus, he fell asleep.
CHAPTER XI
Early the next morning Kenneth rose and rummaged through his books until he found his old and battered text-books on economics.
Into these he dipped during the intervals between patients, making notes of ideas which seemed useful in the organization of the co-operative society. The more he read, the more feasible the plan seemed. Properly guided and carefully managed, there was no reason, so far as he could see, why the society should not be a success. Eighty per cent of the farmers of the South, white and coloured, he estimated, suffered directly or indirectly from the present economic system. Though his interest was in the Negro tillers of the soil, success in their case would inevitably react favourably on the white just as oppression and exploitation of the Negro had done more harm to white people in the South than to Negroes. Kenneth felt the warm glow of the crusader in a righteous cause. Already he saw a new day in the South with white and coloured people free from oppression and hatred and prejudice—prosperous and contented because of that prosperity. He could see a lifting of the clouds of ignorance which hung over all the South, an awakening of the best in all the people of the South. Thus has youth dreamed since the beginning of time. Thus will youth ever dream. And in those dreams rests the hope of the world, for without them this world with all its defects would sink into the black abyss of despair, never to rise again.
His work finished for the day, he went as soon as he decently could to talk with Jane. She, too, had been at work. Eagerly they planned between them the infinite details of so ambitious a scheme. Confidently they discounted possible difficulties they might expect to encounter—the opposition of the whites who were profiting from the present system, the petty jealousies and suspicions of those who would gain most from the success of their scheme. They realized that the Negro had been robbed so much, both by his own people and by the whites, that he was chary of new plans and projects. They knew he was contentious and quarrelsome. These things seemed trivial, however, for with the natural expansiveness of the young they felt that difficulties like these were but trifles to be airily brushed aside.
Jane was not too much engrossed in their plans to notice the change in Kenneth’s manner. She had watched him closely during the times she had seen him since his return. He had been almost morose, his mind divided between his work and the effort to keep to a “middle-of-the-road” course in his relations with the whites. The inevitable conflict within himself, the lack of decisiveness in his daily life that he consciously developed and which was so diametrically opposite to that he used in his profession, had begun to create a complex personality that was far from pleasing. In a freer atmosphere Kenneth would have been a direct, straightforward character, swift to decision and quick of action. One cannot, however, compromise principle constantly and consciously without bearing the marks of such conflicts.