“That’s fine!” she exclaimed when he had ended. “Even if Judge Stevenson is doubtful of how much we can accomplish, we can do something. Now all that remains is for you to present your plan⸺”
“Not mine, yours,” he corrected
“No, it will have to be yours,” she answered. “You know how folks are in the South—they think all that women can do is cook and keep house and bear children. If you want the thing to go, it’ll be best to make them think it’s your scheme.”
Kenneth demurred, but in vain. She would have it no other way. She felt no jealousy. She knew of the peculiar Southern prejudice which relegated women to a position of eternal inferiority. Though she felt the injustice of such arbitrary assumptions, she did not resent it. Like all women, coloured women, she realized that most of the spirit of revolt against the wrongs inflicted on her race had been born in the breasts of coloured women. She knew, and in that knowledge was content, that most of the work of the churches and societies and other organizations which had done so much towards welding the Negro into a racial unit had been done by women. It was amusing to see men, vain creatures that they are, preen themselves on what they had done. It was not so amusing when they, in their pride, sought to belittle what the women had done and take all the credit to themselves. Oh, well, what did it matter? The end was the all-important thing—not the means. Jane appreciated Kenneth’s thoughtfulness and felt no tinge of jealousy if her idea—their idea—should be a success in forming societies to help poor, helpless Negroes out of the morass in which they were bogged. Of such material has the coloured woman been made by adversity.
She watched Kenneth as he told her the developments of which he had thought, the details he had worked out. Each day, it seemed to her, Kenneth became more keenly alive each day saw a brighter sparkle in his eyes, a springiness in his step that had not been there before. There are many men who could willingly have followed—and do follow—without revolt or much inward conflict a course of self-abnegation such as he had mapped out for himself. Not so, however, with Kenneth. He was almost puritanical in his devotion to the fixed moral code he had worked out for his own guidance. It was not a superimposed one, but an integral part of his very being. Nothing could have induced him to surrender to deliberate malice or guile or what he considered dishonesty or cowardice. His was a simple nature, free from the barnacles of pettiness which encumber the average man. He was not essentially religious in the accepted meaning of the word. He believed, though he had not thought much on the subject of religion, so immersed had he been in his beloved profession, in some sort of a God. Of what form or shape this being was, he did not know. He had more or less accepted the beliefs his environment had forced upon him. He doubted the malignity of the God described by most of the ministers he had heard. As a matter of fact, he was rather repelled and nauseated by the religion of the modern Church. Narrow, intolerant of contrary opinion, prying into the lives and affairs of its communicants with which it had no concern, its energies concentrated on raising money and not on saving souls, of little real help to intelligent people to enable them to live more useful lives here on earth, and centering instead on a mysterious and problematical life after death, he felt the Church of Jesus Christ had so little of the spirit of the Christ that he had little patience with it. He went to services more as a perfunctory duty than through any deep-rooted belief that he could get any real help from them in meeting the problems of life he faced. He bore the Church no grudge or ill will—it simply was not a factor in the life of to-day as he saw it.
Nevertheless he had a deep religious or, better, an ethical sense. When he was about to return to Central City, that ethical code had been adapted to conditions he expected to find there. It was galling to him to accept a position of subserviency to things he knew were unjust and wrong, tacitly to admit his inferiority to men to whom he knew he was superior in morals and training and in all the decencies of life, solely because of the mere accident that they had been born with skins which were white and he with one which was not white. When doubts had assailed him, he had quieted or salved his conscience by the constant reminder that he was following such a course for greater eventual good. On his return, when he had found a course such as he had charted for himself was becoming increasingly difficult, he had refused to face the facts his mind told him were true and had plunged more deeply into his work, seeking in it an opiate. Only when Jane had confronted him with the utter futility of his course and had, in effect, accused him of being a moral quitter in considering only himself and blinding himself to the far greater problems of those so closely bound to him by race, did his eyes begin to be opened. Wearied of illusory hopes of peace through compromise, he had grasped the tangible reality of work towards a definite end, through means which he had created and which he would guide and develop as far as he could. With the buoyant hopes and ambitions of the young, especially of the very young, he felt that he had already created that which he was hoping to create.
Like a traveller who has lost his way in a dense forest, an indefinable restlessness had pervaded his being and made him sorely discontented. Now that he had found what seemed the path which would lead him into the clear, open air, the clouds of doubt and perplexity were cleared away just as the bright sun, as it bursts forth after a shower in spring, drives away the moisture in the air.
They sat there in the warm sunlight of early summer, dreaming and planning all the great things they were going to accomplish. It had rained earlier in the morning and from the ground rose a misty vapour. The odour of warm wet earth mingled with the aroma of the flowers. Hens scratched industriously for food to feed the cluster of tiny chicks around them. A cat sneaking along the fence slyly crept near. With a great fluttering of wings and raucous cackling, the hens drove him away. From afar off came the voices of two women, resting for a minute from their morning toil, gossiping with much loud laughter. It was a peaceful, restful scene. To Kenneth as he sat there, problems seemed remote and out of place in that place where all was so calm.
He looked at the girl by his side. It seemed Jane had never looked more charming clad in her bungalow apron, dust-cloth in hand. He was glad she had made no silly, conventional excuses because of her dress. The usual girl would have tried to rush indoors and change her dress. Most women, he reflected, looked like angels at night, but in the harsh glare of morning looked terrible. Jane seemed to him to be even prettier without powder or the soft light of evening. He felt a thrill of pleasure as he saw her dusting furniture in their home.
They rose as Kenneth started to leave. Jane was telling him of some trivial incident, but Kenneth heard nothing of what she said. He turned towards her suddenly.