“You’re right, Kenneth,” Mrs. Harper remarked as she sat down at the table. “Your father and I got along here together in Central City without a bit of trouble for thirty-five years, and I reckon you can do it too.”
“But, mamma,” Bob protested, “I’ve been telling Ken things are not what they were when you and papa came along. Why—”
“Let’s forget the race problem for a while,” Kenneth interrupted. “I’m too hungry and tired to talk about it now.”
“That’s right,” was Mrs. Harper’s comment. “Draw your chairs up to the table. You’re not goin’ to have any trouble here in town, Ken, and we’re mighty glad you came back. Mrs. Amos was in this afternoon and she tells me they’re having some trouble out near Ashland between the coloured sharecroppers and their landlords, but that’ll blow overjust as it’s always done.”
“What’s the trouble out there?” asked Kenneth. He wasn’t much interested, for he could hear Mamie, in the kitchen beyond, singing some popular air to the accompaniment of chicken-frying.
“It’s a case where coloured farmers claim they can’t get fair settlements from their landlords for their crops at the end of the year,” explained his mother.
“Why don’t they hire a lawyer?” Kenneth asked, with little interest.
“That shows you’ve forgotten all about things in the South,” said Bob with mingled triumph and despair at his brother’s ignorance. “There isn’t a white lawyer in Georgia who’d take a case like this. In the first place, the courts would be against him because his client’s a Negro, and in the second place, he’d have to buck this combination of landlords, storekeepers, and bankers who are getting rich robbing Negroes. If a white lawyer took a case of a Negro share-cropper, he’d either sell out to the landlord or be scared to death before he ever got to court. And as for a Negro lawyer,” here Bob laughed sardonically, “he’d be run out of town by the Ku Klux Klan or lynched almost before he took the case!”
“Oh, I don’t know so much about that!” Kenneth replied. “There are landlords, without doubt, who rob their tenants, but after all there are only a few of them. And furthermore,” he declared as Mamie entered the room with a platter of fried chicken in one hand and a plate of hot biscuits in the other, “supper looks just a little bit more interesting to me right now than landlords, tenants, or problems of any kind.”
Mamie divested herself of her apron and sat down to the table. She was an attractive girl of twenty-two or twenty-three, more slender than Bob, and about Kenneth’s height. Her hair was darker than that of either of her brothers, was parted in the middle and brushed down hard on either side. Though not a pretty girl, she had an air about her as though she was happy because of the sheer joy of living. She had graduated from Atlanta University two years before, and with two other girls had been teaching the seven grades in the little ramshackle building that served as a coloured school in the town. That hard work had not as yet begun to tell on her. She seemed filled with buoyant good health and blessed with a lively good nature. Yet she too was inclined to spells of depression like Bob’s. She resembled him more nearly than Kenneth. As has every comely coloured girl in towns of the South like Central City, she had had many repulsive experiences when she had to fight with might and main to ward off unwelcome attentions—both of the men of her own race and of white men. Especially had this been true since the death of her father. Often her face overclouded as she thought of them. She, like Bob, felt always as though they were living on top of a volcano—and never knew when it might erupt. …