She burst into a torrent of weeping, her head on his shoulders. He took the lamp from her hand perplexedly and placed it on the table.
“Heard what, mamma? What’s the matter? What’s happened? Why are you crying like this? What’s wrong?”
The questions poured out of him like a flood. For some time his mother could not speak. Her sobs racked her body. Though she tried to control herself, every effort to do so but caused her to weep the more. Kenneth, puzzled, waited until she could gain control of herself. He thought it funny she carried on this way—she’d never acted like this before. She had always been so well poised. But his alarm and feeling of impending disaster increased to definite proportions when the flood of tears seemed endless.
“Where’s Bob?” he asked, thinking that he could find out from his brother what had gone wrong. At this a fresh burst of weeping greeted him. He led her into his reception room and sat her down on the lounge and himself beside her. At last, between body-tearing sobs, she told him.
“Great God!” he shouted. “No! No! Mamma, it can’t be true! It can’t be true!” But even as he demanded that she tell him it was not true, he knew it was. …
Mrs. Harper’s lamentations were even as those of that other Rachel who wept for her children because they were not. Kenneth sat stunned. It was too terrible—too devastating—too cataclysmic a tragedy to comprehend! Mamie—his own dear little sister—torn, ravished, her life ruined! Bob—with all his fire and ambition, his deep sensitiveness to all that was fine and beautiful, as well as his violent hatred of the mean, the petty, the vicious, the unjust, the sordid-Bob-his brother—dead at the hands of a mob! Thank God, he had died before they laid hands on him!
He laughed—an agonized, terrible mockery that made his mother look at him sharply. He had been a damned fool! He thought bitterly of his thoughts on the train a few hours before. Good God, how petty, how trivial they seemed now! Surely that couldn’t have been just hours ago? It must have been centuries—ages—æons since. He heard the crickets chirping outside the window. From down the street there floated a loud laugh. His wilted collar annoyed him. Cinders from the train scratched his back. He wondered how in such a circumstance he could be conscious of such mundane things.
He laughed again. His mother had ceased her loud wails of grief and sat rocking to and fro, her arms folded tightly across her breast as though she held there the babe who had grown up and met so terrible a fate. Low, convulsive sobs of anguish seemed to come from her innermost soul. … She anxiously touched Kenneth on the shoulder as he laughed. It had a wild, a demoniacal, an eerie ring to it that terrified her. …
What was the use of trying to avoid trouble in the South, he thought? Hell! Hadn’t he tried? Hadn’t he given up everything that might antagonize the whites? Hadn’t he tried in every way he could to secure and retain their friendship? By God, he’d show them now! The white-livered curs! The damned filthy beasts! Damn trying to be a good Negro! He’d fight them to the death! He’d pay them back in kind for what they had brought on him and his!
He sprang to his feet. A fierce, unrelenting, ungovernable hatred blazed in his eyes. He had passed through the most bitter five minutes of his life. Denuded of all the superficial trappings of civilization, he stood there the primal man—the wild beast, cornered, wounded, determined to fight—fight—fight! The fire that lay concealed in the flint until struck, now leaped up in a devastating flame at the blows it had received! All the art of the casuist with which he had carefully built his faith and a code of conduct was cast aside and forgotten! He would demand and take the last ounce of flesh—he would exact the last drop of blood from his enemies with all the cruelty he could invent!