"My friends," he said, "I cannot bear to have you put yourselves in a false position. When you came, perhaps you didn't know. I mean—did you think, perhaps, that we were of your race?"
It was Mis' Sykes who answered him, grand and positive, and as if she was already thinking up her answer when she was born.
"Certainly not," she says. "We were informed—all of us." Then I saw her get herself together for something tremenjus, that should leave no doubt in anybody's mind. "What of that?" says she.
He stood still for a minute. He had deep-set eyes and a tired face that didn't do anything to itself when he talked. But his voice—that did. And when he began to speak again, it seemed to me that the voice of his whole race was coming through him.
"My friends," he said, "how can we talk of other things when our minds are filled with just what this means to us?"
We all kept still. None of us would have known how to say it, even if we had known what to say.
He said: "I'm not speaking of the difficulties—they don't so much matter. Nothing matters—except that even when we have made the struggle, then we're despised no less. We don't often talk to you about it—it's the surprise of this—you must forgive me. But I want you to know that from the time I began my school life, there have been many who despised, and a few who helped, but never until to-night have there been any of your people with the look and word of neighbor—never once in our lives until to-night."
In the silence that fell when he'd finished, I sat there knowing that even now it wasn't like he thought it was—and I wished that it had been so.
He put his hand on his boy's shoulder.
"It's for his sake," he said, "that I thank you most."