THE FIRE IN
THE FLINT

WALTER F. WHITE

NEW YORK

ALFRED • A • KNOPF

MCMXXIV

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. • PUBLISHED, SEPTEMBER, 1924 • SET UP, ELECTROTYPED, PRINTED AND BOUND BY THE VAILBALLOU PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON N. Y. • PAPER FURNISHED BY W. F. ETHERINGTON & CO., NEW YORK. •

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY WIFE

“The fire in the flint never shows until it is struck.”

—Old English Proverb.

THE FIRE IN
THE FLINT

CHAPTER I

Kenneth Harper gazed slowly around his office. A smile of satisfaction wreathed his face, reflecting his inward contentment. He felt like a runner who sees ahead of him the coveted goal towards which he has been straining through many gruelling miles. Kenneth was tired but he gave no thought to his weariness. Two weeks of hard work, countless annoyances, seemingly infinite delays—all were now forgotten in the warm glow which pervaded his being. He, Kenneth B. Harper, M.D., was now ready to receive the stream of patients he felt sure was coming.

He walked around the room and fingered with almost loving tenderness the newly installed apparatus. He adjusted and readjusted the examining-table of shining nickel and white enamel which had arrived that morning from New York. He arranged again the black leather pads and cushions. With his handkerchief he wiped imaginary spots of dust from the plate glass door and shelves of the instrument case, though his sister Mamie had polished them but half an hour before until they shone with crystal clearness. Instrument after instrument he fondled with the air of a connoisseur examining a rare bit of porcelain. He fingered critically their various parts to see if all were in perfect condition. He tore a stamp from an old letter and placed it under the lens of the expensive microscope adjusting and readjusting until every feature of the stamp stood out clearly even to the most infinite detail. He raised and lowered half a dozen times or more the lid of the nickelled sterilizer. He set at various angles the white screen which surrounded the examining-table, viewed it each time from different corners of the room, and rearranged it until it was set just right. He ran his hand over the card index files in his small desk. He looked at the clean white cards with the tabs on them—the cards which, though innocent now of writing, he hoped and expected would soon be filled with the names of innumerable sick people he was treating.

His eye caught what he thought was a pucker in the grey-and-blue-chequered linoleum which covered the floor. He went over and moved the sectional bookcase containing his volumes on obstetrics, on gynæcology, on materia medica, on the diseases he knew he would treat as a general practitioner of medicine in so small a place as Central City. No, that wasn’t a pucker—it was only the light from the window striking it at that angle.

“Dr. Kenneth B. Harper, Physician and Surgeon.” He spelled out the letters which were painted on the upper panes of the two windows facing on State Street. It thrilled him that eight years of hard work had ended and he now was at the point in his life towards which he had longingly looked all those years. Casting his eyes again around the office, he went into the adjoining reception room.

Kenneth threw himself in utter exhaustion into one of the comfortable arm-chairs there. His hands, long-fingered, tapering to slender points, the hands of a pianist, an artist, whether of brush or chisel or scalpel, hung over the sides in languid fashion. He was without coat or vest. His shirt-sleeves were rolled back above his elbows, revealing strongly muscled dark brown arms. His face was of the same richly coloured brown. His mouth was sensitively shaped with evenly matched strong white teeth. The eyes too were brown, usually sober and serious, but flashing into a broad and friendly smile when there was occasion for it. Brushed straight back from the broad forehead was a mass of wavy hair, brown also but of a deeper shade, almost black. The chin was well shaped.

As he lounged in the chair and looked around the reception room, he appeared to be of medium height, rather well-proportioned, almost stocky. Three years of baseball and football, and nearly two years of army life with all its hardships, had thickened up the once rather slender figure and had given to the face a more mature appearance, different from the youthful, almost callow look he had worn when his diploma had been handed him at the end of his college course.

The reception room was as pleasing to him as he sat there as had been the private office. There were three or four more chairs like the one in which he sat. There was a couch to match. The wall-paper was a subdued tan, serving as an excellent background for four brightly coloured reproductions of good pictures. Their brightness was matched by a vase of deep blue that stood on the table. Beside the vase were two rows of magazines placed there for perusal by his patients as they waited admittance to the more austere room beyond. It was comfortable. It was in good taste—almost too good taste, Kenneth thought, for a place like Central City in a section like the southernmost part of Georgia. Some of the country folks and even those in town would probably say it was too plain—didn’t have enough colour about it. Oh, well, that wouldn’t matter, Kenneth thought. They wouldn’t have to live there. Most of them would hardly notice it, if they paid any attention at all to relatively minor and unimportant things like colour schemes.

Kenneth felt that he had good reason to feel content with the present outlook. He lighted a cigarette and settled himself more comfortably in the deep chair and let his mind wander over the long trail he had covered. He thought of the eight happy years he had spent at Atlanta University—four of high school and four of college. He remembered gratefully the hours of companionship with those men and women who had left comfortable homes and friends in the North to give their lives to the education of coloured boys and girls in Georgia. They were so human—so sincere—so genuinely anxious to help. It wasn’t easy for them to do it, either, for it meant ostracism and all its attendant unpleasantnesses to teach coloured children in Georgia anything other than industrial courses. And they were so different from the white folks he knew in Central City. Here he had always been made to feel that because he was a “nigger” he was predestined to inferiority. But there at Atlanta they had treated him like a human being. He was glad he had gone to Atlanta University. It had made him realize that all white folks weren’t bad—that there were decent ones, after all.

And then medical school in the North! How eagerly he had looked forward to it! The bustle, the air of alert and eager determination, the lovely old ivied walls of the buildings where he attended classes. He laughed softly to himself as he remembered how terribly lonesome he had been that first day when as an ignorant country boy he found himself really at a Northern school. That had been a hard night to get through. Everybody had seemed so intent on doing something that was interesting, going so rapidly towards the places where those interesting things were to take place, greeting old friends and acquaintances affectionately and with all the boisterous bonhomie that only youth, and college youth at that, seem to be able to master. It had been a bitter pill for him to swallow that he alone of all that seething, noisy, tremendous mass of students, was alone—without friend or acquaintance—the one lonely figure of the thousands around him.

That hadn’t lasted long though. Good old Bill Van Vleet! That’s what having family and money and prestige behind you did for a fellow! It was a mighty welcome thing when old Bill came to him there as he sat dejectedly that second morning on the campus and roused him out of his gloom. And then the four years when Bill had been his closest friend. He had been one wonderful free soul that knew no line of caste or race.

His friendship with Van Vleet seemed to Kenneth now almost like the memory of a pleasant dream on awaking. Even then it had often seemed but a fleeting, evanescent experience a wholly temporary arrangement that was intended to last only through the four years of medical school. Those times when Bill had invited him to spend Christmas holidays at his home they had been hard invitations to get out of. Bill had been sincere enough, no doubt of that. But Bill’s father—his mother—their friends—would they—old Pennsylvania Dutch family that they were would they be as glad to welcome a Negro into their home? He had always been afraid to take the chance of finding that they wouldn’t. Decent enough had they been when Bill introduced him to them on one of their visits to Philadelphia. But—and this was a big “but”—there was a real difference between being nice to a coloured friend of Bill’s at school and treating that same fellow decently in their own home. Kenneth was conscious of a vague feeling even now that he had not treated them fairly in judging them by the white people of Central City. Yet, white folks were white folks—and that’s that! Hadn’t his father always told him that the best way to get along with white people was to stay away from them and let them alone as much as possible?

Through his mind passed memories of the many conversations he had had with his father on that subject. Especially that talk together before he had gone away to medical school. He didn’t know then it was the last time he would see his father alive. He had had no way of knowing that his father, always so rugged, so buoyantly healthy, so uncomplaining, would die of appendicitis while he, Kenneth, was in France. If he had only been at home!

He’d have known it wasn’t a case of plain cramps, as that old fossil, Dr. Bennett, had called it. What was the exact way in which his father had put his philosophy of life in the South during that last talk they had had together? It had run like this: Any Negro can get along without trouble in the South if he only attends to his own business. It was unfortunate, mighty unpleasant and uncomfortable at times, that coloured people, no matter what their standing, had to ride in Jim Crow cars, couldn’t vote, couldn’t use the public libraries and all those other things. Lynching, too, was bad. But only bad Negroes ever got lynched. And, after all, those things weren’t all of life. Booker Washington was right. And the others who were always howling about rights were wrong. Get a trade or a profession. Get a home. Get some property. Get a bank account. Do something! Be somebody! And then, when enough Negroes had reached that stage, the ballot and all the other things now denied them would come. White folks then would see that the Negro was deserving of those rights and privileges and would freely, gladly give them to him without his asking for them. That was the way he felt. When Bill Van Vleet had urged him to go with him to dinners or the theatre, he had had always some excuse that Bill had to accept whether he had believed it or not. Good Old Bill! They never knew during those more or less happy days what was in store for them both.

Neither of them had known that the German Army was going to sweep down through Belgium. Nor did they know that Bill was fated to end his short but brilliant career as an aviator in a blazing, spectacular descent behind the German lines, the lucky shot of a German anti-aircraft gun.

Graduation. The diploma which gave him the right to call himself “Dr. Kenneth B. Harper.” And then that stormy, yet advantageous year in New York at Bellevue. Hadn’t they raised sand at his, a Negro’s presumption in seeking that interneship at Bellevue! He’d almost lost out. No Negro interne had ever been there before. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Cox, to whom he had had a letter of introduction from his old professor of pathology at school, he never would have got the chance. But it had been worth it.

Kenneth lighted another cigarette and draped his legs over the arm of the chair. It wasn’t bad at all to think of the things he had gone through—now that they were over. Especially the army. Out of Bellevue one week when the chance came to go to the Negro officers’ training-camp at Des Moines. First lieutenant’s bars in the medical corps. Then the long months of training and hard work at Camp Upton, relieved by occasional pleasant trips to New York. Lucky he’d been assigned to the 367th of the 92nd Division. Good to be near a real town like New York.

That had been some exciting ride across. And then the Meuse, the Argonne, then Metz. God, but that was a terrible nightmare! Right back of the lines had he been assigned. Men with arms and legs shot off. Some torn to pieces by shrapnel. Some burned horribly by mustard gas. The worse night had been when the Germans made that sudden attack at the Meuse. For five days they had been fighting and working. That night he had almost broken down. How he had cursed war! And those who made war. And the civilization that permitted war—even made it necessary. Never again for him! Seemed like a horrible dream—a nightmare worse than any he had ever known as a boy when he’d eaten green apples or too much mince pie.

That awful experience he had soon relegated to the background of his mind. Especially when he was spending those blessed six months at the Sorbonne. That had been another hard job to put over. They didn’t want any Negroes staying in France. They’d howled and they’d brought up miles of red tape. But he had ignored the howls and unwound the red tape.

And now, Central City again. It was good to get back. Four—eight—sixteen years had he spent in preparation. Now he was all ready to get to work at his profession. For a time he’d have to do general practising. Had to make money. Then he’d specialize in surgery—major surgery. Soon’s he got enough money ahead, he’d build a sanitarium. Make of it as modern a hospital as he could afford. He’d draw on all of South Georgia for his patients. Nearest one now is Atlanta. All South Georgia—most of Florida—even from Alabama. Ten years from now he’d have a place known and patronized by all the coloured people in the South. Something like the Mayo Brothers up in Rochester, Minnesota!

“Pretty nifty, eh, Ken?”

Kenneth, aroused suddenly from his retrospection and day-dreams, jumped at the unexpected voice behind him. It was his younger brother, Bob. He laughed a little shamefacedly at his having been startled. Without waiting for a reply, Bob entered the room and sat on the edge of the table facing Kenneth.

“Yep! Things are shaping up rather nicely. Everything’s here now but the patients. And those’ll be coming along pretty soon, I believe,” replied Kenneth confidently. He went on talking enthusiastically of the castles in the air he had been building when Bob entered the room—of the hospital he was going to erect—how he planned attending the State Medical Convention every year to form contracts with other coloured doctors of Georgia—how he was intending to visit during the coming year all the coloured physicians within a radius of a hundred miles of Central City to enlist their support. He discussed the question of a name for the hospital. How would Harper’s Sanitarium sound? Or would the Central City Infirmary be better? Or the Hospital of South Georgia?

On and on Kenneth rambled, talking half to Bob, half in audible continuation of his reverie before Bob had entered. But Bob wasn’t listening to him. On his face was the usual half-moody, half-discontented expression which Kenneth knew so well. Bob was looking down the dusty expanse of the road which bore rather poorly the imposing title of State Street. The house was located at the corner of Lee and State Streets. It was set back about fifty feet from the streets, and the yard outside showed the work of one who loved flowers. There was an expanse of smooth lawn, dotted here and there with flowering beds of pansies, of nasturtiums. There were several abundantly laden rose-bushes and two of “cape jessamine” that filled the air with an intoxicating, almost cloying sweetness.

Though it was a balmy October afternoon, the air languorous and caressing, Bob shared none of the atmosphere’s lazy contentment. All this riot of colours and odours served in no manner to remove from his face the dissatisfied look that covered it. He listened to Kenneth’s rhapsodies of what he intended accomplishing with what was almost a grimace of distaste. He was taller than Kenneth, of slighter build, but of the same rich colouring of skin and with the same hair and features.

In spite of these physical resemblances between the two brothers, there was a more intangible difference which clearly distinguished the two. Kenneth was more phlegmatic, more of a philosophic turn of mind, more content with his lot, able to forget himself in his work, and when that was finished, in his books. Bob, on the other hand, was of a highly sensitized nature, more analytical of mind, more easily roused to passion and anger. This tendency had been developed since the death of his father just before he completed his freshman year at Atlanta. The death had necessitated his leaving school and returning to Central City to act as administrator of his father’s estate. His experiences in accomplishing this task had not been pleasant ones. He had been forced to deal with the tricksters that infested the town. He had come in contact with all the chicanery, the petty thievery, the padded accounts, that only petty minds can devise. The utter impotence he had felt in having no legal redress as a Negro had embittered him. Joe Harper, their father, had been exceedingly careful in keeping account of all bills owed and due him. Yet Bob had been forced to pay a number of bills of which he could find no record in his father’s neatly kept papers. These had aggregated somewhere between three and four thousand dollars. Various white merchants of the town claimed that Joe Harper, his father, owed them. Bob knew they were lying. Yet he could do nothing. No court in South Georgia would have listened to his side of the story or paid more than perfunctory attention to him. It was a case of a white man’s word against a Negro’s, and a verdict against the Negro was sure even before the case was opened.

Kenneth, on the other hand, had been a favourite of their quiet, almost taciturn father. Always filled with ambition for his children, Joe Harper had furnished Kenneth, as liberally as he could afford, the money necessary for him to get the medical education he wanted. He had not been a rich man but he had been comfortably fixed financially. Starting out as a carpenter doing odd jobs around Central City, he had gradually expanded his activities to the building of small houses and later to larger homes and business buildings. Most of the two-story buildings that lined Lee Street in the business section of Central City had been built by him. White and coloured alike knew that when Joe Harper took a contract, it would be done right. Aided by a frugal and economical wife, he had purchased real estate and, though the profits had been slow and small, had managed with his wife to accumulate during their thirty-five years of married life between twenty and twenty-five thousand dollars which he left at his death to his wife and three children.

Kenneth had been furnished with the best that his father could afford, while Bob, some ten years younger than his brother, had had to wait until Kenneth finished school before he could begin his course. Bob felt no jealousy of his favoured brother, yet the experiences that had been his in Central City while Kenneth was away had tended towards a bitterness which frequently found expression on his face. He was the natural rebel, revolt was a part of his creed. Kenneth was the natural pacifist—he never bothered trouble until trouble bothered him. Even then, if he could avoid it, he always did. It was not strange, therefore, that he should have come home believing implicitly that his father was right when he had said Kenneth could get along without trouble in Central City as long as he attended to his own business.

Kenneth talked on and on, unfolding the plans he had made for the extending of the influence of his hospital throughout the South. Bob, occupied with his own thoughts, heard but little of it. Suddenly he interrupted Kenneth with a sharply put question.

“Ken, why did you come back to Central City?” he asked. He went on without waiting for a reply. “If I had had your chances of studying up North and in France, and living where you don’t have to be A afraid of getting into trouble with Crackers all the time, I’d rather’ve done anything else than to come back to this rotten place to live the rest of my life.”

Kenneth laughed easily, almost as though a five-year-old had asked some exceedingly foolish question.

“Why did I come back?” he repeated. “That’s easy. I came back because I can make more money here than anywhere else.”

“But that isn’t the most important thing in life!” Bob exclaimed.

“Maybe not the most important,” Kenneth laughed, “but a mighty convenient article to have lying around. I came back here where the bulk of coloured people live and where they make money off their crops and where there won’t be much trouble for me to build up a big practice.”

“That’s an old argument,” retorted Bob. “Nearly a million coloured people went North during the war and they’re making money there hand over fist. You could make just as much money, if not more, in a city like Detroit or Cleveland or New York, and you wouldn’t have to be always afraid you’ve given offence to some of these damned ignorant Crackers down here.”

“Oh, I suppose I could’ve made money there. Dr. Cox at Bellevue told me I ought to stay there in New York and practise in Harlem, but I wanted to come back home. I can do more good here, both for myself and for the coloured people, than I could up there.” He paused and then asserted confidently: “And I don’t think I’ll have any trouble down here. Papa got along all right here in this town for more than fifty years, and I reckon I can do it too.”

“But, Ken,” Bob protested, “the way things were when he came along are a lot different from the way they are now. Just yesterday Old Man Mygatt down to the bank got mad and told me I was an ‘impudent young nigger that needed to be taught my place’ because I called his hand on a note he claimed papa owed the bank. He knew I knew he was lying, and that’s what made him so mad. They’re already saying I’m not a ‘good nigger’ like papa was and that education has spoiled me into thinking I’m as good as they are. Good Lord, if I wasn’t any better than these ignorant Crackers in this town, I’d go out and jump in the river.”

Bob was working himself into a temper. Kenneth interrupted him with a good-natured smile as he said:

“Bob, you’re getting too pessimistic. You’ve been reading too many of these coloured newspapers published in New York and Chicago and these societies that’re always playing up some lynching or other trouble down here—”

“What if I have? I don’t need to read them to know that things are much worse to-day than they were a few years back. You haven’t lived down here for nearly nine years and you don’t know how things are changed.”

“It’s you who have changed—not conditions so much!” Kenneth answered. “What if there are mean white folks? There are lots of other white people who want to see the Negro succeed. Only this morning Dr. Bennett told mamma he was glad I came back and he’d do what he could to help me. And there’re lots more like”

“That’s nice of Dr. Bennett,” interjected Bob. “He can afford to talk big—he’s got the practice of this town sewed up. And, most of all, he’s a white man. Suppose some of these poor whites get it into their heads to make trouble because you’re getting too prosperous—what then? Dr. Bennett and all the rest of the good white folks around here can’t help you!”

“Oh, yes, they can,” Kenneth observed with the same confident smile. “Judge Stevenson and Roy Ewing and Mr. Baird at the Bank of Central City and a lot others run this town and they aren’t going to let any decent coloured man be bothered. Why, I’ll have a cinch around this part of Georgia! There aren’t more than half a dozen coloured doctors in all this part of the country who’ve had a decent medical education and training. All they know is ladling out pills and fake panaceas. In a few years I’ll be able to give up general practising and give all my time to major surgery. I’ll handle pretty nearly everything in this part of the State. And then you’ll see I’m right!”

“Have it your own way,” retorted Bob. “But I’m telling you again, you haven’t been living down here for eight or nine years and you don’t know. When all these Negroes were going North, some of these same ‘good white folks’ you’re depending on started talking about ‘putting niggers in their place’ when they couldn’t get servants and field hands. You’ll find things a lot different from the way they were when you went up North to school.”

“What’re you boys fussing about? What’s the trouble?”

Bob and Kenneth turned at the voice from the doorway behind them. It was their mother. “Nothing, mamma, only Bob’s got a fit of the blues to-day.”

Mrs. Harper came in and looked from one to the other of her sons. She was a buxom, pleasant-faced woman of fifty-odd years, her hair once brown now flecked with grey. She wiped the perspiration from her forehead with the corner of her apron, announcing meanwhile that supper was ready. As he rose, Kenneth continued his explanation of their conversation.

“Bob’s seeing things like a kid in the dark. He thinks I’ll not be able to do the things I came back here to accomplish. Thinks the Crackers won’t let me! I’m going to solve my own problem, do as much good as I can, make as much money as I can! If every Negro in America did the same thing, there wouldn’t be any race problem.”

Mrs. Harper took an arm of each of her sons and led them into the dining-room where their sister Mamie was putting supper on the table.

“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. …

The four sat at supper. Forgotten were problems other than the immediate one of Kenneth’s in getting his practice under way. Eagerly they talked of his plans, his prospects, his ambitions. Bob said nothing until they began to discuss him and his plans for returning to school the following fall, now that Kenneth was back to complete the settling of the small details that remained in connection with Joe Harper’s estate. …

It was a happy and reasonably prosperous, intelligent family group—one that can be duplicated many, many times in the South.

CHAPTER II

Situated in the heart of the farming section of the State, with its fertile soil, its equable climate, its forests of pine trees, Central City was one of the flourishing towns of South Georgia. Its population was between eight and ten thousand, of which some four thousand were Negroes. The wealth and prosperity of the town depended not so much on the town itself as it did on the farmers of the fertile lands surrounding it. To Central City they came on Saturday afternoons to sell their cotton, their corn, their hogs and cows, and to buy in turn sugar, cloth, coffee, farming-implements, shoes, and amusement. It was divided into four nearly equal sections by the intersection of the tracks of the Central of Georgia Railroad and of the Georgia, Southern and Florida Railway. Drowsy, indolent during the first six days of the week, Central City awoke on Saturday morning for “goin’t town” day with its bustle and excitement and lively trade. Then the broad dustiness of Lee Street was disturbed by the Fords and muddied wagons of farmers, white and black. In the wagons were usually splint-bottom chairs or boards stretched from side to side, occupied by scrawny, lanky “po’ whites” with a swarm of children to match, clad in single-piece garments, once red in colour and now, through many washings with lye soap, an indeterminate reddish brown. Or, if the driver was a Negro, he generally was surrounded by just as many little black offspring, clad also in greyish or reddish-brown garments, and scrambling over the farm products being brought to town for sale or exchange for the simple and few store products needed. And beside him the usually buxom, ample-bodied wife, clad in her finest and most gaudy clothing to celebrate the trip to town looked forward to eagerly all the week.

Crowded were the streets with vehicles and the sidewalks with the jostling, laughing, loudly talking throng of humans. After the noonday whistle had blown signalling release to the hordes of whites working in the cotton mill over beyond the tracks, the crowd was augmented considerably, the new-comers made up of those who had deserted the country districts, discouraged by the hard life of farming, by rainy and unprofitable seasons, by the ravages of the boll weevil and of landlords, both working dire distress on poor white and black alike. Discouraged, they had come to “the city” to work at small wages in the cotton mill.

All the trading done on these days did not take place over the counters of the stores that lined Lee Street. In the dirty little alleyways from off the main street, men with furtive eyes but bold ways dispensed synthetic gin, “real” rye whisky, and more often “white mule,” as the moonshine corn whisky is called. Bottles were tilted and held to the mouth a long time and later the scene would be enlivened by furious but shortlived fights. Guns, knives, all sorts of weapons appeared with miraculous speed—the quarrel was settled, the wounded or killed removed, and the throng forgot the incident in some new joyous and usually commonplace or sordid adventure.

When darkness began to approach, the wagons and Fords, loaded with merchandise for the next week, and with the children clutching sticky and brightly coloured candies, began to rumble countrywards, and Central City by nightfall had resumed its sleepy, indolent, and deserted manner.

From the corner where Oglethorpe Avenue crossed Lee Street and where stood the monument to the Confederate Dead, the business section extended up Lee Street for three blocks. Here the street was dignified with a narrow “park,” some twenty feet in width, which ran the length of the business thoroughfare. Over beyond the monument lay the section of Central City where lived the more well-to-do of its white inhabitants. Georgia Avenue was here the realm of the socially elect. Shaded by elms, it numbered several more or less pretentious homes of two stories, some of brick, the majority of frame structure. Here were the homes of Roy Ewing, president of the local Chamber of Commerce and owner of Ewing’s General Merchandise Emporium; of George Baird, president of the Bank of Central City; of Fred Griswold, occupying the same relation to Central City’s other bank, the Smith County Farmers’ Bank; of Ralph Minor, owner and manager of the Bon Ton Store.

Here too were the wives of these men, busying themselves with their household duties and the minor social life of the community. In the morning they attended to the many details of housekeeping; in the afternoon and early evening they sat on their front porches or visited neighbours or went for a ride. Placid, uneventful, stupid lives they led with no other interests than the petty affairs of a small and unprogressive town.

The young girls of Central City usually in the afternoon dressed in all their small-town finery and strolled down to Odell’s Drug Store where the young men congregated. Having consumed a frothy soda or a gummy, sweetish sundae, they went to the Idle Hour Moving Picture Palace to worship at the celluloid shrine of a favourite film actor, usually of the highly romantic type. Then the stroll homewards, always past the Central City Hotel, a two-storied frame structure located at the corner of Lee Street and Oglethorpe Avenue opposite the Confederate monument. In front were arm-chairs, occupied in warm weather, which was nearly all the year round, by travelling salesmen or other transients. Often a sidelong glance and a fleeting, would-be-coy smile would cause one of the chair-occupants to rise as casually as he could feign, yawn and stretch, and with affected nonchalance stroll down Lee Street in the wake of the smiling one. …

At the other end of Lee Street from the residential section of the well-to-do whites, past the business section of that main artery of the town, lay that portion known generally as “Darktown.” Fringing it were several better-than-the-average homes, neat, well painted, comfortable-looking, fronted with smooth lawns and tidy, colourful flower-beds. It was one of these at the corner of Lee and State Streets that the Harpers owned and occupied.

After crossing State Street, an abrupt descent was taken by Lee Street. Here lived in squalor and filth and abject poverty the poorer class of Negroes. The streets were winding, unpaved lanes, veritable seas and rivers of sticky, gummy, discouraging mud in rainy weather, into which the wheels of vehicles sank to their hubs if the drivers of those conveyances were indiscreet enough to drive through them. In summer these eddying wallows of muck and filth and mud dry up and are transformed into swirling storms of germ-laden dust when a vagrant wind sweeps over them or a vehicle drives through them, choking the throats of unlucky passers-by, and, to the despair of the dusky housewives, flying through open windows. The houses that bordered these roads were for the most part of three and four rooms, the exteriors unpainted or whitewashed, the interiors gloomy and smelly. But few of them had sanitary arrangements, and at the end of the little patch of ground that was back of each of them, in which a few discouraged vegetables strove to push their heads above the ground, there stood another unpainted structure, small, known as “the privy.” In front there was nearly always some attempt at flower-cultivation, the tiny beds bordered with bottles, shells, and bits of brightly coloured glass. The ugliness of the houses in many instances was hidden in summer-time by vines and rambler roses that covered the porches and sometimes the fronts of the houses.

Around these houses, in the streets, everywhere, there played a seemingly innumerable horde of black and brown and yellow children, noisy, quarrelsome, clad usually in one-piece dresses of the same indeterminate shade of grey or red or brown that was seen on the country children on Saturday. In front of many of the houses, there sat on sunny days an old and bent man or ancient woman puffing the omnipresent corn-cob pipe. …

A half-mile westward from “Darktown,” and separated from it by the Central of Georgia Railroad tracks, stood the Central City Cotton Spinning-Mill. Clustered around its ugly red-brick walls stood dwellings that differed but little from those of “Darktown.” Here were the same dingy, small, unsanitary, unbeautiful, and unpainted dwellings. Here were the same muddy or dusty unpaved streets. Here were the same squalor and poverty and filth and abject ignorance. There were but few superficial or recognizable differences. One was that the children wore, instead of the brown plumpness of the Negro children, a pale, emaciated, consumptive air because of the long hours in the lint-laden confines of the mills. The men were long, stooped, cadaverous-appearing. The women were sallow, unattractive, sad-looking, each usually with the end of a snuff-stick protruding from her mouth. The children, when they played at all, did so in listless, wearied, uninterested, and apathetic fashion. The houses looked even more gaunt and bare than those in the quarter which housed the poorer Negroes, for the tiny patches of ground that fronted the houses here in “Factoryville” were but seldom planted with flowers. More often it was trampled down until it became a hard, red-clay, sunbaked expanse on which the children, and dogs as emaciated and forlorn, sometimes played.

Here there was but one strong conviction, but one firm rock of faith to which they clung—the inherent and carefully nurtured hatred of “niggers” and a belief in their own infinite superiority over their dark-skinned neighbours. Their gods were Tom Watson and Hoke Smith and Tom Hardwick and other demagogic politicians and office-seekers who came to them every two or four years and harangued them on the necessity of their upholding white civilization by re-electing them to office. But one appeal was needed—but one was used—and that one always successfully. Meanwhile, their children left school and entered the mill to work the few years that such a life gave them. And, in the meantime, the black children they hated so-deprived by prejudice from working in the mills, and pushed forward by often illiterate but always ambitious black parents—went to school. …

This, in brief, was the Central City to which Kenneth had returned. A typical Southern town—reasonably rich as wealth is measured in that part of Georgia—rich in money and lands and cot—amazingly ignorant in the finer things of life. Noisy, unreflective, their wants but few and those easily satisfied. The men, self-made, with all that that distinctly American term implies. The women concerned only with their petty household affairs and more petty gossip and social intercourse. But, beyond these, life was and is a closed book. Or, more, a book that never was written or printed.

The companionship and inspiration of books was unknown. Music, even with the omnipresent Victrola, meant only the latest bit of cheap jazz or a Yiddish or Negro dialect song. Art, in its many forms was considered solely for decadent, effete “furriners.” Hostility would have met the woman of the town’s upper class who attempted to exhibit any knowledge of art. Her friends would have felt that she was trying “to put something over on them.” As for any man of the town, at best he would have been considered a “little queer in the head,” at the worst suspected of moral turpitude or perversion. But two releases from the commonplace, monotonous life were left. The first, liquor. Bootlegging throve. The woods around Central City were infested with “moonshine” stills that seldom were still. The initiated drove out to certain lonely spots, deposited under well-known trees a jug or other container with a banknote stuck in its mouth. One then gave a certain whistle and walked away. Soon there would come an answering signal. One went back to the tree and found the money gone but the container filled with a colourless or pale-yellow liquid. … Or, the more affluent had it brought to them in town hidden under wagon-loads of fodder or cotton.

The other and even more popular outlet of unfulfilled and suppressed emotions was sex. Central City boasted it had no red-light district like Macon and Savannah and Atlanta. That was true. All over the town were protected domiciles housing slatternly women. To them went by circuitous routes the merchants whose stores were on Lee Street. To them went the gangs from the turpentine camps on their periodic pilgrimages to town on pay-day. And a traveller on any of the roads leading from the town could see, on warm evenings, automobiles standing with engines stilled and lights dimmed on the side of the road. Down on Harris and Butler Streets in “Darktown” were other houses. Here were coloured women who seemed never to have to work. Here was seldom seen a coloured man. And the children around these houses were usually lighter in colour than in other parts of “Darktown.”

Negro fathers and mothers of comely daughters never allowed them to go out unaccompanied after dark. There were too many dangers from men of their own race. And even greater ones from men of the other race. There had been too many disastrous consequences from relaxation of vigil by certain bowed and heart-broken coloured parents. And they had no redress at law. The laws of the State against intermarriage saw to it that there should be none. Central City inhabitants knew all these things. But familiarity with them had bred the belief that they did not exist—that is, they were thought a natural part of the town’s armament against scandal. One soon grew used to them and forgot them. The town was no worse than any other—far better than most.

It was a rude shock to Kenneth when he began to see these things through an entirely different pair of eyes than those with which he had viewed them before he left Central City for the North. The sordidness, the blatant vulgarity, the viciousness of it all—especially the houses on Butler and Harris Streets—appalled and sickened him. Even more was he disgusted by the complacent acceptance of the whole miserable business by white and black alike. On two or three occasions he tentatively mentioned it to a few of those he had known intimately years before. Some of them laughed indulgently—others cautioned him to leave it alone. Finding no response, he shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the whole affair from his mind. “It was here long before I was born,” he said to himself philosophically, “it’ll probably be here long after I’m dead, and the best thing for me to do is to stick to my own business and let other people’s morals alone.”

CHAPTER III

Kenneth came into contact with few others than his own people during the first month after his return to Central City. The first two weeks had been spent in getting his offices arranged with the innumerable details of carpentering, plastering, painting, and disposition of the equipment he had ordered in New York during the days he had spent there on his return from France.

During the early months of 1917, when through every available means propaganda was being used to whip into being America’s war spirit, one of the most powerful arguments heard was that of the beneficial effect army life would have on the men who entered the service. Newspapers and magazines were filled with it, orators in church and theatre and hall shouted it, every signboard thrust it into the faces of Americans. Alluring pictures were painted of the growth, physical and mental, that would certainly follow enlistment “to make the world safe for democracy.”

To some of those who fought, such a change probably did come, but the mental outlook of most of them was changed but little. The war was too big a thing, too terrible and too searing a catastrophe, to be adequately comprehended by the farmer boys, the clerks, and the boys fresh from school who chiefly made up the fighting forces. Their lives had been too largely confined to the narrow ways to enable them to realize the immensity of the event into which they had been so suddenly plunged. Their most vivid memories were of “that damned second loot” or of beaucoup vin blanc or, most frequently, of all-too-brief adventures with the mademoiselles. With the end of the war and demobilization had come the short periods of hero-worship and then the sudden forgetfulness of those for whom they had fought. The old narrow life began again with but occasional revolts against the monotony of it all, against the blasting of the high hopes held when the war was being fought. Even these spasmodic revolts eventually petered out in vague mutterings among men like themselves who let their inward dissatisfaction dissipate in thin air.

More deep-rooted was this revolt among Negro ex-service men. Many of them entered the army, not so much because they were fired with the desire to fight for an abstract thing like world democracy, but, because they were of a race oppressed, they entertained very definite beliefs that service in France would mean a more decent regime in America, when the war was over, for themselves and all others who were classed as Negroes. Many of them, consciously or subconsciously, had a spirit which might have been expressed like this: “Yes, we’ll fight for democracy in France, but when that’s over with we’re going to expect and we’re going to get some of that same democracy for ourselves right here in America.” It was because of this spirit and determination that they submitted to the rigid army discipline to which was often added all the contumely that race prejudice could heap upon them.

Kenneth was of that class which thought of these things in a more detached, more abstract, more subconscious manner. During the days when, stationed close to the line, he treated black men brought to the base hospital with arms and legs torn away by exploding shells, with bodies torn and mangled by shrapnel, or with flesh seared by mustard gas, he had inwardly cursed the so-called civilization which not only permitted but made such carnage necessary. But when the nightmare had ended, he rapidly forgot the nausea he had felt, and plunged again into his beloved work. More easily than he would have thought possible, he forgot the months of discomfort and weariness and bloodshed. It came back to him only in fitful memories as of some particularly horrible dream.

To Kenneth, when work grew wearisome or when memories would not down, there came relaxation in literature, an opiate for which he would never cease being grateful to Professor Fuller, his old teacher at Atlanta. It was “Pop”. Fuller who, with his benign and paternal manner, his adoration of the best of the world’s literature, had sown in Kenneth the seed of that same love. He read and reread Jean Christophe, finding in the adventures and particularly in the mental processes of Rolland’s hero many of his own reactions towards life. He had read the plays of Bernard Shaw, garnering here and there a morsel of truth though much of Shaw eluded him. Theodore Dreiser’s gloominess and sex-obsession he liked though it often repelled him; he admired the man for his honesty and disliked his pessimism or what seemed to him a dolorous outlook on life. He loved the colourful romances of Hergesheimer, considering them of little enduring value but nevertheless admiring his descriptions of affluent life, enjoying it vicariously. Willa Cather’s My Antonia he delighted in because of its simplicity and power and beauty.

The works of D. H. Lawrence, Kenneth read with conflicting emotions. Mystical, turgid, tortuous phrases, and meaning not always clear. Yet he revelled in Lawrence’s clear insight into the bends and backwaters and perplexing twistings of the stream of life. Kenneth liked best of all foreign writers Knut Hamsun. He had read many times Hunger, Growth of the Soil, and other novels of the Norwegian writer. He at times was annoyed by their lack of plot, but more often he enjoyed them because they had none, reflecting that life itself is never a smoothly turned and finished work of art, its causes and effects, its tears and joys, its loves and hates neatly dovetailing one into another as writers of fiction would have it.

So too did he satisfy his love for the sea in the novels of Conrad—the love so many have who are born and grow to manhood far from the sea. Kenneth loved it with an abiding and passionate love loved, yet feared it for its relentless power and savagery—a love such as a man would have for an alluring, yet tempestuous mistress of fiery and uncertain temper. In Conrad’s romances he lived by proxy the life he would have liked had not fear of the water and the circumstances of his life prevented it. Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant he read and reread, finding in the struggles of Emma Bovary and Nana and other heroines and heroes of the French realists mental counterparts of some of the coloured men and women of his acquaintance in their struggles against the restrictions of stupid and crass and ignorant surroundings. The very dissimilarities of environment and circumstance between his own acquaintances and the characters in the novels he read, seemed to emphasize the narrowness of his own life in the South. So does a bedridden invalid read with keen delight the adventurous and rococo romances of Zane Grey or Jack London.

But perhaps best of all he admired the writing of Du Bois—the fiery, burning philippics of one of his own race against the proscriptions of race prejudice. He read them with a curious sort of detachment—as being something which touched him in a more or less remote way but not as a factor in forming his own opinions as a Negro in a land where democracy often stopped dead at the colour line.

It was in this that Kenneth’s attitude towards life was most clearly shown. His was the more philosophic viewpoint on the race question, that problem so close to him. The proscriptions which he and others of his race were forced to endure were inconvenient, yet they were apparently a part of life, one of its annoyances, a thing which had always been and probably would be for all time to come. Therefore, he reasoned, why bother with it any more than one was forced to by sheer necessity? Better it was for him if he attended to his own individual problems, solved them to the best of his ability and as circumstances would permit, and left to those who chose to do it the agitation for the betterment of things in general. If he solved his problems and every other Negro did the same, he often thought, then the thing we call the race problem will be solved. Besides, he reasoned, the whole thing is too big for one man to tackle it, and if he does attack it, more than likely he will go down to defeat in the attempt. And what would be gained? …

His office completed, Kenneth began the making of those contacts he needed to secure the patients he knew were coming. In this his mother and Mamie were of invaluable assistance. Everybody knew the Harpers. It was a simple matter for Kenneth to renew acquaintances broken when he had left for school in the North. He joined local lodges of the Grand United Order of Heavenly Reapers and the Exalted Knights of Damon. The affected mysteriousness of his initiation into these fraternal orders, the secret grip, the passwords, the elaborately worded rituals, all of which the other members took so seriously, amused him, but he went through it all with an out wardly solemn demeanour. He knew it was good business to affiliate himself with these often absurd societies which played so large a part in the lives of these simple and illiterate coloured folk. Along with the strenuous emotionalism of their religion, it served as an outlet for their naturally deep feelings. In spite of the renewal of acquaintances, the careful campaign of winning confidence in his ability as a physician, Kenneth found that the flood of patients did not come as he had hoped. The coloured people of Central City had had impressed upon them by three hundred years of slavery and that which was called freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, that no Negro doctor, however talented, was quite as good as a white one. This slave mentality, Kenneth now realized, inbred upon generation after generation of coloured folk, is the greatest handicap from which the Negro suffers, destroying as it does that confidence in his own ability which would enable him to meet without fear or apology the test of modern competition.

Kenneth’s youthful appearance, too, militated against him. Though twenty-nine years old, he looked not more than a mere twenty-four or twenty-five. “He may know his stuff and be as smart as all outdoors,” ran the usual verdict, “but I don’t want no boy treating me when I’m sick.”

Perhaps the greatest factor contributing to the coloured folks’ lack of confidence in physicians of their own race was the inefficiency of Dr. Williams, the only coloured doctor in Central City prior to Kenneth’s return. Dr. Williams belonged to the old school and moved on the theory that when he graduated some eighteen years before from a medical school in Alabama, the development of medical knowledge had stopped. He fondly pictured himself as being the most prominent personage of Central City’s Negro colony, was pompous, bulbous-eyed, and exceedingly fond of long words, especially of Latin derivation. He made it a rule of his life never to use a word of one syllable if one of two or more would serve as well. Active in fraternal order circles (he was a member of nine lodges), class-leader in Central City’s largest Methodist church, arbiter supreme of local affairs in general, he filled the rôle with what he imagined was unsurpassable éclat. His idea of complimenting a hostess was ostentatiously to loosen his belt along about the middle of dinner. Once he had been introduced as the “black William Jennings Bryan,” believed it thereafter, and thought it praise of a high order.

He was one of those who say on every possible occasion: “I am kept so terribly busy I never have a minute to myself.” Like nine out of ten who say it, Dr. Williams always repeated this stock phrase of those who flatter themselves in this fashion—so necessary to those of small minds who would be thought great—not because it was true, but to enhance his pre-eminence in the eyes of his hearers—and in his own eyes as well.

He always wore coats which resembled morning coats, known in local parlance as “Jim-swingers.” He kept his hair straightened, wore it brushed straight back from his forehead like highly polished steel wires, and, with pomades and hair oils liberally applied, it glistened like the patent leather shoes which adorned his ample feet.

His stout form filled the Ford in which he made his professional calls, and it was a sight worth seeing as he majestically rolled through the streets of the town bowing graciously and calling out loud greetings to the acquaintances he espied by the way. Always his bows to white people were twice as low and obsequious as to those of darker skin. Until Kenneth returned, Dr. Williams had had his own way in Central City. Through his fraternal and church connections and lack of competition, he had made a little money, much of it through his position as medical examiner for the lodges to which he belonged. As long as he treated minor ailments—cuts, colic, childbirths, and the like he had little trouble. But when more serious maladies attacked them, the coloured population sent for the old white physician, Dr. Bennett, instead of for Dr. Williams.

The great amount of time at his disposal irritated Kenneth. He was like a spirited horse, champing at the bit, eager to be off. The patronizing air of his people nettled him—caused him to reflect somewhat bitterly that “a prophet is not without honour save in his own country.” And when one has not the gift of prophecy to foretell, or of clairvoyance to see, what the future holds in the way of success, one is not likely to develop a philosophic calm which enables him to await the coming of long-desired results. He was seated one day in his office reading when his mother entered. Closing his book, he asked the reason for her frown.

“You remember Mrs. Bradley—Mrs. Emma Bradley down on Ashley Street-don’t you, Kenneth?” Without waiting for a reply, Mrs. Harper went on: “Well, she’s mighty sick. Jim Bradley has had Dr. Bennett in to see what’s the matter with her but he don’t seem to do her much good.”

Kenneth remembered Mrs. Bradley well indeed. The most talkative woman in Central City. It was she who had come to his mother with a long face and dolorous manner when he as a youngster had misbehaved in church. He had learned instinctively to connect Mrs. Bradley’s visits with excursions to the little back room accompanied by his mother and a switch cut from the peach-tree in the back yard—a sort of natural cause and effect. Visions of those days rose in his mind and he imagined he could feel the sting of those switches on his legs now.

“What seems to be the trouble with her?” he asked.

“It’s some sort of stomach-trouble—she’s got an awful pain in her side. She says it can’t be her appendix because she had that removed up to Atlanta when she was operated on there for a tumour nearly four years ago. Dr. Bennett gave her some medicine but it doesn’t help here any. Won’t you run down there to see her?”

“I can’t, mamma, until I am called in professionally. Dr. Bennett won’t like it. It isn’t ethical. Besides, didn’t Mrs. Bradley say when I came back that she didn’t want any coloured doctor fooling with her?”

“Yes, she did, but you mustn’t mind that. Just run in to see her as a social call.”

Kenneth rose and instinctively took up his bag. Remembering, he put it down, put on his hat, kissed his mother, and walked down to Mrs. Bradley’s. Outside the gate stood Dr. Bennett’s mud-splashed buggy, sagging on one side through years of service in carrying its owner’s great bulk. Between the shafts stood the old bay horse, its head hung dejectedly as though asleep, which Central City always connected with its driver.

Entering the gate held by one hinge, Kenneth made his way to the little three-room unpainted house which served as home for the Bradleys and their six children. On knocking, the door was opened by Dr. Bennett, who apparently was just leaving. He stood there, his hat on, stained by many storms, its black felt turning a greenish brown through years of service and countless rides through the red dust of the roads leading out of Central City. Dr. Bennett himself was large and flabby. His clothes hung on him in haphazard fashion and looked as though they had never been subjected to the indignity of a tailor’s iron. A Sherlock Holmes, or even one less gifted, could read on his vest with little difficulty those things which its wearer had eaten for many meals past. Dr. Bennett’s face was red through exposure to many suns, and covered with the bristle of a three days’ growth of beard. Small eyes set close together, they belied a bluff good humour which Dr. Bennett could easily assume when there was occasion for it. The corners of the mouth were stained a deep brown where tobacco juice had run down the folds of the flesh.

Behind him stood Jim Bradley with worried face, his ashy black skin showing the effects of remaining all night by the bedside of his wife.

Dr. Bennett looked at Kenneth inquiringly.

“Don’t you remember me, Dr. Bennett? I’m Kenneth Harper.”

“Bless my soul, so it is. How’re you, Ken? Le’s see it’s been nigh on to eight years since you went No’th, ain’t it? Heard you was back in town. Hear you goin’ to practise here. Come ‘round to see me some time. Right glad you’re here. I’ll be kinder glad to get somebody to help me treat these niggers for colic or when they get carved up in a crap game. Hope you ain’t got none of them No’then ideas ’bout social equality while you was up there. Jus’ do like your daddy did, and you’ll get along all right down here. These niggers who went over to France and ran around with them Frenchwomen been causin’ a lot of trouble ‘round here, kickin’ up a rumpus, and talkin’ ‘bout votin’ and ridin’ in the same car with white folks. But don’t you let them get you mixed up in it, ‘cause there’ll be trouble sho’s you born if they don’t shut up and git to work. Jus’ do like your daddy did, and you’ll do a lot to keep the white folks’ friendship.”

Dr. Bennett poured forth all this gratuitous advice between asthmatic wheezes without waiting for Kenneth to reply. He then turned to Jim Bradley with a parting word of advice.

“Jim, keep that hot iron on Emma’s stomach and give her those pills every hour. ‘Tain’t nothin’ but the belly-ache. She’ll be all right in an hour or two.”

Turning without another word, he half ambled, half shuffled out to his buggy, pulled himself up into it with more puffing and wheezing, and drove away. Jim Bradley took Kenneth’s arm and led him back on to the little porch, closing the door behind him.

“I’m pow’ful glad t’ see you, Ken. My, but you done growed sence you went up No’th! Befo’ you go in dar, I want t’ tell you somethin’. Emma’s been right po’ly fuh two days. Her stomach’s swelled up right sma’t and she’s been hollering all night. Dis mawning she don’t seem jus’ right in de haid. I tol her I was gwine to ast you to come see her, but she said she didn’t want no young nigger doctah botherin’ with her. But don’t you min’ her. I wants you to tell me what to do.”

Kenneth smiled.

“I’ll do what I can for her, Jim. But what about Dr. Bennett?”

“Dat’s a’ right. He give her some med’cine but it ain’t done her no good. She’s too good a woman fuh me to lose her, even if she do talk a li’l’ too much. You make out like you jus’ drap in to pass the time o’ day with her.”

Kenneth entered the dark and ill-smelling room. Opposite the door a fire smouldered in the fire-place, giving fitful spurts of flame that illumined the room and then died down again. There was no grate, the pieces of wood resting on crude andirons, blackened by the smoke of many fires. Over the mantel there hung a cheap charcoal reproduction of Jim and Emma in their wedding-clothes, made by some local “artist” from an old photograph. One or two nondescript chairs worn shiny through years of use stood before the fire. In one corner stood a dresser on which were various bottles of medicine and of “Madame Walker’s Hair Straightener.” On the floor a rug, worn through in spots and patched with fragments of other rugs all apparently of different colours, covered the space in front of the bed. The rest of the floor was bare and showed evidences of a recent vigorous scrubbing. The one window was closed tightly and covered over with a cracked shade, long since divorced from its roller, tacked to the upper ledge of the window.

On the bed Mrs. Bradley was rolling and tossing in great pain. Her eyes opened slightly when Kenneth approached the bed and closed again immediately as a new spasm of pain passed through her body. She moaned piteously and held her hands on her side, pressing down hard one hand over the other.

At a sign from Jim, Kenneth started to take her pulse.

“Go way from here and leave me ‘lone! Oh, Lawdy, why is I suff’rin’ this way? I jus’ wish I was daid! Oh-oh-oh!”

This last as she writhed in agony. Kenneth drew back the covers, examined Mrs. Bradley’s abdomen, took her pulse. Every sign pointed to an attack of acute appendicitis. He informed Jim of his diagnosis.

“But, Doc, it ain’t dat trouble, ’cause Emma says dat was taken out a long time ago.”

“I can’t help what she says. She’s got appendicitis. You go get Dr. Bennett and tell him your wife has got to be operated on right away or she is going to die. Get a move on you now! If it was my case, I would operate within an hour. Stop by my house and tell Bob to bring me an ice bag as quick as he can.”

Jim hurried away to catch Dr. Bennett. Kenneth meanwhile did what he could to relieve Mrs. Bradley’s suffering. In a few minutes Bob came with the ice bag. Then Jim returned with his face even more doleful than it had been when Kenneth had told him how sick his wife was.

“Doc Bennett says he don’t care what you do. He got kinder mad when I told him you said it was ‘pendicitis, and tol’ me dat if I couldn’t take his word, he wouldn’t have anything mo’ to do with Emma. He seemed kinder mad ‘cause you said it was mo’ than a stomach-ache. Said he wa’n’t goin’ to let no young nigger doctor tell him his bus’ness. So, Doc, you’ll have t’ do what you thinks bes’.”

“All right, I’ll do it. First thing, I’m going to move your wife over to my office. We can put her up in the spare room. Bob will drive her over in the car. Get something around her and you’d better come on over with her. I’ll get Dr. Williams to help me.”

Kenneth was jubilant at securing his first surgical case since his return to Central City, though his pleasure was tinged with doubt as to the ethics of the manner in which it had come to him. He did not let that worry him very long, however, but began his preparations for the operation.

First he telephoned to Mrs. Johnson, who, before she married and settled down in Central City, had been a trained nurse at a coloured hospital at Atlanta. She hurried over at once. Neat, quiet, and efficient, she took charge immediately of preparations, sterilizing the array of shiny instruments, preparing wads of absorbent cotton, arranging bandages and catgut and hæmostatics.

Kenneth left all this to Mrs. Johnson, for he knew in her hands it would be well done. He telephoned to Dr. Williams to ask that he give the anæsthesia. In his excitement Kenneth neglected to put in his voice the note of asking a great and unusual favour of Dr. Williams. That eminent physician, eminent in his own eyes, cleared his throat several times before replying, while Kenneth waited at the other end of the line. He realized his absolute dependence on Dr. Williams, for he knew no white doctor would assist a Negro surgeon or even operate with a coloured assistant. There was none other in Central City who could give the ether to Mrs. Bradley. It made him furious that Dr. Williams should hesitate so long. At the same time, he knew he must restrain the hot and burning words that he would have used. The pompous one hinted of the pressure of his own work—work that would keep him busy all day.

Into his words he injected the note of affront at being asked—he, the coloured physician of Central City—to assist a younger man. Especially on that man’s first case. Kenneth swallowed his anger and pride, and pleaded with Dr. Williams at least to come over. Finally, the older physician agreed in a condescending manner to do so.

Hurrying back to his office, Kenneth found Mrs. Bradley arranged on the table ready for the operation. Examining her, he found she was in delirium, her eyes glazed, her abdomen hard and distended, and she had a temperature of 105 degrees. He hastily sterilized his hands and put on his gown and cap. As he finished his preparations, Dr. Williams in leisurely manner strolled into the room with a benevolent and patronizing “Howdy, Kenneth, my boy. I won’t be able to help you out after all. I’ve got to see some patients of my own.”

He emphasized “my own,” for he had heard of the manner by which Kenneth had obtained the case of Mrs. Bradley Kenneth, pale with anger, excited over his first real case in Central City, stared at Dr. Williams in amazement at his words.

“But, Dr. Williams, you can’t do that! Mrs. Bradley here is dying!”

The older doctor looked around patronizingly at the circle of anxious faces. Jim Bradley, his face lined and seamed with toil, the lines deepened in distress at the agony of his wife and the imminence of losing her, gazed at him with dumb pleading in his eyes, pleading without spoken words with the look of an old, faithful dog beseeching its master. Bob looked with a malevolent glare at his pompous sleekness, as though he would like to spring upon him.

Mrs. Johnson plainly showed her contempt of such callousness on the part of one who bore the title, however poorly, of physician. In Kenneth’s eyes was a commingling of eagerness and rage and bitterness and anxiety. On Emma Bradley’s face there was nothing but the pain and agony of her delirious ravings. Dr. Williams seemed to enjoy thoroughly his little moment of triumph. He delayed speaking in order that it might be prolonged as much as possible. The silence was broken by Jim Bradley.

“Doc, won’t you please he’p?” he pleaded. “She’s all I got!”

Kenneth could remain silent no longer. He longed to punch that fat face and erase from it the supercilious smirk that adorned it.

“Dr. Williams,” he began with cold hatred in his voice, “either you are going to give this anæsthesia or else I’m going to go into every church in Central City and tell exactly what you’ve done here today.”

Dr. Williams turned angrily on Kenneth.

“Young man, I don’t allow anybody to talk to me like that-least of all, a young whippersnapper just out of school …” he shouted.

By this time Kenneth’s patience was at an end. He seized the lapels of the other doctor’s coat in one hand and thrust his clenched fist under the nose of the now thoroughly alarmed Dr. Williams.

“Are you going to help—or aren’t you?” he demanded.

The situation was becoming too uncomfortable for the older man. He could stand Kenneth’s opposition but not the ridicule which would inevitably follow the spreading of the news that he had been beaten up and made ridiculous by Kenneth. He swallowed—a look of indecision passed over his face as he visibly wondered if Kenneth really dared hit him—followed by a look of fear as Kenneth drew back his fist as though to strike. Discretion seemed the better course to pursue he could wait until a later and more propitious date for his revenge—he agreed to help. A look of relief came over Jim Bradley’s face. A grin covered Bob’s as he saw his brother showing at last some signs of fighting spirit. Without further words Kenneth prepared to operate. …

The patient under the ether, Kenneth with sure, deft strokes made an incision and rapidly removed the appendix. Ten—twelve—fifteen minutes, and the work was done. He found Mrs. Bradley’s peritoneum badly inflamed, the appendix swollen and about to burst. A few hours’ delay and it would have been too late. …

The next morning Mrs. Bradley’s temperature had gone down to normal. Two weeks later she was sufficiently recovered to be removed to her home. Three weeks later she was on her feet again. Then Kenneth for the first time in his life had no fault to find with the vigour with which Mrs. Bradley could use her tongue. Glorying as only such a woman can in her temporary fame at escape from death by so narrow a margin, she went up and down the streets of the town telling how Kenneth had saved her life. With each telling of the story it took on more embellishments until eventually the simple operation ranked in importance in her mind with the first sewing-up of the human heart.

Kenneth found his practice growing. His days were filled with his work. One man viewed his growing practice with bitterness. It was Dr. Williams, resentful of the small figure he had cut in the episode in Kenneth’s office, which had become known all over Central City. Of a petty and vindictive nature, he bided his time until he could force atonement from the upstart who had so presumptuously insulted and belittled him, the Beau Brummel, the leading physician, the prominent coloured citizen. But Kenneth, if he knew of the hatred in the man’s heart, was supremely oblivious of it.

The morning after his operation on Mrs. Bradley, he added another to the list of those who did not wish him well. He had taken the bottle of alcohol containing Mrs. Bradley’s appendix to Dr. Bennett to show that worthy that he had been right, after all, in his diagnosis. He found him seated in his office, Dr. Bennett, with little apparent interest, glanced at the bottle.

“Humph!” he ejaculated, aiming at the cuspidor and letting fly a thin stream of tobacco juice which accurately met its mark. “You never can tell what’s wrong with a nigger anyhow. They ain’t got nacheral diseases like white folks. A hoss doctor can treat ’em better’n one that treats humans. I always said that a nigger’s more animal than human. …”

Kenneth had been eager to discuss the case of Mrs. Bradley with his fellow practitioner. He had not even been asked to sit down by Dr. Bennett. He realized for the first time that in spite of the superiority of his medical training to that of Dr. Bennett’s, the latter did not recognize him as a qualified physician, but only as a “nigger doctor.” Making some excuse, he left the house. Dr. Bennett turned back to the local paper he had been reading when Kenneth entered, took a fresh chew of tobacco from the plug in his hip pocket, grunted, and remarked: “A damned nigger telling me I don’t know medicine!”

CHAPTER IV

Two months passed by. Kenneth had begun to secure more patients than he could very well handle. Already he was kept busier than Dr. Williams though there was enough practice for both of them. Kenneth soon began to tire of treating minor ailments and longed to reach the time when he could give up his general practice and devote his time to surgery. Except for the delivery of the babies that came with amazing rapidity in the community, he did little else than treat colic, minor cuts, children’s diseases, with an occasional case of tuberculosis. More frequently he treated for venereal diseases, though this latter was even more distasteful to him than general practice while at the same time more remunerative.

A new source of practice and revenue began gradually to grow. The main entrance to his office was on Lee Street. This door was some fifty feet back from Lee Street, and the overhanging branches of the elms cut off completely the light from the street lamp at the corner. One night, as he sat reading in his office, there came a knock at his door. Opening it, he found standing there Roy Ewing. Ewing had inherited the general merchandise store bearing his name from his father, was a deacon in the largest Baptist Church in Central City, was president of the Central City Chamber of Commerce, and was regarded as a leading citizen.

Kenneth gazed at his caller in some surprise.

“Hello, Ken. Anybody around?”

On being assured that he was alone, Ewing entered, brushing by Kenneth to get out of the glare of the light. Kenneth followed him into the office, meanwhile asking his caller what he could do for him.

“Ken, I’ve got a little job I want you to do for me. I’m in a little trouble. Went up to Macon last month with Bill Jackson, and we had a little fun. I guess I took too much liquor. We went by a place Bill knew about where there were some girls. I took a fancy to a little girl from Atlanta who told me she had slipped away from home and her folks thought she was visiting her cousins at Forsyth. Anyhow, I thought everything was all right, but I’m in a bad way and I want you to treat me. I can’t go to Dr. Bennett ’cause I don’t want him to know about it. I’ll take care of you all right, and if you get me fixed up I’ll pay you well.”

Kenneth looked at him in amazement. Roy Ewing, acknowledged leader of the “superior race”! He knew too much of the ways of the South, however, to make any comment or let too much of what was going on in his mind show on his face. He gave the treatment required. That was Kenneth’s introduction to one part of the work of a coloured physician in the South. Many phases of life that he as a youth had never known about or, before his larger experience in the North and in France, had passed by him unnoticed, he now had brought to his attention. This was one of them. He began to see more clearly that his was going to be a difficult course to pursue. He determined anew that as far as possible he would keep to his own affairs and meddle not at all with the life about him.

When Ewing had gone, Kenneth returned to his reading. Hardly had he started again when Bob came in.

“Can you stop for a few minutes, Ken? I want to talk with you.”

With a look of regret at his book, Kenneth settled back and prepared to listen.

“What world problem have you got on your mind now, Bob?”

“Don’t start to kidding me, Ken. I don’t see how you can shut your eyes to how coloured people are being treated here.”

“What’s wrong? Everything seems to me to be getting along as well as can be expected.”

“That’s because you don’t go out of the house unless you are hurrying to give somebody a pill or a dose of medicine. To-day I came by the school to get Mamie and bring her home. You ought to see the dump they call a school building. It’s a dirty old building that looks like it’ll fall down any time a hard wind comes along. All that’s inside is a rickety table, and some hard benches with no desks, and when it rains they have to send the children home, as the water stands two or three inches deep on the floor. Outside of Mamie they haven’t one teacher who’s gone any higher than the sixth or seventh grade—they have to take anybody who is willing to work for the twelve dollars a month they pay coloured teachers.”

Bob’s face had on it the look of discontent and resentment that was almost growing chronic.

“Well, what can we do about it? I’m afraid you’re getting to be a regular Atlas, trying to carry all the burdens of the world on your shoulders. I know things aren’t all they ought to be, but you and I can’t solve the problems. The race problem will be here long after we’re dead and gone.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, shut up that preachy tone of long-suffering patience, will you?—and forget your own little interests for a while. I know you think I’m silly to let these things worry me. But the reason why things are as bad as they are is just because the majority of Negroes are like you—always dodging anything that may make them unpopular with white folks. And that isn’t all. There’s a gang of white boys that hang around Ewing’s Store that meddle with every coloured girl that goes by. I was in the store to-day when Minnie Baxter passed by on her way to the post office, and that dirty little Jim Archer said something that made me boil all over. And it didn’t help any to know that if I had said a word to him, there would have been a fight, and I would have been beaten half to death if I hadn’t been killed.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that, too. What we ought to do is to try and keep these girls off of Lee Street, unless someone is with them. If we weren’t living in the South, we might do something. But here we are, and as long as we stay here, we’ve got to swallow a lot of these things and stay to ourselves.”

“But, Ken, it isn’t always convenient for someone to go downtown with them. I’ll tell you what let’s do. Let’s get the better class of coloured people together like Reverend Wilson, Mr. Graham, Mr. Adams, and some others, and form a Coloured Protective League here in Central City. We can then take up these cases and see if something can’t be done to remedy them.”

Bob leaned forward in his eagerness to impress Kenneth with his idea.

“You see, if any one or two of us takes up a case we are marked men. But if there are two or three hundred of us they can’t take it out on all of us.”

“That’s true. But what about the effect on the white people whose actions you want to check? If Negroes start organizing for any purpose whatever, there’ll always be folks who’ll declare they are planning to start some trouble. No, I don’t think we ought to do anything just now. I tell you what I’ll do. The next time I see Roy Ewing, I’ll speak to him and ask him to stop those fellows from annoying our girls, The fellows can take care of themselves.”

Bob rose and shrugged his shoulders and said nothing more. Kenneth after a minute or two returned to his book.

Nothing further was said on the subject for several days. When Mr. Ewing called the following week, Kenneth brought the matter up, and told him what Bob had said about the boys in front of Ewing’s store.

“I’ve seen them doing it, Ken, and I spoke to them only to-day about it. But you know, boys will be boys, and they haven’t done any harm to the girls. Their talk is a little rough at times, but as long as it stops there, I don’t see why anybody should object.”

“But, Mr. Ewing, Bob tells me that they say some pretty raw things. Suppose one of them said the same things to Mrs. Ewing, how would you feel then?”

Ewing flushed.

“That’s different. Mrs. Ewing is a white woman.”

“But can’t you see that we feel towards our women just as you do towards yours? If one of those fellows ever spoke to my sister, there’s be trouble, and the Lord knows I want to get along with all the people here, if I can. If this thing called democracy that I helped fight for is worth anything at all, it ought to mean that we coloured people should be protected like anybody else.”

Mr. Ewing looked at Kenneth sharply.

“I know that things aren’t altogether as they ought to be. It’s pretty tough on fellows like you, Ken, who have had an education. While you were away, a bunch of these mill hands ’cross the tracks got Jerry Bird, a nigger that’d been working for me nearly five years. He came here from down the country some place after you left for up North. Jerry was as steady a fellow as I’ve ever seen—as honest as the day was long. I trusted Jerry anywhere, lots quicker than I would’ve some of these white people ’round here. He had a black skin but his heart was white. One night Jerry was over to my house helping Mrs. Ewing until nearly ten o’clock. On his way home this bunch of roughnecks from “Factoryville” stopped him while they were looking for a nigger that’d scared a white girl. When Jerry got scared and started to run, they took out after him and strung him up to a tree. And he wasn’t any more guilty of touching that white girl than you or me.”

“What did you do about it?” asked Bob.

“Nothing. Suppose I had kicked up a ruckus about it. They found out afterwards that the girl hadn’t been bothered at all. But just suppose I had gone and cussed out the fellows who did the lynching. Most of them trade at my store. Or if they don’t, a lot of their friends do. They’d have taken their trade to some other store and I’d ‘a’ gained nothing for my trouble.”

“But surely you don’t believe that lynching ever helps, do you?”

“Yes and no. Lynching never bothers folks like you. Why, your daddy was one of the most respected folks in this town. But lynching does keep some of these young nigger bucks in check.”

“Does it? It seems to me that there isn’t much less so-called rape around here or anywhere else in the South, even after forty years of lynching. Mr. Ewing, why don’t you and the other decent white people here come out against lynching?”

“Who? Me? Never!” Ewing looked his amazement at the suggestion. “Why, it would ruin my business, my wife would begin to be dropped by all the other folks of the town, and it wouldn’t be long before they’d begin calling me a ‘nigger-lover.’ No, sir-ee! I’ll just let things rock along and let well enough alone.”

“Mr. Ewing, if fifty men like you in this town banded together and came out flat-footedly against lynching, there are lots more who would join you gladly.”

“That may be true,” Ewing answered doubtfully. “But then again it mightn’t. Let’s see who might be some of the fifty. There’s George Baird, he’s president of the Bank of Central City, and Fred Griswold, president of the Smith County Farmers’ Bank. You can count them out because they’d be afraid of losing their depositors. Then there’s Ralph Minor who owns the Bon Ton Store. He’s out for the same reason that I am. Then there’s Nat Phelps, who runs the Central City Dispatch. He has a hard enough time as it is. If he lost a couple of hundred subscribers, he’d have to close up shop. And so it goes.”

“What about the preachers? It doesn’t seem much of a religion they’re preaching if the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ doesn’t form part of their creed.”

“Oh, you needn’t look for nothing much from them. Three years ago old Reverend Adams down to the First Methodist took it into his head he was going to tackle something easy—nothing like the race problem. He started in to wipe out the bootleggers ’round here, thinking he could get a lot of support. But he didn’t, because most of the folks he figgered on lining up with him were regular customers of the fellows he was after.” Ewing chuckled at the memory of the crusade that had died “aborning.” “When the next quarterly conference was held, they elected a new pastor for the First Methodist. No, Ken, it ain’t so easy as it looks. You’re asking me to do something that not a Southern white man has done since the Civil War⸺”

Rising, he walked towards the door and remarked:

“My advice to you is to stay away from any talk like this with anybody else. There probably ain’t another man in town who would’ve talked to you like this, and if the boys in the Ku Klux Klan knew I had been running along like this with a coloured man, I don’t know what’d happen to me. See you later. So long!”

Kenneth walked up and down the room with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, his thoughts rushing through his head in helter-skelter fashion. He was suddenly conscious of a feeling that he had been thrust into a tiny boat and forced to embark on a limitless sea, with neither compass nor chart nor sun nor moon to guide him. Would he arrive? Or would he go down in some squall which arose from he knew not where or when? The whole situation seemed so vast, so sinister, so monstrous, that he shuddered involuntarily, as he had done as a child when left alone in a dark room at night. Religion, which had been the guide and stay of his father in like circumstances, offered him no solace. He thought with a faint smile of the institution known as the Church. What was it? A vast money machine, interested in rallies and pastors’ days and schemes to milk more dollars from its communicants. In preparing people to die. He wasn’t interested in what was going to happen to him after death. What he wanted was some guide and comfort in his present problems. No, religion and the Church as it was now constituted wasn’t the answer. What was? He could not give it.

“Here I am,” he soliloquized, “with the best education money can buy. And yet Roy Ewing, who hasn’t been any further than high school, tells me I’d better submit to all this without protest. Yet he stands for the best there is here in Central City, and I suppose he represents the most liberal thought of the South. How’s it all going to end? Even a rat will fight when he’s cornered, and these coloured people aren’t going to stand for these things all the time. What can I do? God, there isn’t anything—anything I can do? Bob is right! Something must be done, but what is it? I reckon these white folks must be blind—or else they figure on leaving whatever solution there may be to their children, hoping the storm doesn’t break while they are liv. ing. No! That isn’t it. They think because they’ve been able to get away with it thus far, they’ll always be able to get away with it. Oh, God, I’m helpless! I’m helpless!”

Kenneth had begun to comprehend the delicate position a Negro always occupies in places like Central City—in fact, throughout the South. So little had he come into contact with the perplexities of the race question before he went away to school, he had seen little of the windings and turnings, the tortuous paths the Negro must follow to avoid giving offence to the dominant white sentiment. As he saw each day more and more of the evasions, the repressions, the choking back of natural impulses the Negro practised to avoid trouble, Kenneth often thought of the coloured man as a chip of wood floating on the surface of a choppy sea, tossed this way and that by every wind that blew upon the waters. He must of necessity be constantly on his guard when talking with his white neighbours, or with any white men in the South, to keep from uttering some word, some phrase which, like a seed dropped and forgotten, lies fallow for a time in the brain of the one to whom he talks, but later blossoms forth into that noxious death-dealing plant which is the mob. Innocent enough of guile or malice that word may be, yet he must be careful lest it be distorted and magnified until it can be the cause of violence to himself and his people. Often—very often—it is true that no evil follows. Yet the possibility that it may come must always be considered. But one factor is fixed and immutable the more intelligent and prosperous the Negro and the more ignorant and poor the white man, the graver the danger, for in the mind of the latter are jealousy and ignorance and stupidity and abject fear of the educated and successful Negro.

His talk with Ewing had crystallized the thoughts, half developed, which his observations since his return had planted in his mind. Kenneth began to see how involved the whole question really was, he was seeing dim paths of expediency and opportunism he would be forced to tread if he expected to reach the goal he had set for himself. Already he found one of his pet ideas to be of doubtful value the theory he had had that success would give a Negro immunity from persecution. Like a scroll slowly unwinding before his eyes, Kenneth saw, as yet only partially, that instead of freeing him from danger of the mob, too great prosperity would make him and every other Negro outstanding targets of the wrath and envy of the poorer whites—that jealousy which “is cruel as the grave.” Oh, well, he reflected, others had avoided trouble and so could he. He would have to be exceedingly careful to avoid too great display, and at the same time cultivate the goodwill of those men like Roy Ewing and Judge Stevenson who would stand by him if there was need.

CHAPTER V

Kenneth was roused by a light tap upon the door. Opening it, Mamie stood on the threshold. Inquiring whether Kenneth had finished his work, and on being told he had, she entered. “Kenneth, why do you spend all your time here in the office? Don’t you think mamma and I want to talk with you occasionally?”

Mamie seated herself on the arm of Kenneth’s chair.

“Seems like you’re becoming a regular hermit since you’ve been back. Come on in the parlour—Jane Phillips is in there and she wants to see you. Remember her?”

Kenneth smiled. “Remember Jane Phillips? Of course I do. Scrawny little thing—running all to legs and arms. She was a homely little brat, wasn’t she?”

It was now Mamie’s turn to smile.

“I’m going to tell her what you said,” she threatened. “She’s lots different from the girl you remember.”

They went into the parlour.

Jane Phillips stood by the piano. She turned as Kenneth and Mamie entered the room, and came towards them, a smile on her face. Kenneth, as he advanced towards her, was frankly amazed at the transformation in the girl whom he had not seen for nine years. Jane laughed.

“Don’t you know me, Kenneth? Or must I call you Dr. Harper now?”

“No, my name is still Kenneth⸺” he answered.

“Tell Jane what you called her a few minutes ago, or I will,” interrupted Mamie. Kenneth looked embarrassed. Jane insisted on being told, whereupon Mamie repeated Kenneth’s description of Jane as a child.

Caught between the upper and nether millstones of the raillery of the two girls, Kenneth tried to explain away his embarrassment, but they gave him no peace.

“Let me explain,” he begged. “When I went away you were a scrawny little thing, a regular tomboy and as mischievous as they make them. And now you’re a—you’re—you’re” Jane laughed at his attempt, somewhat lacking in fullness, to say what she had become with the passage of the years.

“Whatever it is you are trying to say, I hope it’s something all right you are calling me—though from your tone I’m not at all sure,” she ended, letting a note of mock concern creep in her voice.

By this time Kenneth had somewhat recovered his composure. He entered into the spirit of play himself by telling her his surprise had been due to his finding her unchanged from the little girl he had once known, but Jane laughed at his ineffectual efforts to answer Mamie’s and her teasing. To change the conversation, he demanded that she tell him all that she had been doing since he saw her last.

“There isn’t much to tell,” she declared. “I went away soon after you did, going to Fisk University, graduated last June, got a position teaching in North Carolina, and am home for the holidays. Next year I want to have enough money to go to Oberlin and finish my music. That’s all there is to my little story. You are the one who has been having all sorts of experiences. I want to hear your story.”

“Mine isn’t much longer,” answered Kenneth. “Four years of medical school. A year’s interneship in New York at Bellevue. Three months in training camps. A year and a half in France. Six months at the Sorbonne. Then New York. Then exams at Atlanta for my licence. Home. And here I am.”

“Don’t you believe him, Jane,” said Mamie.

“That’s just his way of telling it. Ken has had all sorts of exciting experiences, yet he has come home and we can’t get him to talk about a thing except building a practice and a hospital.”

“What do you want me to talk about?” asked Kenneth.

“Paris—school—army life what did you see?—how do you like New York?—is New York as good a place to live in as Paris?”

Kenneth threw up his hands in mock defence at the barrage of questions Jane and Mamie fired at him.

“Just a minute—just a minute,” he begged them. “I could talk all night on any one of the questions you’ve asked and then not finish with it or tell you more than half. If you two will only be quiet, I’ll tell you as much as I can.”

Mrs. Harper, hearing the voices, came into the room. The three women sat in silence as Kenneth told of his years at school, of his stay in New York, his experiences in the army, of the beauties of Paris even in war time, of study at a French university. He gave to the narrative a vividness and air of reality that made his auditors see through his eyes the scenes and experiences he was describing. Though none of them had been in France, he made them feel as though they too were walking through the Place de la Concorde viewing the statues to the eight great cities of France or shopping in the Rue de la Paix or attempting to order dinner in a restaurant with an all-too-inadequate French vocabulary. He finished.

“Now you’ve got to sing for me, Jane, as a reward for all the talking I’ve been doing.”

With the usual feminine protests that she had no music with her, Jane went to the open piano. She inquired what he would like to have her sing.

“Anything except the ‘Memphis Blues,’ which is all I’ve heard since I came back to Central City,” he answered.

Jane ran over the keys experimentally, improvising. A floor lamp stood near the piano casting a soft light over her. Her long, delicately pointed fingers lingered lovingly on the ivory keys, and then she played the opening bars of Saint-Saën’s “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice.” Her voice, a rounded, rich contralto, showing considerable training, gave to the song a tender pathos, a yearning, a promise of deep and understanding love. She sang with a grace and clear phrasing that bespoke the simple charm of the singer. Kenneth gazed at her in wonder at the amazing metamorphosis of the shy, gawky child Jane whom he had only rarely noticed, and then with the condescending air of twenty looking at twelve. In her stead had come a woman, rounded, attractive even beautiful, intelligent, and altogether desirable. The chrysalis had changed to the gorgeously coloured butterfly. Her skin was a soft brown—almost bronze. He thought of velvety pansies richly coloured—of the warmth of rubies of great price of the lustrous beauty of the sky on a spring evening. Her eyes shone with a sparkling and provocative clearness, looking straight at one from their brown depths. Little tendrils of her black hair at the back of her neck were disturbed every now and then by the breeze from the open windows, while above were piled masses of coiled blackness that shone in the dim light with a glossy lustre. To Kenneth came visions of a soft-eyed señorita in an old Spanish town leaning from her balcony while below, to the accompaniment of a muted guitar, her lover sang to her of his ardent love. Kenneth blushed when he realized that in every picture he had cast himself for the rôle of gallant troubadour.

His mother had quietly slipped from the room to retire for the evening. Mamie had gone to prepare something cool for them to drink. Kenneth had not heard them go. In fact, lost in the momentary forgetfulness created by Jane and the song, he had completely forgotten them. He did not, however, fail to realize that the dreams he was having were in large measure due to the soft light, to surprise at the great changes in Jane, to the lulling seductiveness of the music. He was sure that his feeling was due in largest measure to a reaction from his unpleasant conversation with Roy Ewing. He vaguely realized that when on the morrow he saw Jane by daylight, she would not seem half so charming and attractive. Yet he was of such a temperament that he could give himself up to the spell of the moment and extract from it all the pleasure in it. It was in that manner he put aside the things which were unpleasant, enabling him to shake off memories like mists of the morning ascending from the depths of a valley.

The song was ended. Herself caught in its spell, Jane swung into that most beautiful of the Negro spirituals, “Deep River.” Into it she poured her soul. She filled the room with the pathos of that song born in the dark days of slavery of a people torn from their home and thrust into the thraldom of human bondage.

And then Jane sang “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The song ended, her fingers yet clung to the keys but her hands hung listless. Kenneth knew not how or when he had risen from his chair and gone to the piano where he stood behind Jane. Something deep within them had been touched by the music—a strange thrill filled them, making them oblivious to everything except the presence of each other. Kenneth lightly placed his hands on her shoulders. Without speaking or turning, she placed her hands for a moment on his. He bent over her while she raised her face to his, her eyes misty with tears born of the emotion aroused by the song. Though often laughed at in real life and often distorted in fiction, love almost at first sight had been born within them. Kenneth slowly brought her face nearer his while Jane, with parted lips, let the back of her head rest against his breast. Love, with its strange retroactive effects, brought to both of them in that moment the sudden realization, though neither of them had known it, that they had always loved each other. Not a word had been spoken—each was busy constructing his love in silence. A great emptiness in their lives had been suddenly, miraculously filled.

Their lips were almost touching when a noise brought them to themselves with a shock. It was Mamie. She entered the room bearing a tray on which were sandwiches, cakes, and tall glasses in which cracked ice clinked coolingly. Kenneth hid his annoyance and, with as nonchalant an air as possible, went back to his chair.

When they had eaten, Jane rose to go. Kenneth walked home with her. Neither spoke until they had reached her gate. Jane entered as Kenneth held it open for her. He would have followed her in but she turned, extended her hand to him as a sign of dismissal, and asked him to leave her there. Kenneth said nothing, but his face showed his disappointment at being hastened away by the same girl who less than half an hour before had almost been in his arms.

“Please don’t say anything, Ken,” she pleaded. “It was my fault—I shouldn’t have done what I did. I used to worship you when I was little, but I thought I had gotten over that—until to-night.”

Her voice sank almost to a whisper. In it was a note of trouble and perplexity. She went on:

“I—oh, Kenneth—what happened to-night must not be repeated.”

Puzzled and a bit hurt, he asked her what she meant.

“Don’t get the wrong idea, Ken. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you for the world.”

“But what is it, Jane?” begged Kenneth. “I love you, Jane, have always loved you. I was blind—until to-night⸺”

Kenneth poured forth the words in a torrent of emotion. Whirling thoughts tore through his brain. He sought to seize Jane’s hand and draw her to him, but she eluded him.

“No—no—Kenneth, you mustn’t. I can’t let you make love to me. Let’s be friends, Ken, and enjoy these few days and forget all we’ve said to-night, won’t you, please?” she ended pleadingly.

Kenneth said nothing. He turned abruptly and strode away without even saying good night. Hands thrust deep into his pockets, his head hanging in disappointment and wounded pride, he hurried home without once turning to look back. …

Her ten days of vacation passed all too soon for Jane. She and Kenneth saw each other frequently, but never alone until the night before she returned to North Carolina. It was at a dance given in her honour. All evening he had been seeking a dance with her, but met with no success until the party was almost over. They danced in silence. Jane seemed suddenly sad. All evening she had been happy, gay, even flirtatious, but now that she was with Kenneth, her gaiety had been dropped like a mask. Half-way through the dance they came near a door that opened on a balcony overlooking a flower garden. Saying nothing to Jane, Kenneth danced her through the door and on to the balcony, where they sat on a bench that stood in the semi-darkness. Though it was December, the air was warm. No sound disturbed the silence of the night save the music and voices which floated through the open door.

“Haven’t you anything to say?” Kenneth anxiously inquired, taking one of Jane’s hands in his.

“Nothing except this—I don’t know whether I care for you or not,” said Jane as she freed her hand and drew herself away. Her voice was firm and determined. Kenneth, ignorant of the ways of a maid with a man, said nothing, but his shoulders drooped dejectedly.

“What happened the other night was madness—I was very foolish for allowing it.” She paused, and then went on. “Kenneth, I don’t know, I want my music, I want to see something of life I want to live! I just can’t tie myself down by marrying—I don’t know whether I’ll ever want to. You’ll have to wait—if you care to⸺”

It was half command, half question. He said nothing.

He did not know how she longed for him to argue with her, override her objections, convince her against her will. She waited a full minute. Still he sat there silent. She rose and re-entered the house, leaving him there alone.

CHAPTER VI

Life moved along evenly with Kenneth, busied with the multitude of duties with which the physician in the half-rural, half-urban towns of the South must deal. His days were filled with his blasto work and he was usually to be found in his office until ten or eleven o’clock every evening. Often he was roused in the middle of the night to attend some one of his patients. He did not mind this except when calls came to him from the outlying country districts. Not infrequently he made long trips of seven, eight, or ten miles into the country to treat some person who might just as well have called him during the previous day. He had purchased a Ford runabout in which he made these trips.

On a Sunday morning soon after his return to Central City, Kenneth with his mother, Mamie, and Bob attended the Mount Zion Baptist Church, but this he did without much eagerness, solely as a duty.

Though years had passed since last he entered the church, Kenneth noticed that it stood as it always had, save that it looked more down-at-heel than formerly. Before the door stood the same little groups, eagerly snatching a few words of conversation before entering. Near the door were ranged the young men, garbed in raiment of varied and brilliant hue, ogling the girls as they passed in with their parents. There was much good-natured badinage and scuffling among the youths, with an occasional burst of ribald laughter at the momentary discomfiture of one of their number. As he passed them, Kenneth smiled to himself as he remembered how he but a few years since had been one of that crowd around the same door. That is, one of the crowd until his father, with a stern word or perhaps only a meaningful glance, had been wont to summon him within the church. Often had he been teased unmercifully by the other boys when one of these summonses had come.

Though the jests had been hard to bear, the likelihood of paternal wrath had been too unpleasant an alternative for him to dare disregard his father’s commands.

Kenneth noticed the vestibule had survived the passage of years without apparent change, if one disregarded the increased dinginess of the carpet. There was the same glass-covered bulletin board with its list of the sick and of those who were delinquent in the payment of their dues. There was the same dangling rope with a loop at the end of it, and the same sexton was about to ring the bell above, announcing the beginning of the morning service. There were the same yellowed walls, the same leather-covered swinging doors with the same greasy spots where countless hands had pushed them to enter the auditorium of the church. Kenneth smiled to himself as he remembered how he once had declared in a dispute with a boy whose parents attended the Methodist church near by that the Mount Zion Baptist Church was “the biggest and finest church in the whole world.” He thought of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, of St. Paul’s in London, as he recalled the boast of his youth.

Inside, the same air of unchanging permanence seemed also to have ruled. As he followed the officious usher and his mother and sister to their pew, Kenneth noted the same rows of hard seats worn shiny by years of use, the same choir loft to the left of the pulpit with its faded red curtains. The same worn Bible lay open on the pulpit kept open by a hymn-book. Beside it was the same ornately carved silver pitcher and goblet. Kenneth felt as though he had never left Central City when he looked for and found the patches of calcimine hanging from the ceiling and the yellowed marks on the walls made by water dripping from leaks in the roof. As a boy he had amused himself during seemingly interminable sermons by constructing all sorts of fanciful stories around these same marks, seeing in them weirdly shaped animals. Once he had laughed aloud when, after gazing at one of them, it had suddenly dawned upon him that the shadow cast by a pendent flake of calcimine resembled the lean and hungry-looking preacher who was pastoring Mount Zion at the time. Kenneth would never forget the commotion his sudden laughter had caused, nor the whipping he received when he and his father reached home that Sunday.

The hum of conversation ceased. The pastor, the Reverend Ezekiel Wilson, entered the pulpit from a little door back of it. The choir sang lustily the Doxology. All the familiar services came back to Kenneth as he sat and looked at the dusky faces around him.

Preliminaries ended, the Reverend Wilson began to preach. He was a fat, pompous, oily man—with a smooth and unctuous manner. His voice sank at times to a whisper—at others, roared until the rafters of the building seemed to ring with its echoes. He played on it as consciously as the dried-up little organist in the gaily coloured bonnet did on the keys of the asthmatic little organ. His text was taken from the 13th chapter of First Corinthians, first verse that familiar text, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

Slowly, softly, he began to speak.

“Breddern and sisters, they’s a lot of you folks right here this mawnin’ what thinks you is Christ’uns. You think jus’ ‘cause you comes here ev’ry Sunday and sings and shouts and rants around dat you is got the sperit of Jesus in you. Well, I’m tellin’ you this mawnin’ dat you’d better wake up and get yo’self right with God, ’cause you ain’t no mo Christ’un dan if you neveh been to chu’ch a-tall. De Good Book says you got to have char’ty, and de Good Book don’t lie.”

There came from the Amen corner a fervently shouted “Amen!” From another came as equally fervid a shout: “Ain’t it the truth!” The preacher paused for effect. He mopped his brow and glared around the congregation. His auditors sat in expectant silence. Suddenly he lashed out in scathing arraignment of the sins of his flock. Each and every one of its faults he pilloried with words of fire and brimstone. He painted a vivid and uncomfortably realistic picture of a burning Hell into which all sinners would inevitably be cast. Almost with the air of a hypnotist, he gradually advanced the tempo of his speech. Like a wind playing over a field of corn, swaying the tops of the stalks as it wills, so did he play on the emotions and fears and passions of his congregation. Only a master of human psychology could have done it. It was a living, breathing, vengeful God he preached, and his auditors fearfully swayed and rocked to and fro as he lashed them unmercifully. Lips compressed, there came from them a nasal confirmation of the preacher’s words that ranged from deep, guttural grunts of approval as he scored a point to a high-pitched rising and falling moan that sounded like nothing so much as a child blowing through tissue paper stretched over a comb. Frequently the preacher would without perceptible pause swing into a rolling, swinging, half-moaning song which the congregation took up with fervour. The beat was steadily advanced by the leader until he and his audience were worked up to an emotional ecstasy bordering on hysteria. His jeremiad ended, the preacher painted a glowing picture of the ineffable peace and joy that came to those who rested their faith in Him who died for the remission of their sins.

A tumultuous thunderous climax—a dramatic pause and then he swung into a fervent prayer in which the preacher talked as though his God were an intimate friend and confidant. The entire drama lasting more than an hour was thrilling and enervating and theatric. Yet beneath it lay a devout sincerity that removed the scene from the absurd to that which bordered on the magnificent. To these humble folk their religion was the most important thing in their lives, and, after all, what matters it what a man does? It is the spirit in which he performs an act that makes it dignified or pathetic or ludicrous—not the act itself.

In spite of his sophistication, Kenneth never was able entirely to ward off the chills of excitement that ran down his spine at these weird religious ceremonies. He saw through the whole theatric performance and yet way down beneath it all there was a sincerity and genuineness that never failed to impress him. This was not a mere animalism nor was it the joke that white people sometimes tried to make of it. Fundamentally, it was rooted and grounded in an immutable and unfailing belief in the supreme power of a tangible God—a God that personally directed the most minute of the affairs of the most lowly of creatures. It had been the guide and refuge of the fathers and mothers of these same people through the dark days of slavery. In the same manner it was almost the only refuge for these children and grandchildren of the slaves in withstanding the trials of a latter-day slavery in many respects more oppressive than the pre-Civil War variety.

Kenneth walked home from church running over these things in his mind. Was this religious fervour the best thing for his people? Why did not the Church attract more intelligent and able young men of his race instead of men like Reverend Wilson? Why didn’t some twentieth-century Moses arise to lead them out of the thraldom of this primitive religion? Would that Moses, when he came, be able to offer a solace as effective to enable these people of his to bear the burdens that lay so heavily upon them?

He thought again of his conversation with Roy Ewing. What was the elusive solution to this problem of race in America? Why couldn’t the white people of the South see where their course was leading them? Ewing was right. No white man of the South had ever come out in complete defiance of the present regime which was so surely damning the South and America. Kenneth saw his people kept in the bondage of ignorance. Why? Because it was to the economic advantage of the white South to have it so. Why was a man like Reverend Wilson patted on the back and every Negro told that men of his kind were “safe and sane leaders”? Why was every Negro who too audibly or visibly resented the brutalities and proscriptions of race prejudice instantly labelled as a radical—a dangerous character—as one seeking “social equality”? What was this thing called “social equality” anyhow? That was an easy question to answer. It was about the only one he could answer with any completeness. White folks didn’t really believe that Negroes sought to force themselves in places where they weren’t wanted, any more than decent white people wanted to force themselves where they were not invited. No, that was the smoke-screen to hide something more sinister. Social equality would lead to intermarriage, they thought, and the legitimatizing of the countless half-coloured sons and daughters of these white people. Why, if every child in the South were a legitimate one, more than half of the land and property in the South would belong to coloured owners.

Did the white people who were always talking about “social equality” think they really were fooling anybody with their constant denunciation of it? Twenty-nine States of America had laws against intermarriage. All these laws were passed by white legislators. Were these laws passed to keep Negroes from seizing some white woman and forcing her to marry him against her will? Or were these laws unconscious admissions by these white men that they didn’t trust their women or their men to keep from marrying Negroes? Any fool knew that if two people didn’t want to marry each other, there was no law of God or man to make them marry. No, the laws were passed because white men wanted to have their own women and use coloured women too without any law interfering with their affairs or making them responsible for the consequences.

Kenneth usually ended these arguments with himself with a feeling of complete impotence, of travelling around like a squirrel in a circular cage. No matter where he started or how fast or how far he travelled, he always wound up at the same point and with the same sense of blind defeat. Oh, well, better men than he had tried to answer the same questions and failed. He’d stay to himself and attend to his own business and let such problems go hang. But in spite of himself he often found himself enmeshed in this endless maze of reasoning. Just as frequently he determined to put from himself again the perplexing and seemingly insoluble problems.

It was after one of these soliloquies on his way from church one bright Sunday in April that Kenneth reached home and found a call for him to come at once to a house down on Butler Street, in the heart of the Negro district in the bottoms. Telling his mother to keep dinner for him as he would be back shortly, he hurried down State Street. Turning suddenly into Harris Street, which crossed State, which in turn would lead him to the house he sought on Butler Street, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a white man who looked like George Parker, cashier of the Bank of Central City Parker, if it was he, turned hastily at Kenneth’s approach and went up a narrow alley which ran off Harris Street. Kenneth thought nothing of the incident other than a vague and quickly passing wonder at Parker’s presence in that part of town.

Kenneth hurried on, instinctively stepping over or around the numerous children whose complexions ranged in colour from a deep black to a yellow that was almost white, and mangy-looking dogs that seemed to infest the street. Approaching the house he sought, he found a group of excitedly talking Negroes gathered around the gate. The group separated to let him pass, and from it came one or two greetings to Kenneth in the form of “Hello, Doc.” He paid little attention to them, but proceeded up the path to the house.

Entering, he was surprised to find it furnished more ornately and comfortably than usual in that section. He knew the place of old, remembering that his father had always warned him against going into this section. Here it was reported that strange things went on, that a raid by the police was not uncommon. He had upon one occasion seen the patrol wagon, better known as the “Black Maria,” drive away loaded with bottles of whisky and with a nondescript lot of coloured men and women. Most of the property in this section was owned by white people, which they held on to jealously. They charged and received rentals two or three times as high as in other sections of “Darktown.”

Kenneth found in the front room another excited and chattering lot of men and women. The men seemed rather furtive and were dressed in “peg-top” trousers with wide cuffs, and gaudily coloured shirts. The women were clad in red and pink kimonos and boudoir caps. With an inclusive “Hello, folks,” Kenneth followed a woman who seemed to be in charge of the house into the next room. In the centre of the darkened room there stood the bed, dishevelled, the sheets stained with blood. On them lay a man fully clothed, his eyes closed as though in great pain, and breathing heavily, with sharp gasps every few seconds. By the bed, bathing the man’s brow, stood a woman in a rumpled night-dress and kimono. Kenneth recognized the man as Bud Ware, sometimes a Pullman porter, who used his occupation, it was rumoured, to bring liquor from Atlanta, which his wife sold. It was his wife Nancy who bathed his brow and who moved away from the bed when Kenneth approached. She informed him that he had come home unexpectedly from his run, and had been shot. Kenneth said nothing but went immediately to work. He found Bud with two bullet holes in his abdomen and one through his right leg. It was evident that he had but a few hours, at most, to live. Kenneth did what he could to relieve Bud’s suffering. Turning to Nancy, he told her what he had discovered. She stared at Kenneth wide-eyed for a minute and then burst forth in an agony of weeping.

“Oh, Lawdy, why didn’t I do what Bud tol’ me to do? Bud tol’ me to let dat man alone! Why didn’t I do it? Why didn’t I do it?”

Her screams mounted higher and higher until they reached ear-piercing shrieks. A head or two were stuck interrogatively through the opened door at the sound of Nancy’s woe, and as quickly withdrawn. Kenneth administered an opiate to Bud to relieve his pain and sat by the bed to do what he could in the short while that life remained. The sordidness of the whole affair sickened him and he longed to get away where he could breathe freely.

Strengthened by the opiate, Bud’s eyes flickered and then opened for a fraction of a minute. He smiled faintly when he recognized Kenneth. He made several ineffectual attempts to speak, but each effort resulted only in a gasp of pain. Kenneth ordered him to lie still. Bud, however, kept trying to speak. Roused by Nancy’s shrieks, he finally managed to gasp out a few words, interrupted by spasms of pain that shook his whole body.

“I knows I ain’t got long, Doc. Dat’s a’ right, Nancy, I ain’t blamin’ you none. I knows you couldn’t he’p it.”

He fell back on the pillow, coughing and writhing in pain.

“Lif’ me a li’l—hiar—on the pillar, Doc. Dat’s mo’ like—it! Doc—I ain’t been much ‘count. I tol’ dat man Parker—to stop foolin’ with my ’oman—but—he keep on—comin’ here—when I’m gone. He knew I wuz sellin’ liquor—an’ he tol Nancy he wuz gwine—hav’ his brudder—She’f Parker put me on—chain gang—if she tell me he come here—w’en I wuz gone.”

He had another paroxysm of coughing and lay for a minute as though already dead. Kenneth administered restoratives, meanwhile telling Nancy to keep quiet, which only made her weep the louder. After a few minutes Bud began speaking again.

“I come home to-day—an’ kotched him here. W’en I got mad an’ tol him—to get out—and stahted towards him—he grabbed his gun an’—shot me.” After a pause: “Doc, whyn’t dese white fo’ks—leave our women alone?—I ain’t nevah bothered none of their women.—An’ now—I’s done got—killed jus’ ’cause—I—I⸺”

He half raised himself on the pillow, looking at Nancy.

“Doan cry, Nancy gal—doan cry⸺”

He fell back dead. Kenneth, of no further assistance, left Nancy to her grief after promising to send the undertaker in to prepare Bud’s body for burial, and made his way out through the crowd, now greatly increased in numbers, gathered around the door. He wondered if anything would be done about the murder, at the same time knowing that nothing would. The South says it believes in purity. What was that phrase the Ku Kluxers used so much—“preservation of the sanctity of the home, protection of the purity of womanhood”? Yes, that was it. Suppose the races of the two principals had been reversed—that Bud Ware had been caught with George Parker’s wife. Why, the whole town would have turned out to burn Bud at the stake. Weren’t coloured women considered human—wasn’t their virtue as dear to them as to white women? Nancy and Bud weren’t of much good to the community but if Bud wanted his wife kept inviolate, hadn’t he as much right to guard her person as George Parker to protect his wife and two daughters? Again he felt himself up against a blind wall in which there was no gate, and which was too high to climb. He had determined to stay out of reach of the long arms of the octopus they called the race problem—but he felt himself slowly being drawn into its insidious embrace.

CHAPTER VII

Central City was the county seat of Smith County. The morning after the murder of Bud Ware, Kenneth went down to the County Court House to file his report on the death. It was a two-story building, originally of red brick but now of a faded brownish red through the rains and sun of many years. It sat back from the street about fifty feet and was surrounded by a yard covered here and there with bits of grass but for the most part clear of all vegetation, its red soil trampled by many feet on “co’t day.” The steps were worn thin through much wear of heavy boots. On either side of the small landing at the top, there hung a bulletin board on which were pasted or tacked yellow notices of sheriff’s sales, rewards for the arrest of criminals, and other court documents. The floor of the dark and narrow hallway was stained a reddish colour by the mud and dust from the feet of those who had entered the building. Just inside the doorway, on either side, were rectangular boxes filled with sawdust for the convenience of those of a tobacco-chewing disposition, which included most of the male population. The condition of the floor around the boxes seemed to indicate that only a few of these had realized for what purpose the boxes had been placed there. Over all was a liberal coating of the dust that had blown in the door and windows.

Entering the office of the County Health Commissioner, Kenneth found that dignitary in his shirtsleeves, feet comfortably placed on top of his desk.

“Good morning, Mr. Lane. I’ve come to make a report of a death.”

At the sound of Kenneth’s voice, County Commissioner of Health Henry Lane turned in his chair without moving his feet to see who it was that had entered. Long, lanky, a two days’ growth of red beard on his face, Mr. Lane removed the corn-cob pipe from his mouth with a rising and falling of a prominent Adam’s apple. Seeing that his visitor was only a Negro, he replaced his pipe in his mouth and, between several jerky puffs to get it going again, querulously replied:

“Can’t you see I’m busy? Why don’t you save up them repo’ts till you git a passel of them, and then bring ‘em in? Got no time t’ be writin’ up niggers’ deaths, anyhow. Ev’ry time I turn ‘round, some nigger’s gittin’ carved up or shot or somepin’.”.

“I understand it’s the law, Mr. Lane, that deaths of anybody, white or coloured, must be reported by the physician at once.”

“Drat the law. That’s fo’ white folks.”

He drew himself out of his chair with great reluctance and ambled over to the counter, drawing to him a pad and pencil as he turned towards Kenneth.

“What nigger’s dead now?” he inquired.