GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD
GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD
Come hear Rev. E.B. Blackwater's greatMissionary Address on
Come hear Rev. E.B. Blackwater's greatMissionary Address on
CHRISTIANIZING AFRICA
CHRISTIANIZING AFRICA
ELOQUENT, PROFOUND, HEART-SEARCHING.ILLUSTRATED WITH SLIDES.
ELOQUENT, PROFOUND, HEART-SEARCHING.ILLUSTRATED WITH SLIDES.
Half a dozen negroes lounged in the sunshine on Hobbett's corner as Peter came up. They were amusing themselves after the fashion of blacks, with mock fights, feints, sudden wrestlings. They would seize one another by the head and grind their knuckles into one another's wool. Occasionally, one would leap up and fall into one of those grotesque shuffles called "breakdowns." It all held a certain rawness, an irrepressible juvenility.
As Peter came up, Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a pantomime of thrusting. He was clearly reproducing the action which had won for him his military medal. Then suddenly he fell down in the dust and writhed. He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of his four victims. His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of the bayonet-fight and of killing four men. Tump himself got up out of the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes. Peter caught the end of his sentence, "Sho put it to 'em, black boy. Fo' white men—"
His audience roared again, swayed around, and pounded one another in an excess of mirth.
Siner shouted from across the street two or three times before he caught Tump's attention. The ex-soldier looked around, sobered abruptly.
"Whut-chu want, nigger?" His inquiry was not over-cordial.
Peter nodded him across the street.
The heavily built black in khaki hesitated a moment, then started across the street with the dragging feet of a reluctant negro. Peter looked at him as he came up.
"What's the matter, Tump?" he asked playfully.
"Ain't nothin' matter wid me, nigger." Peter made a guess at Tump's surliness.
"Look here, are you puffed up because Cissie Dildine struck you for a ten?"
Tump's expression changed.
"Is she struck me fuh a ten?"
"Yes; on that school subscription."
"Is dat whut you two niggers wuz a-talkin' 'bout over thaiuh in yo' house?"
"Exactly." Peter showed the list, with Cissie's name on it. "She told me to collect from you."
Tump brightened up.
"So dat wuz whut you two niggers wuz a-talkin' 'bout over at yo' house." He ran a fist down into his khaki, and drew out three or four one-dollar bills and about a pint of small change. It was the usual crap-shooter's offering. The two negroes sat down on the ramshackle porch of an old jeweler's shop, and Tump began a complicated tally of ten dollars.
By the time he had his dimes, quarters, and nickels in separate stacks, services in the village church were finished, and the congregation came filing up the street. First came the school-children, running and chattering and swinging their books by the straps; then the business men of the hamlet, rather uncomfortable in coats and collars, hurrying back to their stores; finally came the women, surrounding the preacher.
Tump and Peter walked on up to the entrance of the Planter's Bank and there awaited Mr. Henry Hooker, the cashier. Presently a skinny man detached himself from the church crowd and came angling across the dirty street toward the bank. Mr. Hooker wore somewhat shabby clothes for a banker; in fact, he never could recover from certain personal habits formed during a penurious boyhood. He had a thin hatchet face which just at this moment was shining though from some inward glow. Although he was an unhandsome little man, his expression was that of one at peace with man and God and was pleasant to see. He had been so excited by the minister that he was constrained to say something even to two negroes. So as he unlocked the little one-story bank, he told Tump and Peter that he had been listening to a man who was truly a man of God. He said Blackwater could touch the hardest heart, and, sure enough, Mr. Hooker's rather popped and narrow-set eyes looked as though he had been crying.
All this encomium was given in a high, cracked voice as the cashier opened the door and turned the negroes into the bank. Tump, who stood with his hat off, listening to all the cashier had to say, said he thought so, too.
The shabby interior of the little bank, the shabby little banker, renewed that sense of disillusion that pervaded Peter's home-coming. In Boston the mulatto had done his slight banking business in a white marble structure with tellers of machine-like briskness and neatness.
Mr. Hooker strolled around into his grill-cage; when he was thoroughly ensconced he began business in his high voice:
"You came to see me about that land, Peter?"
Yes, sir."
"Sorry to tell you, Peter, you are not back in time to get the Tomwit place."
Peter came out of his musing over the Boston banks with a sense of bewilderment.
"How's that? why, I bought that land—"
"But you paid nothing for your option, Siner."
"I had a clear-cut understanding with Mr. Tomwit—"
Mr. Hooker smiled a smile that brought out sharp wrinkles around the thin nose on his thin face.
"You should have paid him an earnest, Siner, if you wanted to bind your trade. You colored folks are always stumbling over the law."
Peter stared through the grating, not knowing what to do.
"I'll go see Mr. Tomwit," he said, and started uncertainly for the door.
The cashier's falsetto stopped him:
"No use, Peter. Mr. Tomwit surprised me, too, but no use talking about it. I didn't like to see such an important thing as the education of our colored people held up, myself. I've been thinking about it."
"Especially when I had made a fair square trade," put in Peter, warmly.
"Exactly," squeaked the cashier. "And rather than let your project be delayed, I'm going to offer you the old Dillihay place at exactly the same price, Peter—eight hundred."
"The Dillihay place?"
"Yes; that's west of town; it's bigger by twenty acres than old man Tomwit's place."
Peter considered the proposition.
"I'll have to carry this before the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence, Mr. Hooker."
The cashier repeated the smile that bracketed his thin nose in wrinkles.
"That's with you, but you know what you say goes with the niggers here in town, and, besides, I won't promise how long I'll hold the Dillihay place. Real estate is brisk around here now. I didn't want to delay a good work on account of not having a location." Mr. Hooker turned away to a big ledger on a breast-high desk, and apparently was about to settle himself to the endless routine of bank work.
Peter knew the Dillihay place well. It lacked the timber of the other tract; still, it was fairly desirable. He hesitated before the tarnished grill.
"What do you think about it, Tump?"
"You won't make a mistake in buying," answered the high voice of Mr. Hooker at his ledger.
"I don' think you'll make no mistake in buyin', Peter," repeated Tump's bass.
Peter turned back a little uncertainly, and asked how long it would take to fix the new deed. He had a notion of making a flying canvass of the officers of the Sons and Daughters in the interim. He was surprised to find that Mr. Hooker already had the deed and the notes ready to sign, in anticipation of Peter's desires. Here the banker brought out the set of papers.
"I'll take it," decided Peter; "and if the lodge doesn't want it, I'll keep the place myself."
"I like to deal with a man of decision," piped the cashier, a wrinkled smile on his sharp face.
Peter pushed in his bag of collections, then Mr. Hooker signed the deed, and Peter signed the land notes. They exchanged the instruments. Peter received the crisp deed, bound in blue manuscript cover. It rattled unctuously. To Peter it was his first step toward a second Tuskegee.
The two negroes walked out of the Planter's Bank filled with a sense of well-doing. Tump Pack was openly proud of having been connected, even in a casual way, with the purchase. As he walked down the steps, he turned to Peter.
"Don' reckon nobody could git a deed off on you wid stoppers in it, does you?"
"We don't know any such word as 'stop,' Tump," declared Peter, gaily.
For Peter was gay. The whole incident at the bank was beginning to please him. The meeting of a sudden difficulty, his quick decision—it held the quality of leadership. Napoleon had it.
The two colored men stepped briskly through the afternoon sunshine along the mean village street. Here and there in front of their doorways sat the merchants yawning and talking, or watching pigs root in the piles of waste.
In Peter's heart came a wonderful thought. He would make his industrial institution such a model of neatness that the whole village of Hooker's Bend would catch the spirit. The white people should see that something clean and uplifting could come out of Niggertown. The two races ought to live for a mutual benefit. It was a fine, generous thought. For some reason, just then, there flickered through Peter's mind a picture of the Arkwright boy sitting hunched over in the cedar glade, staring at the needles.
All this musing was brushed away by the sight of old Mr. Tomwit crossing the street from the east side to the livery-stable on the west. That human desire of wanting the person who has wronged you to know that you know your injury moved Peter to hurry his steps and to speak to the old gentleman.
Mr. Tomwit had been a Confederate cavalryman in the Civil War, and there was still a faint breeze and horsiness about him. He was a hammered-down old gentleman, with hair thin but still jet-black, a seamed, sunburned face, and a flattened nose. His voice was always a friendly roar. Now, when he saw Peter turning across the street to meet him, he halted and called out at once:
"Now Peter, I know what's the matter with you. I didn't do you right."
Peter went closer, not caring to take the whole village into his confidence.
"How came you to turn down my proposition, Mr. Tomwit," he asked, "after we had agreed and drawn up the papers?"
"We-e-ell, I had to do it, Peter," explained the old man, loudly.
"Why, Mr. Tomwit?"
"A white neighbor wanted me to, Peter," boomed the cavalryman.
"Who, Mr. Tomwit?"
"Henry Hooker talked me into it, Peter. It was a mean trick, Peter. I done you wrong." He stood nodding his head and rubbing his flattened nose in an impersonal manner. "Yes, I done you wrong, Peter," he acknowledged loudly, and looked frankly into Peter's eyes.
The negro was immensely surprised that Henry Hooker had done such a thing. A thought came that perhaps some other Henry Hooker had moved into town in his absence.
"You don't mean the cashier of the bank?"
Old Mr. Tomwit drew out a plug of Black Mule tobacco, set some gapped, discolored teeth into corner, nodded at Peter silently, at the same time utilizing the nod to tear off a large quid. He rolled tin about with his tongue and after a few moments adjusted it so that he could speak.
"Yeah," he proceeded in a muffled tone, "they ain't but one Henry Hooker; he is the one and only Henry. He said if I sold you my land, you'd put up a nigger school and bring in so many blackbirds you'd run me clean off my farm. He said it'd ruin the whole town, a nigger school would."
Peter was astonished.
"Why, he didn't talk that way to me!"
"Natchelly, natchelly," agreed the old cavalryman, dryly.—"Henry has a different way to talk to ever' man, Peter."
"In fact," proceeded Peter, "Mr. Hooker sold me the old Dillihay place in lieu of the deal I missed with you."
Old Mr. Tomwit moved his quid in surprise.
"The hell he did!"
"That at least shows he doesn't think a negro school would ruin the value of his land. He owns farms all around the Dillihay place."
Old Mr. Tomwit turned his quid over twice and spat thoughtfully.
"That your deed in your pocket?" With the air of a man certain of being obeyed he held out his hand for the blue manuscript cover protruding from the mulatto's pocket. Peter handed it over. The old gentleman unfolded the deed, then moved it carefully to and from his eyes until the typewriting was adjusted to his focus. He read it slowly, with a movement of his lips and a drooling of tobacco-juice. Finally he finished, remarked, "I be damned!" in a deliberate voice, returned the deed, and proceeded across the street to the livery-stable, which was fronted by an old mulberry-tree, with several chairs under it. In one of these chairs he would sit for the remainder of the day, making an occasional loud remark about the weather or the crops, and watching the horses pass in and out of the stable.
Siner had vaguely enjoyed old Mr. Tomwit's discomfiture over the deed, if it was discomfiture that had moved the old gentleman to his sententious profanity. But the negro did not understand Henry Hooker's action at all. The banker had abused his position of trust as holder of a deed in escrow snapping up the sale himself; then he had sold Peter the Dillihay place. It was a queer shift.
Tump Pack caught his principal's mood with that chameleon-like mental quality all negroes possess.
"Dat Henry Hooker," criticized Tump, "allus was a lil ole dried-up snake in de grass."
"He abused his position of trust," said Peter, gloomily; "I must say, his motives seem very obscure to me."
"Dat sho am a fine way to put hit," said Tump, admiringly.
"Why do you suppose he bought in the Tomwit tract and sold me the Dillihay place?"
Asked for an opinion, Tump began twiddling military medal and corrugated the skin on his inch-high brow.
"Now you puts it to me lak dat, Peter," he answered with importance, "I wonders ef dat gimlet-haided white man ain't put some stoppers in dat deed he guv you. He mout of."
Such remarks as that from Tump always annoyed Peter. Tump's intellectual method was to talk sense just long enough to gain his companion's ear, and then produce something absurd and quash the tentative interest.
Siner turned away from him and said, "Piffle."
Tump was defensive at once.
"'T ain't piffle, either! I's talkin' sense, nigger."
Peter shrugged, and walked a little way in silence, but the soldier's nonsense stuck in his brain and worried him. Finally he turned, rather irritably.
"Stoppers—what do you mean by stoppers?"
Tump opened his jet eyes and their yellowish whites. "I means nigger- stoppers," he reiterated, amazed in his turn.
"Negro-stoppers—" Peter began to laugh sardonically, and abruptly quit the conversation.
Such rank superiority irritated the soldier to the nth power.
"Look heah, black man, I knows Iisright. Heah, lonme look at dat-aiuh, deed. Maybe I can find 'em. I knows I suttinly is right."
Peter walked on, paying no attention to the request Until Tump caught his arm and drew him up short.
"Look heah, nigger," said Tump, in a different tone, "I faded dad deed fuh ten iron men, an' I reckon I got a once-over comin' fuh my money."
The soldier was plainly mobilized and ready to attack. To fight Tump, to fight any negro at all, would be Peter's undoing; it would forfeit the moral leadership he hoped to gain. Moreover, he had no valid grounds for a disagreement with Tump. He passed over the deed, and the two negroes moved on their way to Niggertown.
Tump trudged forward with eyes glued to paper, his face puckered in the unaccustomed labor of reading.
His thick lips moved at the individual letters, and constructed them bunglingly into syllables and words. He was trying to uncover the verbal camouflage by which the astute white brushed away all rights of all black men whatsoever.
To Peter there grew up something sadly comical in Tump's efforts. The big negro might well typify all the colored folk of the South, struggling in a web of law and custom they did not understand, misplacing their suspicions, befogged and fearful. A certain penitence for having been irritated at Tump softened Peter.
"That's all right, Tump; there's nothing to find."
At that moment the soldier began to bob his head.
"Eh! eh! eh! W-wait a minute!" he stammered. "Whut dis? B'lieve I done foun' it! I sho is! Heah she am! Heah's dis nigger-stopper, jes lak I tol' you!" Tump marked a sentence in the guaranty of the deed with a rusty forefinger and looked up at Peter in mixed triumph and accusation.
Peter leaned over the deed, amused.
"Let's see your mare's nest."
"Well, she 'fo' God is thaiuh, an' you sho let loose a hundud dollars uv our 'ciety's money, an' got nothin' fuh hit but a piece o' paper wid a nigger-stopper on hit!"
Tump's voice was so charged with contempt that Peter looked with a certain uneasiness at his find. He read this sentence switched into the guaranty of the indenture:
"Be it further understood and agreed that no negro, black man, Afro- American, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, or any person whatsoever of colored blood or lineage, shall enter upon, seize, hold, occupy, reside upon, till, cultivate, own or possess any part or parcel of said property, or garner, cut, or harvest therefrom, any of the usufruct, timber, or emblements thereof, but shall by these presents be estopped from so doing forever."
Tump Pack drew a shaken, unhappy breath.
"Now, I reckon you see whut a nigger-stopper is."
Peter stood in the sunshine, looking at the estoppel clause, his lips agape. Twice he read it over. It held something of the quality of those comprehensive curses that occur in the Old Testament. He moistened his lips and looked at Tump.
"Why that can't be legal." His voice sounded empty and shallow.
"Legal! 'Fo' Gawd, nigger, whauh you been to school all dese yeahs, never to heah uv a nigger-stopper befo'!"
"But—but how can a stroke of the pen, a mere gesture, estop a whole class of American citizens forever?" cried Peter, with a rising voice. "Turn it around. Suppose they had put in a line that no white man should own that land. It—it's empty! I tell you, it's mere words!"
Tump cut into his diatribe: "No use talkin' lak dat. Our 'ciety thought you wuz a aidjucated nigger. We didn't think no white man could put nothin' over on you."
"Education!" snapped Siner. "Education isn't supposed to keep you away from shysters!"
"Keep you away fum 'em!" cried Tump, in a scandalized voice. "'Fo' Gawd, nigger, you don' know nothin'! O' co'se a aidjucation ain't to keep you away fum shysters; hit's to mek you one 'uv 'em!"
Peter stood breathing irregularly, looking at his deed. A determination not to be cheated grew up and hardened in his nerves. With unsteady hands he refolded his deed and put it into his pocket, then he turned about and started back up the village street toward the bank.
Tump stared after him a moment and presently called out:
"Heah, nigger, whut you gwine do?" A moment later he repeated to his friend's back: "Look heah, nigger, I 'vise you ag'inst anything you's gwine do, less'n you's ready to pass in you' checks!" As Peter strode on he lifted his voice still higher: "Peter! Hey, Peter, I sho' 'vise you 'g'inst anything you's 'gwine do!"
A pulse throbbed in Siner's temples. The wrath of the cozened heated his body. His clothes felt hot. As he strode up the trash-piled street, the white merchants lolling in their doors began smiling. Presently a laugh broke out at one end of the street and was caught up here and there. It was the undying minstrel jest, the comedy of a black face. Dawson Bobbs leaned against the wide brick entrance of the livery-stable, his red face balled into shining convexities by a quizzical smile.
"Hey, Peter," he drawled, winking at old Mr. Tomwit, "been investin' in real estate?" and broke into Homeric laughter.
As Peter passed on, the constable dropped casually in behind the brown man and followed him up to the bank.
To Peter Siner the walk up to the bank was an emotional confusion. He has a dim consciousness that voices said things to him along the way and that there was laughter. All this was drowned by desperate thoughts and futile plans to regain his lost money, flashing through his head. The cashier would exchange the money for the deed; he would enter suit and carry it to the Supreme Court; he would show the money had not been his, he had had no right to buy; he would beg the cashier. His head seemed to spin around and around.
He climbed the steps into the Planter's Bank and opened the screen-door. The cashier glanced up briefly, but continued busily at his ledger.
Peter walked shakenly to the barred window in the grill.
"Mr. Hooker."
"Very busy now, Peter," came the high voice.
"I want to know about this deed."
The banker was nimbly setting down long rows of figures. "No time to explain deeds, Peter."
"But—but there is a clause in this deed, Mr. Hooter, estopping colored persons from occupying the Dillihay place."
"Precisely. What about it?" Mr. Hooker snapped out his inquiry and looked up suddenly, catching Peter full in the face with his narrow-set eyes. It was the equivalent of a blow.
"According to this, I—I can't establish a school on it."
"You cannot."
"Then what can I do with it?" cried Peter.
"Sell it. You have what lawyers call a cloud on the title. Sell it. I'll give you ten dollars for your right in it, just to clear up my title."
A queer trembling seized Peter. The little banker turned to a fantastic caricature of a man. His hatchet face, close-set eyes, harsh, straight hair, and squeaky voice made him seem like some prickly, dried-up gnome a man sees in a fever.
At that moment the little wicket-door of the window opened under the pressure of Peter's shoulder. Inside on the desk, lay neat piles of bills of all denominations, ready to be placed in the vault. In a nervous tremor Peter dropped in his blue-covered deed and picked up a hundred-dollar bill.
"I—I won't trade," he jibbered. "It—it wasn't my money. Here's your deed!" Peter was moving away. He felt a terrific impulse to run, but he walked.
The banker straightened abruptly. "Stop there, Peter!" he screeched.
At that moment Dawson Bobbs lounged in at the door, with his perpetual grin balling up his broad red face. He had a toothpick, in his mouth.
"'S matter?" he asked casually.
"Peter there," said the banker, with a pale, sharp face, "doesn't want to stick to his trade. He is just walking off with one of my hundred- dollar bills."
"Sick o' yo' deal, Peter?" inquired Bobbs, smiling and shifting the toothpick. He bit down on it. "Well, whut-chu want done, Henry?"
"Oh," hesitated the cashier in a quandary, "nothing, I suppose. Siner was excited; you know how niggers are. We can't afford to send every nigger to the pen that breaks the law." He stood studying Peter out of his close-set eyes. "Here's your deed, Peter." He shoved it back under the grill. "And lemme give you a little friendly advice. I'd just run an ordinary nigger school if I was you. This higher education don't seem to make a nigger much smarter when he comes back than when he starts out." A faint smile bracketed the thin nose.
Dawson Bobbs roared with sudden appreciation, took the bill from Peter's fingers, and pushed it back under the grill.
The cashier picked up the money, casually. He considered a moment, then reached for a long envelop. As he did so, the incident with Peter evidently passed from his mind, for his hatchet face lighted up as with some inward illumination.
"Bobbs," he said warmly, "that was a great sermon Brother Blackwater preached. It made me want to help according as the Lord has blessed me. Couldn't you spare five dollars, Bobbs, to go along with this?"
The constable tried to laugh and wriggle away, but the cashier's gimlet eyes kept boring him, and eventually he fished out a five-dollar bill and handed it in. Mr. Hooker placed the two bills in the envelop, sealed it, and handed it to the constable.
"Jest drop that in the post-office as you go down the street, Bobbs," he directed in his high voice. Peter caught a glimpse of the type-written address.
It was
Rev. Lemuel Hardiman,c/o United Missions,Katuako Post,Bahr el Ghazal,Sudan,East Africa.
The white population of Hooker's Bend was much amused and gratified at the outcome of the Hooker-Siner land deal. Every one agreed that the cashier's chicanery was a droll and highly original turn to give to a negro exclusion clause drawn into a deed. Then, too, it involved several legal points highly congenial to the Hooker's Bend intellect Could the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence recover their hundred dollars? Could Henry Hooker force them to pay the remaining seven hundred? Could not Siner establish his school on the Dillihay place regardless of the clause, since the cashier would be estopped from obtaining an injunction by his own instrument?
As a matter of fact, the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence sent a committee to wait on Mr. Hooker to see what action he meant to take on the notes that paid for his spurious deed. This brought another harvest of rumors. Street gossip reported that Henry had compromised for this, that, and the other amount, that he would not compromise, that he had persuaded the fool niggers into signing still other instruments. Peter never knew the truth. He was not on the committee.
But high above the legal phase of interest lay the warming fact that Peter Siner, a negro graduate of Harvard, on his first tilt in Hooker's Bend affairs had ridden to a fall. This pleased even the village women, whose minds could not follow the subtle trickeries of legal disputation. The whole affair simply proved what the white village had known all along: you can't educate a nigger. Hooker's Bend warmed with pleasure that half of its population was ineducable.
White sentiment in Hooker's Bend reacted strongly on Niggertown. Peter Siner's prestige was no more. The cause of higher education for negroes took a mighty slump. Junius Gholston, a negro boy who had intended to go to Nashville to attend Fisk University, reconsidered the matter, packed away his good clothes, put on overalls, and shipped down the river as a roustabout instead.
In the Siner cabin old Caroline Siner berated her boy for his stupidity in ever trading with that low-down, twisting snake in the grass, Henry Hooker. She alternated this with floods of tears. Caroline had no sympathy for her offspring. She said she had thrown away years of self- sacrifice, years of washing, a thousand little comforts her money would have bought, all for nothing, for less than nothing, to ship a fool nigger up North and to ship him back.
Of all Niggertown, Caroline was the most unforgiving because Peter had wounded her in her pride. Every other negro in the village felt that genial satisfaction in a great man's downfall that is balm to small souls. But the old mother knew not this consolation. Peter was her proxy. It was she who had fallen.
The only person in Niggertown who continued amiable to Peter Siner was Cissie Dildine. The octoroon, perhaps, had other criteria by which to judge a man than his success or mishaps dealing with a pettifogger.
Two or three days after the catastrophe, Cissie made an excursion to the Siner cabin with a plate of cookies. Cissie was careful to place her visit on exactly a normal footing. She brought her little cakes in the role of one who saw no evil, spoke no evil, and heard no evil. But somehow Cissie's visit increased the old woman's wrath. She remained obstinately in the kitchen, and made remarks not only audible, but arresting, through the thin partition that separated it from the poor living-room.
Cissie was hardly inside when a voice stated that it hated to see a gal running after a man, trying to bait him with a lot of fum-diddles.
Cissie gave Peter a single wide-eyed glance, and then attempted to ignore the bodiless comment.
"Here are some cookies, Mr. Siner," began the girl, rather nervously. "I thought you and Ahnt Carolin'—"
"Yeah, I 'magine dey's fuh me!" jeered the spectral voice.
"Might like them," concluded the girl, with a little gasp.
"I suttinly don' want no light-fingered hussy ma'yin' my son," proceeded the voice, "an' de whole Dildine fambly 'll bear watchin'."
In the Siner Cabin Old Caroline Siner Berated Her Boy.In the Siner Cabin Old Caroline Siner Berated Her Boy.
In the Siner Cabin Old Caroline Siner Berated Her Boy.In the Siner Cabin Old Caroline Siner Berated Her Boy.
"Won't you have a seat?" asked Peter, exquisitely uncomfortable.
Cissie handed him her plate in confusion.
"Why, no, Mr. Siner," she hastened on, in her careful grammar, "I just— ran over to—"
"To fling herse'f in a nigger's face 'cause he's been North and got made a fool uv," boomed the hidden censor.
"I must go now," gasped Cissie.
Peter made a harried gesture.
"Wait—wait till I get my hat."
He put the plate down with a swift glance around for his hat. He found it, and strode to the door, following the girl. The two hurried out into the street, followed by indistinct strictures from the kitchen. Cissie breathed fast, with open lips. They moved rapidly along the semicircular street almost with a sense of flight. The heat of the early autumn sun stung them through their clothes. For some distance they walked in a nervous silence, then Cissie said:
"Your mother certainly hates me, Peter."
"No," said Peter, trying to soften the situation; "it's me; she's terribly hurt about—" he nodded to-ward the white section—"that business."
Cissie opened her clear brown eyes.
"Your own mother turned against you!"
"Oh, she has a right to be," began Peter, defensively. "I ought to have read that deed. It's amazing I didn't, but I—I really wasn't expecting a trick, Mr. Hooker seemed so—so sympathetic—" He came to a lame halt, staring at the dust through which they picked their way.
"Of course you weren't expecting tricks!" cried Cissie, warmly. "The whole thing shows you're a gentleman used to dealing with gentlemen. But of course these Hooker's Bend negroes will never see that!"
Peter, surprised and grateful, looked at Cissie. Her construction of the swindle was more flattering than any apology he had been able to frame for himself.
"Still, Cissie, I ought to have used the greatest care—"
"I'm not talking about what you 'ought,'" stated the octoroon, crisply; "I'm talking about what you are. When it comes to 'ought,' we colored people must get what we can, any way we can. We fight from the bottom." The speech held a viperish quality which for a moment caught the brown man's attention; then he said:
"One thing is sure, I've lost my prestige, whatever it was worth."
The girl nodded slowly.
"With the others you have, I suppose."
Peter glanced at Cissie. The temptation was strong to give the conversation a personal turn, but he continued on the general topic:
"Well, perhaps it's just as well. My prestige was a bit too flamboyant, Cissie. All I had to do was to mention a plan. The Sons and Daughters didn't even discuss it. They put it right through. That wasn't healthy. Our whole system of society, all democracies are based on discussion. Our old Witenagemot—"
"But it wasn'tourold Witenagemot," said the girl.
"Well—no," admitted the mulatto, "that's true."
They moved along for some distance in silence, when the girl asked:
"What are you going to do now, Peter?"
"Teach, and keep working for that training-school," stated Peter, almost belligerently. "You didn't expect a little thing like a hundred dollars to stop me, did you?"
"No-o-o," conceded Cissie, with some reserve of judgment in her tone. Presently she added, "You could do a lot better up North, Peter."
"For whom?"
"Why, yourself," said the girl, a little surprised.
Siner nodded.
"I thought all that out before I came back here, Cissie. A friend of mine named Farquhar offered me a place with him up in Chicago,—a string of garages. You'd like Farquhar, Cissie. He's a materialist with an absolutely inexorable brain. He mechanizes the universe. I told him I couldn't take his offer. 'It's like this,' I argued: 'if every negro with a little ability leaves the South, our people down there will never progress.' It's really that way, Cissie, it takes a certain mental atmosphere to develop a people as a whole. A few individuals here and there may have the strength to spring up by themselves, but the run of the people—no. I believe one of the greatest curses of the colored race in the South is the continual draining of its best individuals North. Farquhar argued—" just then Peter saw that Cissie was not attending his discourse. She was walking at his side in a respectful silence. He stopped talking, and presently she smiled and said:
"You haven't noticed my new brooch, Peter." She lifted her hand to her bosom, and twisted the face of the trinket toward him. "You oughtn't to have made me show it to you after you recommended it yourself." She made a littlemoueof disappointment.
It was a pretty bit of old gold that complimented the creamy skin. Peter began admiring it at once, and, negro fashion, rather overstepped the limits white beaux set to their praise, as he leaned close to her.
At the moment the two were passing one of the oddest houses in Niggertown. It was a two-story cabin built in the shape of a steamboat. A little cupola represented a pilot-house, and two iron chimneys served for smoke-stacks.
This queer building had been built by a negro stevedore because of a deep admiration for the steamboats on which he had made his living. Instead of steps at the front door, this boat-like house had a stage- plank. As Peter strolled down the street with Cissie, admiring her brooch, and suffused with a sense of her nearness, he happened to glance up, and saw Tump Pack walk down the stage-plank, come out, and wait for them at the gate.
There was something grim in the ex-soldier's face and in the set of his gross lips as the two came up, but the aura of the girl prevented Peter from paying much attention to it. As the two reached Tump, Peter had just lifted his hand to his hat when Tump made a quick step out at the gate, in front of them, and swung a furious blow at Peter's head.
Cissie screamed. Siner staggered back with flames dancing before his eyes. The soldier lunged after his toppling man with gorilla-like blows. Hot pains shot through Peter's body. His head roared like a gong. The sunlight danced about him in flashes. The air was full of black fists smashing him, and not five feet away, the bullet head of Tump Pack bobbed this way and that in the rapid shifts of his attack. A stab of pain cut off Peter's breath. He stood with his diaphragm muscles tense and paralyzed, making convulsive efforts to breathe. At that moment he glimpsed the convexity of Tump's stomach. He drop-kicked at it with foot-ball desperation. Came a loud explosive groan. Tump seemed to rise a foot or two in air, turned over, and thudded down on his shoulders in the dust. The soldier made no attempt to rise, but curled up, twisting in agony.
Peter stood in the dust-cloud, wabbly, with roaring head. His open mouth was full of dust. Then he became aware that negroes were running in from every direction, shouting. Their voices whooped out what had happened, who it was, who had licked. Tump Pack's agonized spasms brought howls of mirth from the black fellows. Negro women were in the crowd, grinning, a little frightened, but curious. Some were in Mother-Hubbards; one had her hair half combed, one side in a kinky mattress, the other lying flat and greased down to her scalp.
When Peter gradually became able to breathe and could think at all, there was something terrible to him in Tump's silent attack and in this extravagant black mirth over mere suffering. Cissie was gone,—had fled, no doubt, at the beginning of the fight.
The prostrate man's tortured abdomen finally allowed him to twist around toward Peter. His eyes were popped, and seemed all yellows and streaked with swollen veins.
"I'll git you fuh dis," he wheezed, spitting dust "You did n' fight fair, you—"
The black chorus rolled their heads and pounded one another in a gale of merriment.
Peter Siner turned away toward his home filled with sick thought. He had never realized so clearly the open sore of Niggertown life and its great need of healing, yet this very episode would further bar him, Peter, from any constructive work. He foresaw, too plainly, how the white town and Niggertown would react to this fight. There would be no discrimination in the scandal. He, Peter Siner, would be grouped with the boot-leggers and crap-shooters and women-chasers who filled Niggertown with their brawls. As a matter of simple fact, he had been fighting with another negro over a woman. That he was subjected to an attack without warning or cause would never become a factor in the analysis. He knew that very well.
Two of Peter's teeth were loose; his left jaw was swelling; his head throbbed. With that queer perversity of human nerves, he kept biting his sore teeth together as he walked along.
When he reached home, his mother met him at the door. Thanks to the swiftness with which gossip spreads among black folk, she had already heard of the fight, and incidentally had formed her judgment of the matter. Now she looked in exasperation at her son's swelling face.
"I 'cla' 'fo' Gawd!—ain't been home a week befo' he's fightin' over a nigger wench lak a roustabout!"
Peter's head throbbed so he could hardly make out the details of Caroline's face.
"But, Mother—" he began defensively, "I—"
"Me sweatin' over de wash-pot," the negress went on, "so's you could go up North an' learn a lil sense; heah you comes back chasin' a dutty slut!"
"But, Mother," he begged thickly, "I was simply walking home with Miss Dildine."
"Miss Dildine! Miss Dildine!" exploded the ponderous woman, with an erasing gesture. "Ef you means dat stuck-up fly-by-night Cissie Dildine, say so, and don' stan' thaiuh mouthin', 'Miss Dildine, Miss Dildine'!"
"Mother," asked Peter, thickly, through his swelling mouth, "do you want to know what did happen?"
"I knows. I tol' you to keep away fum dat hussy. She's a fool 'bout her bright color an' straight hair. Needn't be givin' herse'f no airs!"
Peter stood in the doorway, steadying himself by the jamb. The world still swayed from the blows he had received on the head.
"What girl would you be willing for me to go with?" he asked in faint satire.
"Heah in Niggertown?"
Peter nodded. The movement increased his headache.
"None a-tall. No Niggertown wench a-tall. When you mus' ma'y, I's 'speckin' you to go off summuhs an' pick yo' gal, lak you went off to pick yo' aidjucation." She swung out a thick arm, and looked at Peter out of the corner of her eyes, her head tilted to one side, as negresses do when they become dramatically serious.
Peter left his mother to her stare and went to his own room. This constant implication among Niggertown inhabitants that Niggertown and all it held was worthless, mean, unhuman depressed Peter. The mulatto knew the real trouble with Niggertown was it had adopted the white village's estimate of it. The sentiment of the white village was overpowering among the imitative negroes. The black folk looked into the eyes of the whites and saw themselves reflected as chaff and skum and slime, and no human being ever suggested that they were aught else.
Peter's room was a rough shed papered with old newspapers. All sorts of yellow scare-heads streaked his walls. Hanging up was a crayon enlargement of his mother, her broad face as unwrinkled as an egg and drawn almost white, for the picture agents have discovered the only way to please their black patrons is to make their enlargements as nearly white as possible.
In one corner, on a home-made book-rack, stood Peter's library,—a Greek book or two, an old calculus, a sociology, a psychology, a philosophy, and a score of other volumes he had accumulated in his four college years. As Peter, his head aching, looked at these, he realized how immeasurably removed he was from the cool abstraction of the study.
The brown man sat down in an ancient rocking-chair by the window, leaned back, and closed his eyes. His blood still whispered in his ears from his fight. Notwithstanding his justification, he gradually became filled with self-loathing. To fight—to hammer and kick in Niggertown's dust— over a girl! It was an indignity.
Peter shifted his position in his chair, and his thoughts took another trail. Tump's attack had been sudden and silent, much like a bulldog's. The possibility of a simple friendship between a woman and a man never entered Tump's head; it never entered any Niggertown head. Here all attraction was reduced to the simplest terms of sex. Niggertown held no delicate intimacies or reserves. Two youths could not go with the same girl. Black women had no very great powers of choice over their suitors. The strength of a man's arm isolated his sweetheart. That did not seem right, resting the power of successful mating entirely upon brawn.
As Peter sat thinking it over, it came to him that the progress of any race depended, finally, upon the woman having complete power of choosing her mate. It is woman alone who consistently places the love accent upon other matters than mere flesh and muscle. Only woman has much sex selectiveness, or is inclined to select individuals with qualities of mind and spirit.
For millions of years these instinctive spiritualizers of human breeding stock have been hampered in their choice of mates by the unrestrained right of the fighting male. Indeed, the great constructive work of chivalry in the middle ages was to lay, unconsciously, the corner-stone of modern civilization by resigning to the woman the power of choosing from a group of males.
Siner stirred in his chair, surprised at whither his reverie had lead him. He wondered how he had stumbled upon these thoughts. Had he read them in a book? In point of fact, a beating administered by Tump Pack had brought the brown man the first original idea he had entertained in his life.
By this time, Peter's jaw had reached its maximum swelling and was eased somewhat. He looked out of his little window, wondering whether Cissie Dildine would choose him—or Tump Pack.
Peter was surprised to find blue dusk peering through his panes. All the scare-heads on his walls had lapsed into a common obscurity. As he rose slowly, so as not to start his head hurting again, he heard three rapid pistol shots in the cedar glade between Niggertown and the white village. He knew this to be the time-honored signal of boot-leggers announcing that illicit whisky was for sale in the blackness of the glade.