CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VILifemoved 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, theReverend 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 equallyfervid 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 glowingpicture 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 lawinterfering 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 vagueand 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 werestuck 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 communitybut 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.

Lifemoved 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, theReverend 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 equallyfervid 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 glowingpicture 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 lawinterfering 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 vagueand 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 werestuck 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 communitybut 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.

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