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'."
[Illustration: 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't _our_ old 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 little _moue_ of 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.