When Peter Siner started on his indefinite errand among the village
stores he believed it would require much tact and diplomacy to discuss
the race question without offense. To his surprise, no precaution was
necessary. Everybody agreed at once that the South would be benefited by
a more trustworthy labor, that if the negroes were trustworthy they
could be paid more; but nobody agreed that if negroes were paid more
they would become more trustworthy. The prevailing dictum was, A
nigger's a nigger.
As Peter came out into the shabby little street of Hooker's Bend
discouragement settled upon him. He felt as if he had come squarely
against some blank stone wall that no amount of talking could budge. The
black man would have to change his psychology or remain where he was, a
creature of poverty, hovels, and dirt; but amid such surroundings he
could not change his psychology.
The point of these unhappy conclusions somehow turned against Cissie
Dildine. The mulatto became aware that his whole crusade had been
undertaken in behalf of the octoroon. Everything the merchants said
against negroes became accusations against Cissie in a sharp personal
way. "A nigger is a nigger"; "A thief is a thief"; "She wouldn't quit
stealing if I paid her a hundred a week." Every stroke had fallen
squarely on Cissie's shoulders. A nigger, a thief; and she would never
be otherwise.
It was all so hopeless, so unchangeable, that Peter walked down the
bleak street unutterably depressed There was nothing he could do. The
situation was static. It seemed best that he should go away North and
save his own skin. It was impossible to take Cissie with him. Perhaps in
time he would come to forget her, and in so doing he would forget the
pauperism and pettinesses of all the black folk of the South. Because
through Cissie Peter saw the whole negro race. She was flexuous and
passionate, kindly and loving, childish and naïvely wise; on occasion
she could falsify and steal, and in the depth of her Peter sensed a
profound capacity for fury and violence. For all her precise English,
she was untamed, perhaps untamable.
Cissie was a far cry from the sort of woman Peter imagined he wanted for
a mate; yet he knew that if he stayed on in Hooker's Bend, seeing her,
desiring her, with her luxury mocking the loneliness of the old Renfrew
manor, presently he would marry her. Already he had had his little
irrational moments when it seemed to him that Cissie herself was quite
fine and worthy and that her speculations were something foreign and did
not pertain to her at all.
He would better go North. It would be safer up there. No doubt he could
find another colored girl in the North. The thought of fondling any
other woman filled Peter with a sudden, sharp repulsion. However, Peter
was wise. He knew he would get over that in time.
With this plan in mind, Peter set out down the street, intending to
cross the Big Hill at the church, walk over to his mother's shack, and
pack his few belongings preparatory to going away.
It was not a heroic retreat. The conversation which he had had with his
college friend Farquhar recurred to Peter. Farquhar had tried to
persuade Peter to remain North and take a position in a system of
garages out of Chicago.
"You can do nothing in the South, Siner," assured Farquhar; "your
countrymen must stand on their own feet, just as you are doing."
Peter had argued the vast majority of the negroes had no chance, but
Farquhar pressed the point that Peter himself disproved his own
statement. At the time Peter felt there was an clench in the
Illinoisan's logic, but he was not skilful enough to analyze it. Now the
mulatto began to see that Farquhar was right. The negro question was a
matter of individual initiative. Critics forgot that a race was composed
of individual men.
Peter had an uneasy sense that this was exceedingly thin logic, a mere
smoke screen behind which he meant to retreat back up North. He walked
on down the poor village street, turning it over and over in his mind,
affirming it positively to himself, after the manner of uneasy
consciences.
An unusual stir among the negroes on Hobbett's corner caught Peter's
attention and broke into his chain of thought. Half a dozen negroes
stood on the corner, staring down toward the white church. A black boy
suddenly started running across the street, and disappeared among the
stores on the other side. Peter caught glimpses of him among the
wretched alleyways and vacant lots that lie east of Main Street. The boy
was still running toward Niggertown.
By this time Peter was just opposite the watchers on the corner. He
lifted his voice and asked them the matter, but at the moment they began
an excited talking, and no one heard him.
Jim Pink Staggs jerked off his fur cap, made a gesture, contorted his
long, black face into a caricature of fright, and came loping across the
street, looking back over his shoulder, mimicking a run for life His
mummery set his audience howling.
The buffoon would have collided with Peter, but the mulatto caught Jim
Pink by the arm and shoulder, brought him to a halt, and at the same
time helped him keep his feet.
To Peter's inquiry what was the matter, the black fellow whirled and
blared out loudly, for the sake of his audience:
"'Fo' Gawd, nigger, I sho thought Mr. Bobbs had me!" and he writhed his
face into an idiotic grimace.
The audience reeled about in their mirth. Because with negroes, as with
white persons, two thirds of humor is in the reputation, and Jim Pink
was of prodigious repute.
Peter walked along with him patiently, because he knew that until they
were out of ear-shot of the crowd there was no way of getting a sensible
answer out of Jim Pink.
"Where are you going?" he asked presently.
"Thought I'd step over to Niggertown." Jim Pink's humorous air was still
upon him.
"What's doing over there? What were the boys raising such a hullabaloo
about?"
"Such me."
"Why did that boy go running across like that?"
Jim Pink rolled his eyes on Peter with a peculiar look.
"Reckon he mus' 'a' wanted to git on t'other side o' town."
Peter flattered the Punchinello by smiling a little.
"Come, Jim Pink, what do you know?" he asked. The magician poked out his
huge lips.
"Mr. Bobbs turn acrost by de church, over de Big Hill. Da' 's always a
ba-ad sign."
Peter's brief interest in the matter flickered out. Another arrest for
some niggerish peccadillo. The history of Niggertown was one long series
of petty offenses, petty raids, and petty punishments. Peter would be
glad to get well away from such a place.
"Think I'll go North, Jim Pink," remarked Peter, chiefly to keep up a
friendly conversation with his companion.
"Whut-chu goin' to do up thaiuh?"
"Take a position in a system of garages."
"A position is a job wid a white color on it," defined the minstrel.
"Whut you goin' to do wid Cissie?"
Peter looked around at the foolish face.
"With Cissie?--Cissie Dildine?"
"Uh huh."
"Why, what makes you think I'm going to do anything with Cissie?"
"M-m, visitin' roun'." The fool flung his face into a grimace, and
dropped it as one might shake out a sack.
Peter watched the contortion uneasily.
"What do you mean--visiting around?"
"Diff'nt folks go visitin' roun';
Some goes up an' some goes down."
Apparently Jim Pink had merely quoted a few words from a poem he knew.
He stared at the green-black depth of the glade, which set in about
half-way up the hill they were climbing.
"Ef this weather don' ever break," he observed sagely, "we sho am in fuh
a dry spell."
Peter did not pursue the topic of the weather. He climbed the hill in
silence, wondering just what the buffoon meant. He suspected he was
hinting at Cissie's visit to his room. However, he did not dare ask any
questions or press the point in any manner, lest he commit himself.
The minstrel had succeeded in making Peter's walk very uncomfortable, as
somehow he always did. Peter went on thinking about the matter. If Jim
Pink knew of Cissie's visit, all Niggertown knew it. No woman's
reputation, nobody's shame or misery or even life, would stand between
Jim Pink and what he considered a joke. The buffoon was the crudest
thing in this world--a man who thought himself a wit.
Peter could imagine all the endless tweaks to Cissie's pride Niggertown
would give the octoroon. She had asked Peter to marry her and had been
refused. She had humbled herself for naught. That was the very tar of
shame. Peter knew that in the moral categories of Niggertown Cissie
would suffer more from such a rebuff than if she had lied or committed
theft and adultery every day in the calendar. She had been refused
marriage. All the folk-ways of Niggertown were utterly topsyturvy. It
was a crazy-house filled with the most grotesque moral measures.
It seemed to Peter as he entered the cedar-glade that he had lost all
sympathy with this people from which he had sprung. He looked upon them
as strange, incomprehensible beings, just as a man will forget his own
childhood and look upon children as strange, incomprehensible little
creatures. In the midst of his thoughts he heard himself saying to Jim
Pink:
"I suppose it is as dusty as ever."
"Dustier 'an ever," assured Jim Pink.
Apparently their conversation had recurred to the weather, after all.
A chill silence encompassed the glade. The path the negroes followed
wound this way and that among reddish boulders, between screens of
intergrown cedars, and over a bronze mat of needles. Their steps were
noiseless. The odor of the cedars and the temple-like stillness brought
to Peter's mind the night of his mother's death. It seemed to him a long
time since he had come running through the glade after a doctor, and
yet, by a queer distortion of his sense of time, his mother's death and
burial bulked in his past as if it had occurred yesterday.
There was no sound in the glade to disturb Peter's thoughts except a
murmur of human voices from some of the innumerable privacies of the
place, and the occasional chirp of a waxwing busy over clusters of
cedar-balls.
It had been five weeks and a day since Caroline died. Five weeks and a
day; his mother's death drifting away into the mystery and oblivion of
the past. Likewise, twenty-five years of his own life completed and
gone.
A procession of sad, wistful thoughts trailed through Peter's brain: his
mother, and Ida May, and now Cissie. It seemed to Peter that all any
woman had ever brought him was wistfulness and sadness. His mother had
been jealous, and instead of the great happiness he had expected, his
home life with her had turned out a series of small perplexities and
pains. Before that was Ida May, and now here was her younger sister.
Peter wondered if any man ever reached the peace and happiness
foreshadowed in his dream of a woman.
* * * * *
A voice calling his name checked Peter's stride mechanically, and caused
him to look about with the slight bewilderment of a man aroused from a
reverie.
At the first sound, however, Jim Pink became suddenly alert. He took
three strides ahead of Peter, and as he went he whispered over his
shoulder:
"Beat it, nigger! beat it!"
The mulatto recognized one of Jim Pink's endless stupid attempts at
comedy. It would be precisely Jim Pink's idea of a jest to give Peter a
little start. As the mulatto stood looking about among the cedars for
the person who had called his name, it amazed him that Jim Pink could be
so utterly insane; that he performed some buffoonery instantly, by
reflex action as it were, upon the slightest provocation. It was almost
a mania with Jim Pink; it verged on the pathological.
The clown, however, was pressing his joke. He was pretending great fear,
and was shouting out in his loose minstrel voice:
"Hey, don' shoot down dis way, black man, tull I makes my exit!" And a
voice, rich with contempt, called back:
"You needn't be skeered, you fool rabbit of a nigger!"
Peter turned with a qualm. Quite close to him, and in another direction
from which he had been looking, stood Tump Pack. The ex-soldier looked
the worse for wear after his jail sentence. His uniform was frayed, and
over his face lay a grayish cast that marks negroes in bad condition. At
his side, attached by a belt and an elaborate shoulder holster, hung a
big army revolver, while on the greasy lapel of his coat was pinned his
military medal for exceptional bravery on the field of battle.
"Been lookin' fuh you fuh some time, Peter," he stated grimly.
Peter considered the formidable figure with a queer sensation. He tried
to take Tump's appearance casually; he tried to maintain an air of
ordinariness.
"Didn't know you were back."
"Yeah, I's back."
"Have you--been looking for me?"
"Yeah."
"Didn't you know where I was staying?"
"Co'se I did; up 'mong de white folks. You know dey don' 'low no
shootin' an' killin' 'mong de white folks." He drew his pistol from the
holster with the address of an expert marksman.
[Illustration: "Naw yuh don't," he warned sharply. "You turn roun' an'
march on to niggertown"]
Peter stood, with a quickening pulse, studying his assailant. The glade,
the air, the sunshine, seemed suddenly drawn to a tension, likely to,
break into violent commotion. His abrupt danger brought Peter to a
feeling of lightness and power. A quiver went along his spine. His
nostrils widened unconsciously as he calculated a leap and a blow at
Tump's gun.
The soldier took a step backward, at the same time bringing the barrel
to a ready.
"Naw you don't," he warned sharply. "You turn roun' an' march on to
Niggertown."
"What for?" Peter still tried to be casual, but his voice held new
overtones.
"Because, nigger, I means to drap you right on de Main Street o'
Niggertown, 'fo' all dem niggers whut's been a-raggin' me 'bout you an'
Cissie. I's gwine show dem fool niggers I don' take no fumi-diddles
off'n nobody."
"Tump," gasped Jim Pink, in a husky voice, "you oughtn't shoot Peter; he
mammy jes daid."
"'En she won' worry none. Turn roun', Peter, an' when I says, 'March,'
you march." He leveled his pistol. "'Tention! Rat about face! March!"
Peter turned and moved off down the noiseless path, walking with the
stiff gait of a man who expects a terrific blow from behind at any
instant.
The mulatto walked twenty or more paces amid a confusion of self-
protective impulses. He thought of whirling on Tump even at this late
date. He thought of darting behind a cedar, but he knew the man behind
him was an expert shot, and something fundamental in the brown man
forbade his getting himself killed while running away. It was too
undignified a death.
Presently he surprised himself by calling over his shoulder, as a sort
of complaint:
"How came you with the pistol, Tump? Thought it was against the law to
carry one."
"You kin ca'y 'em ef you don' keep 'em hid," explained the ex-soldier in
a wooden voice. "Mr. Bobbs tol' me dat when he guv my gun back."
The irony of the thing caught Peter, for the authorities to arrest Tump
not because he was trying to kill Peter, but because he went about his
first attempt in an illegal manner. For the first time in his life the
mulatto felt that contempt for a white man's technicalities that flavors
every negro's thoughts. Here for thirty days his life had been saved by
a technical law of the white man; at the end of the thirty days, by
another technical law, Tump was set at liberty and allowed to carry a
weapon, in a certain way, to murder him. It was grotesque; it was
absurd. It filled Peter with a sudden violent questioning of the whole
white régime. His thoughts danced along in peculiar excitement.
At the turn of the hill the trio came in sight of the squalid semicircle
of Niggertown. Here and there from a tumbledown chimney a feather of
pale wood smoke lifted into the chill sunshine. The sight of the houses
brought Peter a sharp realization that his life would end in the curving
street beneath him. A shock at the incomprehensible brevity of his life
rushed over him. Just to that street, just as far as the curve, and his
legs were swinging along, carrying him forward at an even gait.
All at once he began talking, arguing. He tried to speak at an ordinary
tempo, but his words kept edging on faster and faster:
"Tump, I'm not going to marry Cissie Dildine."
"I knows you ain't, Peter."
"I mean, if you let me alone, I didn't mean to."
"I ain't goin' to let you alone."
"Tump, we had already decided not to marry."
After a short pause Tump said in a slightly different tone:
"'Pears lak you don' haf to ma'y her--comin' to yo' room."
A queer sinking came over the mulatto. "Listen, Tump, I--we--in my room
--we simply talked, that's all. She came to tell me she was goin away.
I--I didn't harm her, Tump." Peter swallowed. He despaired of being
believed.
But his defense only infuriated the soldier. He suddenly broke into
violent profanity.
"Hot damn you! shut yo black mouf! Whut I keer whut-chu done! You weaned
her away fum me. She won't speak to me! She won't look at me!" A sudden
insanity of rage seized Tump. He poured on his victim every oath and
obscenity he had raked out of the whole army.
Strangely enough, the gunman's outbreak brought a kind of relief to
Peter Siner. It exonerated him. He was not suspected of wronging Cissie;
or, rather, whether he had or had not wronged her made no difference to
Tump. Peter's crime consisted in mere being, in existing where Cissie
could see him and desire him rather than Tump. Why it calmed Peter to
know that Tump held no dishonorable charge against him the mulatto
himself could not have told. Tump's violence showed Peter the certainty
of his own death, and somehow it washed away the hope and the thought of
escape.
Half-way down the hill they entered the edge of Niggertown. The smell of
sties and stables came to them. Peter's thoughts moved here and there,
like the eyes of a little child glancing about as it is forced to leave
a pleasure-ground.
Peter knew that Jim Pink, who now made a sorry figure in their rear,
would one day give a buffoon's mimicry of this his walk to death. He
thought of Tump, who would have to serve a year or two in the Nashville
Penitentiary, for the murder of negroes is seldom severely punished. He
thought of Cissie. He was being murdered because Cissie desired him.
And then Peter remembered the single bit of wisdom that his whole life
had taught him. It was this: no people can become civilized until the
woman has the power of choice among the males that sue for her hand. The
history of the white race shows the gradual increase of the woman's
power of choice. Among the yellow races, where this power is curtailed,
civilization is curtailed. It was this principle that exalted chivalry.
Upon it the white man has reared all his social fabric.
So deeply ingrained is it that almost every novel written by white men
revolves about some woman's choice of her mate being thwarted by power
or pride or wealth, but in every instance the rightness of the woman's
choice is finally justified. The burden of every song is love, true
love, enduring love, a woman's true and enduring love.
And in his moment of clairvoyance Peter saw that these songs and stories
were profoundly true. Against a woman's selectiveness no other social
force may count.
That was why his own race was weak and hopeless and helpless. The males
of his people were devoid of any such sentiment or self-repression. They
were men of the jungle, creatures of tusk and claw and loin. This very
act of violence against his person condemned his whole race.
These thoughts brought the mulatto an unspeakable sadness, not only for
his own particular death, but that this idea, this great redeeming
truth, which burned so brightly in his brain, would in another moment
flicker out, unrevealed, and be no more.