LIFE moved along evenly with Kenneth, busied with the multitude of
duties with which the physician in the half-rural, half-urban towns
of the South must deal. His days were filled with his blasto work
and he was usually to be found in his office until ten or eleven
o'clock every evening. Often he was roused in the middle of the
night to attend some one of his patients. He did not mind this
except when calls came to him from the outlying country districts.
Not infrequently he made long trips of seven, eight, or ten miles
into the country to treat some person who might just as well have
called him during the previous day. He had purchased a Ford runabout
in which he made these trips.
On a Sunday morning soon after his return to Central City, Kenneth
with his mother, Mamie, and Bob attended the Mount Zion Baptist
Church, but this he did without much eagerness, solely as a duty.
Though years had passed since last he entered the church, Kenneth
noticed that it stood as it always had, save that it looked more
down-at-heel than formerly. Before the door stood the same little
groups, eagerly snatching a few words of conversation before
entering. Near the door were ranged the young men, garbed in raiment
of varied and brilliant hue, ogling the girls as they passed in with
their parents. There was much good-natured badinage and scuffling
among the youths, with an occasional burst of ribald laughter at the
momentary discomfiture of one of their number. As he passed them,
Kenneth smiled to himself as he remembered how he but a few years
since had been one of that crowd around the same door. That is, one
of the crowd until his father, with a stern word or perhaps only a
meaningful glance, had been wont to summon him within the church.
Often had he been teased unmercifully by the other boys when one of
these summonses had come.
Though the jests had been hard to bear, the likelihood of paternal
wrath had been too unpleasant an alternative for him to dare
disregard his father's commands.
Kenneth noticed the vestibule had survived the passage of years
without apparent change, if one disregarded the increased dinginess
of the carpet. There was the same glass-covered bulletin board with
its list of the sick and of those who were delinquent in the payment
of their dues. There was the same dangling rope with a loop at the
end of it, and the same sexton was about to ring the bell above,
announcing the beginning of the morning service. There were the same
yellowed walls, the same leather-covered swinging doors with the
same greasy spots where countless hands had pushed them to enter the
auditorium of the church. Kenneth smiled to himself as he remembered
how he once had declared in a dispute with a boy whose parents
attended the Methodist church near by that the Mount Zion Baptist
Church was "the biggest and finest church in the whole world." He
thought of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, of St. Paul's in
London, as he recalled the boast of his youth.
Inside, the same air of unchanging permanence seemed also to have
ruled. As he followed the officious usher and his mother and sister
to their pew, Kenneth noted the same rows of hard seats worn shiny
by years of use, the same choir loft to the left of the pulpit with
its faded red curtains. The same worn Bible lay open on the pulpit
kept open by a hymn-book. Beside it was the same ornately carved
silver pitcher and goblet. Kenneth felt as though he had never left
Central City when he looked for and found the patches of calcimine
hanging from the ceiling and the yellowed marks on the walls made by
water dripping from leaks in the roof. As a boy he had amused
himself during seemingly interminable sermons by constructing all
sorts of fanciful stories around these same marks, seeing in them
weirdly shaped animals. Once he had laughed aloud when, after gazing
at one of them, it had suddenly dawned upon him that the shadow cast
by a pendent flake of calcimine resembled the lean and
hungry-looking preacher who was pastoring Mount Zion at the time.
Kenneth would never forget the commotion his sudden laughter had
caused, nor the whipping he received when he and his father reached
home that Sunday.
The hum of conversation ceased. The pastor, the Reverend Ezekiel
Wilson, entered the pulpit from a little door back of it. The choir
sang lustily the Doxology. All the familiar services came back to
Kenneth as he sat and looked at the dusky faces around him.
Preliminaries ended, the Reverend Wilson began to preach. He was a
fat, pompous, oily man—with a smooth and unctuous manner. His voice
sank at times to a whisper—at others, roared until the rafters of
the building seemed to ring with its echoes. He played on it as
consciously as the dried-up little organist in the gaily coloured
bonnet did on the keys of the asthmatic little organ. His text was
taken from the 13th chapter of First Corinthians, first verse that
familiar text, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of
angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a
tinkling cymbal."
Slowly, softly, he began to speak.
"Breddern and sisters, they's a lot of you folks right here this
mawnin' what thinks you is Christ'uns. You think jus' ‘cause you
comes here ev'ry Sunday and sings and shouts and rants around dat
you is got the sperit of Jesus in you. Well, I'm tellin' you this
mawnin' dat you'd better wake up and get yo'self right with God,
'cause you ain't no mo Christ'un dan if you neveh been to chu'ch
a-tall. De Good Book says you got to have char'ty, and de Good Book
don't lie."
There came from the Amen corner a fervently shouted "Amen!" From
another came as equally fervid a shout: "Ain't it the truth!" The
preacher paused for effect. He mopped his brow and glared around the
congregation. His auditors sat in expectant silence. Suddenly he
lashed out in scathing arraignment of the sins of his flock. Each
and every one of its faults he pilloried with words of fire and
brimstone. He painted a vivid and uncomfortably realistic picture of
a burning Hell into which all sinners would inevitably be cast.
Almost with the air of a hypnotist, he gradually advanced the tempo
of his speech. Like a wind playing over a field of corn, swaying the
tops of the stalks as it wills, so did he play on the emotions and
fears and passions of his congregation. Only a master of human
psychology could have done it. It was a living, breathing, vengeful
God he preached, and his auditors fearfully swayed and rocked to and
fro as he lashed them unmercifully. Lips compressed, there came from
them a nasal confirmation of the preacher's words that ranged from
deep, guttural grunts of approval as he scored a point to a
high-pitched rising and falling moan that sounded like nothing so
much as a child blowing through tissue paper stretched over a comb.
Frequently the preacher would without perceptible pause swing into a
rolling, swinging, half-moaning song which the congregation took up
with fervour. The beat was steadily advanced by the leader until he
and his audience were worked up to an emotional ecstasy bordering on
hysteria. His jeremiad ended, the preacher painted a glowing picture
of the ineffable peace and joy that came to those who rested their
faith in Him who died for the remission of their sins.
A tumultuous thunderous climax—a dramatic pause and then he swung
into a fervent prayer in which the preacher talked as though his God
were an intimate friend and confidant. The entire drama lasting more
than an hour was thrilling and enervating and theatric. Yet beneath
it lay a devout sincerity that removed the scene from the absurd to
that which bordered on the magnificent. To these humble folk their
religion was the most important thing in their lives, and, after
all, what matters it what a man does? It is the spirit in which he
performs an act that makes it dignified or pathetic or ludicrous—not
the act itself.
In spite of his sophistication, Kenneth never was able entirely to
ward off the chills of excitement that ran down his spine at these
weird religious ceremonies. He saw through the whole theatric
performance and yet way down beneath it all there was a sincerity
and genuineness that never failed to impress him. This was not a
mere animalism nor was it the joke that white people sometimes tried
to make of it. Fundamentally, it was rooted and grounded in an
immutable and unfailing belief in the supreme power of a tangible
God—a God that personally directed the most minute of the affairs of
the most lowly of creatures. It had been the guide and refuge of the
fathers and mothers of these same people through the dark days of
slavery. In the same manner it was almost the only refuge for these
children and grandchildren of the slaves in withstanding the trials
of a latter-day slavery in many respects more oppressive than the
pre-Civil War variety.
Kenneth walked home from church running over these things in his
mind. Was this religious fervour the best thing for his people? Why
did not the Church attract more intelligent and able young men of
his race instead of men like Reverend Wilson? Why didn't some
twentieth-century Moses arise to lead them out of the thraldom of
this primitive religion? Would that Moses, when he came, be able to
offer a solace as effective to enable these people of his to bear
the burdens that lay so heavily upon them?
He thought again of his conversation with Roy Ewing. What was the
elusive solution to this problem of race in America? Why couldn't
the white people of the South see where their course was leading
them? Ewing was right. No white man of the South had ever come out
in complete defiance of the present regime which was so surely
damning the South and America. Kenneth saw his people kept in the
bondage of ignorance. Why? Because it was to the economic advantage
of the white South to have it so. Why was a man like Reverend Wilson
patted on the back and every Negro told that men of his kind were
"safe and sane leaders"? Why was every Negro who too audibly or
visibly resented the brutalities and proscriptions of race prejudice
instantly labelled as a radical—a dangerous character—as one seeking
"social equality"? What was this thing called "social equality"
anyhow? That was an easy question to answer. It was about the only
one he could answer with any completeness. White folks didn't really
believe that Negroes sought to force themselves in places where they
weren't wanted, any more than decent white people wanted to force
themselves where they were not invited. No, that was the
smoke-screen to hide something more sinister. Social equality would
lead to intermarriage, they thought, and the legitimatizing of the
countless half-coloured sons and daughters of these white people.
Why, if every child in the South were a legitimate one, more than
half of the land and property in the South would belong to coloured
owners.
Did the white people who were always talking about "social equality"
think they really were fooling anybody with their constant
denunciation of it? Twenty-nine States of America had laws against
intermarriage. All these laws were passed by white legislators. Were
these laws passed to keep Negroes from seizing some white woman and
forcing her to marry him against her will? Or were these laws
unconscious admissions by these white men that they didn't trust
their women or their men to keep from marrying Negroes? Any fool
knew that if two people didn't want to marry each other, there was
no law of God or man to make them marry. No, the laws were passed
because white men wanted to have their own women and use coloured
women too without any law interfering with their affairs or making
them responsible for the consequences.
Kenneth usually ended these arguments with himself with a feeling of
complete impotence, of travelling around like a squirrel in a
circular cage. No matter where he started or how fast or how far he
travelled, he always wound up at the same point and with the same
sense of blind defeat. Oh, well, better men than he had tried to
answer the same questions and failed. He'd stay to himself and
attend to his own business and let such problems go hang. But in
spite of himself he often found himself enmeshed in this endless
maze of reasoning. Just as frequently he determined to put from
himself again the perplexing and seemingly insoluble problems.
It was after one of these soliloquies on his way from church one
bright Sunday in April that Kenneth reached home and found a call
for him to come at once to a house down on Butler Street, in the
heart of the Negro district in the bottoms. Telling his mother to
keep dinner for him as he would be back shortly, he hurried down
State Street. Turning suddenly into Harris Street, which crossed
State, which in turn would lead him to the house he sought on Butler
Street, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a white man who looked like
George Parker, cashier of the Bank of Central City Parker, if it was
he, turned hastily at Kenneth's approach and went up a narrow alley
which ran off Harris Street. Kenneth thought nothing of the incident
other than a vague and quickly passing wonder at Parker's presence
in that part of town.
Kenneth hurried on, instinctively stepping over or around the
numerous children whose complexions ranged in colour from a deep
black to a yellow that was almost white, and mangy-looking dogs that
seemed to infest the street. Approaching the house he sought, he
found a group of excitedly talking Negroes gathered around the gate.
The group separated to let him pass, and from it came one or two
greetings to Kenneth in the form of "Hello, Doc." He paid little
attention to them, but proceeded up the path to the house.
Entering, he was surprised to find it furnished more ornately and
comfortably than usual in that section. He knew the place of old,
remembering that his father had always warned him against going into
this section. Here it was reported that strange things went on, that
a raid by the police was not uncommon. He had upon one occasion seen
the patrol wagon, better known as the "Black Maria," drive away
loaded with bottles of whisky and with a nondescript lot of coloured
men and women. Most of the property in this section was owned by
white people, which they held on to jealously. They charged and
received rentals two or three times as high as in other sections of
"Darktown."
Kenneth found in the front room another excited and chattering lot
of men and women. The men seemed rather furtive and were dressed in
"peg-top" trousers with wide cuffs, and gaudily coloured shirts. The
women were clad in red and pink kimonos and boudoir caps. With an
inclusive "Hello, folks," Kenneth followed a woman who seemed to be
in charge of the house into the next room. In the centre of the
darkened room there stood the bed, dishevelled, the sheets stained
with blood. On them lay a man fully clothed, his eyes closed as
though in great pain, and breathing heavily, with sharp gasps every
few seconds. By the bed, bathing the man's brow, stood a woman in a
rumpled night-dress and kimono. Kenneth recognized the man as Bud
Ware, sometimes a Pullman porter, who used his occupation, it was
rumoured, to bring liquor from Atlanta, which his wife sold. It was
his wife Nancy who bathed his brow and who moved away from the bed
when Kenneth approached. She informed him that he had come home
unexpectedly from his run, and had been shot. Kenneth said nothing
but went immediately to work. He found Bud with two bullet holes in
his abdomen and one through his right leg. It was evident that he
had but a few hours, at most, to live. Kenneth did what he could to
relieve Bud's suffering. Turning to Nancy, he told her what he had
discovered. She stared at Kenneth wide-eyed for a minute and then
burst forth in an agony of weeping.
"Oh, Lawdy, why didn't I do what Bud tol' me to do? Bud tol' me to
let dat man alone! Why didn't I do it? Why didn't I do it?"
Her screams mounted higher and higher until they reached
ear-piercing shrieks. A head or two were stuck interrogatively
through the opened door at the sound of Nancy's woe, and as quickly
withdrawn. Kenneth administered an opiate to Bud to relieve his pain
and sat by the bed to do what he could in the short while that life
remained. The sordidness of the whole affair sickened him and he
longed to get away where he could breathe freely.
Strengthened by the opiate, Bud's eyes flickered and then opened for
a fraction of a minute. He smiled faintly when he recognized
Kenneth. He made several ineffectual attempts to speak, but each
effort resulted only in a gasp of pain. Kenneth ordered him to lie
still. Bud, however, kept trying to speak. Roused by Nancy's
shrieks, he finally managed to gasp out a few words, interrupted by
spasms of pain that shook his whole body.
"I knows I ain't got long, Doc. Dat's a' right, Nancy, I ain't
blamin' you none. I knows you couldn't he'p it."
He fell back on the pillow, coughing and writhing in pain.
"Lif' me a li'l—hiar—on the pillar, Doc. Dat's mo' like—it! Doc—I
ain't been much ‘count. I tol' dat man Parker—to stop foolin' with
my 'oman—but—he keep on—comin' here—when I'm gone. He knew I wuz
sellin' liquor—an' he tol Nancy he wuz gwine—hav' his brudder—She'f
Parker put me on—chain gang—if she tell me he come here—w'en I wuz
gone."
He had another paroxysm of coughing and lay for a minute as though
already dead. Kenneth administered restoratives, meanwhile telling
Nancy to keep quiet, which only made her weep the louder. After a
few minutes Bud began speaking again.
"I come home to-day—an' kotched him here. W'en I got mad an' tol
him—to get out—and stahted towards him—he grabbed his gun an'—shot
me." After a pause: "Doc, whyn't dese white fo'ks—leave our women
alone?—I ain't nevah bothered none of their women.—An' now—I's done
got—killed jus' 'cause—I—I⸺"
He half raised himself on the pillow, looking at Nancy.
"Doan cry, Nancy gal—doan cry⸺"
He fell back dead. Kenneth, of no further assistance, left Nancy to
her grief after promising to send the undertaker in to prepare Bud's
body for burial, and made his way out through the crowd, now greatly
increased in numbers, gathered around the door. He wondered if
anything would be done about the murder, at the same time knowing
that nothing would. The South says it believes in purity. What was
that phrase the Ku Kluxers used so much—"preservation of the
sanctity of the home, protection of the purity of womanhood"? Yes,
that was it. Suppose the races of the two principals had been
reversed—that Bud Ware had been caught with George Parker's wife.
Why, the whole town would have turned out to burn Bud at the stake.
Weren't coloured women considered human—wasn't their virtue as dear
to them as to white women? Nancy and Bud weren't of much good to the
community but if Bud wanted his wife kept inviolate, hadn't he as
much right to guard her person as George Parker to protect his wife
and two daughters? Again he felt himself up against a blind wall in
which there was no gate, and which was too high to climb. He had
determined to stay out of reach of the long arms of the octopus they
called the race problem—but he felt himself slowly being drawn into
its insidious embrace.