A
737,261


PRO PER
University of
Michigan
Libraries,
1817
TES SCIENTIA VERITAS
-


BOOKS
Lauriats
BOSTON &
CHESTNUT HILL


PROPERTY OF
University of
Michiñan
Libraries
1817
IES SCIENTIA VERITAS


الم
BOOKS
Lauriats
BOSTON &
CHESTNUT HILL





The Band Will Not Play Dixie





FIRST EDITION
Copyright, 1955, by Theodore Browne
All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form
Published by the Exposition Press Inc.
386 Fourth Avenue, New York 16, N. Y.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress catalog card number: 55-11114
--
! INI
-


(13-205598
The Band Will Not Play Dixie


My arrival back in New York City was as unceremonious as had
been my departure. There had been no one to see me off when I
sailed for Europe; there was now, on my return, no one to greet
me at the pier.
I commandeered the first cab I got to and instructed the driver
to take me to the Booker T. Washington Hotel up in Harlem.
The swift newsreel of downtown Manhattan ended when we
rounded Columbus Circle and came up Manhattan Avenue along-
side Central Park. We stopped for a traffic signal at the intersec-
tion of 116th Street and Seventh Avenue.
I was in Harlem.
The Booker T. was a little farther up the avenue. A man, lan-
guishing with a pushbroom in the act of sweeping the sidewalk
out front, noted our arrival and summoned a bellhop.
The bellhop made a show of hustling himself into action. I no-
ticed a pretty young thing saunter out of the lobby behind him and
wait to one side in the doorway. Meanwhile, he took my bags and
I followed him inside, passing the pretty young thing who looked
me up and down in a faceless, clinical fashion.
"Stick around,” he told her in an undertone.
"I got plenty to do," she said impressively.
"Well, go 'head, then!” he sulked.
The girl laughed heartlessly. He looked back at her and rolled
his eyes, indignant and restrained.
The lobby was small and unpretentious as hotel lobbies go.
There was not a single potted palm or a green thing growing there.


There was no attempt to make it other than a place to check in
and check out. Except for a circular bench in the center that faced
the elevator, there was no place to sit or lounge. The lobby had
the surface cleanliness of having been swept and dusted cursorily.
A short, wide hall led off into a dining room. A waiter was clear-
ing a table near the entrance. I could hear people chatting softly
and the sounds they made with knives and forks, but all this activ-
ity was out of sight and beyond the door.
The desk clerk, a waspish young man, who had a scrubbed-
clean, cocoa-brown complexion and was prematurely bald in front,
had got himself off to a bad start by trying to take care of me and
the switchboard at the same time. To make matters worse, the bell-
hop baited him by banging the bell and calling attention to me.
"Will you stop it!" he shrieked.
"Where's Sandra?" the bellhop asked.
"How th'hell I know!” he snapped.
“Tha's what she here fuh. Not you."
"Well, she's not here and I got to answer this switchboard."
"Ain't yo job.”
"Oh, go take a you-know-what for yourself!" He gave me a "Yes,
I said it and I'll say it again!" look.
My aloofness did not soothe his wrath.
Finally, he untangled himself and came pouting to the desk
and allowed me to register. He was coldly precise and efficient. I
noticed the Phi Beta Kappa key. There was no doubt of his feel-
ing superior to his job and to these cheap surroundings. I had no-
ticed, too, the title on the jacket of the book he must have laid
aside when the switchboard had interrupted his reading, Racial
Tensions-North and South. I would have liked to have asked him
about the book, only I was afraid he might resent my inquisitive-
ness.
The bellhop, I think out of respect for me, restrained a mighty
nasty urge, having suffered himself to wait this long for me to reg-
ister. As he had done with the girl, he retaliated by rolling his
eyes indignantly as he hustled up my bags and routed me toward
the elevator.


10
talking on the phone. When he saw me, he gawked and grinned.
"Say, hold the phone. . . . 'Thello King!" I shook his left hand.
He was holding the phone in his right. “'Thello, I sure am glad to
see you, boy. You sure looking fine. Pull up that chair here and
sit down. I'll be right with you, 'Thello. . . . Chivers? ... Hello?
... Lissen, here. I tell you what. I'll send Sandra-you know
Sandra, my secretary-I'll send her out soon she gits back from
lunch. I'll send her out and you give her all the details. How's
that? Fine! Lovely! Solid!”
He turned to me. "'Thello, boy, you sure looking good. Nigger,
how you manage to keep so chippie-looking, what I want to know,
streamlined-and look at me? I borrowed your tux to wear to a for-
mal once, remember?"
“Soft living," I laughed. “Too much fried chicken and pork
chops."
Taz shook his head remorsefully. “Tha's a fact! I eat too damn
much of what I oughtn't to eat. 'Thello, you ought to know Chivers
Bousefield-the Urban-Welfare-League Bousefield? Just occurred to
me.”
“I ought to. He's been my brother-in-law for twenty years.”
"Well, I'll be who-struck-John! S'if I don't know that! What
th'hell is the matter with me, anyway? That was Chivers Bousefield
I was just talking with on the phone. Does he know you're here?”
“Not yet.”
“Mercedes know?"
I shook my head.
"Wha's all the mystery?"
"I want to surprise them."
“They giving a little party tonight, you know—or, don't you?"
I didn't, of course. "Is it formal?”
"Oh, no, no, no," Taz hastened to assure. “Nothing but a lit-
tle get-together. Few of the 'intelligentsia' who like to gab about
the race problem and that sort of thing, don't you know." Chuckling
over his Briticism, Taz lapsed back into his own comfortable south-
ern naturalness. “That's right up Chivers' alley!” he said.
He joked about my brother-in-law Chivers Bousefield who was


11
a regional secretary of the National Urban Welfare League. Taz
called the organization a talk-and-do-nothing outfit, claimed that
all Chivers did was compile a lot of worthless statistics about the
Negro-this and the-Negro-that, making intricate charts of progress
and decline. Said Taz, Chivers even had charts to show the increase
over a five-year period in the number of Negro men who deserted
their wives and children when the men lost their jobs. “ 'Thello,
you know for yourself, Chivers's just trying to make his ownself
look important! He ain't helping nobody solve nothing! Now, is he?"
Taz had a perverse streak in his make-up. He was happiest
when he could make fun of something or somebody. He even made
fun of his own pomposity, recalling how he had put on the dog
when he and Gussie, his wife, attended a reception for the Mayor
at one of the big hotels downtown, how he "carried it off” without
the white folks so much as suspecting that he really felt out of
place. With all his college training, his ability, and affluence in
the newspaper field, Taz was still a big, corn-fed country boy, who
could be counted upon to do anything that was expected of him,
that is, providing it didn't jeopardize too many of the creature com-
forts he slavishly loved.
Yet, he could be nagging and unreasonable when he sought to
get his own way. He began to upbraid me for quitting my job as
foreign correspondent. I knew this was coming. I argued that any-
body could report the stuff I was sending him. I told him that Biggy
Danbridge, whom I had left in charge of the office over there, was
just as capable as I to do that kind of jejune reporting.
When I said that, Taz rolled his big eyes at me and puffed
angrily.
“What you talking 'bout, 'Thello? Biggy Danbridge ain't no
writer. Why, that journalistic yardbird! What th'hell can he write!
Read this-_" He handed me the item Biggy had just cabled from
London, then he sat primly upright, his fat hands gingerly astride
his hips, waiting for me to peruse the evidence which would make
me out a liar. Meanwhile, he fussed, “Mess he wrote 'bout some
African Prince Toko-some-goddam-thing (I'm positive he ain't got
his name spelled right either!) having a audience with the Queen.


12
A nine-year-old child coulda reported better than that. Fool don't
even say where it took place! Read it! Biggy ain't doing a thing
over yonder but whoring! No explanation of what business the
Prince was on. ... How much you bet me Biggy was even there?"
“What you gonna do with this?” I capitulated.
I thought he was going to crush the cable with his big hands
and pitch it into the wastebasket. No doubt he was tempted, but
he restrained himself.
“Damn his ignorant soul to hell! And you give up your job to
somebody like him!”.
Knowing Taz, I knew he wasn't as outraged as he was then
pretending to be. He loved this sort of thing, this pyrotechnical
bitching
"Biggy studied journalism at Columbia," I needled.
"Tha's the lie Biggy told you," Taz woofed. “You fool 'nough
to believe that. The only thing Biggy studied in his life is a rac-
ing form! 'Thello, for an intelligent man, I declare, you can sure
let people talk you into believing everything they tell you. Biggy
went to Columbia! Biggy ain't went nowhere, you ask me. Ol' Biggy
used to borrow books from the Public Library and carry them round
under his arm-and pose!"
"You don't think he read them?"
"Read what!"
“He may have got the knowledge by osmosis," I suggested, with
seeming innocence.
"Tha's the only way, too!"
"I only took his word about Columbia,” I said.
Taz threw up his hands. "'Thello, please!” he entreated.
We both burst out laughing together.
Subsiding and feeling much better, Taz said, “I tell you, I'll
guess up the missing information and stick the whole thing on page
one. We got a picture of this Prince took some years ago when
he was in Paris. Ain't nobody goin' to know the difference, no-
how.” He hastily scribbled a marginal note on the cable and laid
it aside. He knocked the ashes from his pipe into the wastebasket,
then burrowed the bowl inside his tobacco pouch. Several matches
were expended during the lighting process. Belching a penumbral


13
haze of sickly sweet smoke, Taz settled back comfortably, the chair
creaking in protest. The weighty calm was indicative. All joking
aside now.
"Now, I want you to tell a fool something," Taz resumed. “What
th'hell you quit your job for? Wha's this all about, anyway? In your
letter you went all round Robin Hood's barnyard to tell me you
was quitting. Wha's behind all this? Wha's your real reason? Now,
dispense with the double-talk. I want it straight. You don't have to
be no diplomat with me. Anything I hate is for a writer to talk
the way he writes!"
"You finished?"
"You got the floor.”
"I'll let you in on a little secret. I'm going to write a book.”
Taz looked fiercely at me. “Is that all?”
"What do you mean 'Is that all? I have to gather material,
which takes time. You know that."
“Ain't this a crime!" Taz caviled. “Hear you talk, you'd think
you was writing a daily column! You coulda turned out half-dozen
books. Why, your job don't take up that much of your time. Tell
the truth, 'Thello. Now, does it? Own up to the truth."
“I have to be here to work on my book," I explained. “I have
to consult with people like Solomon Morehouse and knock about
the country and sort of find out first-hand what's going on.”
"What sort of book is this you're writing, if I'm not being too
personal? Do I understand you to say you're going to consult with
Solomon Morehouse?”
I nodded. “The book's to be about him."
"Solomon Morehouse?” His tone was disparaging.
"Most significant Negro in America," I boosted. “Biggest race
leader since Marcus Garvey. He's getting things done, boy."
"He's making a heap of sound and fury, if tha's what you mean,"
Taz said.
"What does surprise me is that you and your paper don't get
solidly behind him. Hitch your wagon to his star, man. He's going
places. All you do is knock the man. If you're not knocking him,
you do something worse, which is ignore him."


14
“The Examiner tries to be impartial. We don't kowtow and we
don't ride on anybody's bandwagon."
“Impartiality often breeds contempt. You're either for him or
you're against him. I think you're against him. Honest to good-
ness, the stuff you print about Morehouse, you think some white
southern liberal was writing it.”
"Awright, you! I'm goin' to tell you something. 'Thello, you
messin' with dynamite. I'm warning you, because you're my friend
and I hate to see you get in wrong. Solomon Morehouse is a very
dangerous man. Oh, I admit he's done some good. We got seven
Negro Congressmen, thanks mainly to his agitation. The Federa-
tion of Workers in Personal Service is now a great national organi-
zation--"
“And whoever dreamed it was possible to organize Negro women
doing domestic service?" I pointed out.
"Yeah, I know. I know all that. He's done some good, but the
harm he's done, in my opinion, far outweighs the good. I say he's
dangerous. I say Solomon Morehouse is a dangerous spellbinder.
He's one of them mass-hypnotists, much on the order of a Hitler.
All right, you laugh. 'Tain't funny. Why, man, Solomon More-
house has got Negroes stirred up to a point where they're liable
to wreck themselves and the entire country 'long with them. You
haven't seen it, but I have. You hear me? He's got these Negroes-
not only here in New York City, but all throughout this here
country-he got'em to a fever pitch of wild excitement. They gone
crazy! Man, they ready for anything he tells'em. Why, Father Di-
vine and Marcus Garvey never had the mass appeal as this con-
juratin' nigger has. I'm here to tell you! I ain't exaggerating. I
wouldn't lie. Why should I lie? ... Lissen heah, it ain't just to
the ignorant he appeals. He's got young college intellectuals wav-
ing his banners and out making fiery speeches on the street cor-
ners. You don't realize the discontent and overcrowding thas' here.
Negro population alone has tripled inside three years! Yes, sir!
Where they coming from?-every backwoods corner and hog wal-
low in the South. I tell you, "Thello, they some bad niggers in
Harlem now. You'll see when you've walked around a bit. Be
careful where you go. Oh, my, they're bad! I got myself a police
--
!


15
permit to tote a gun. Yeah! I'll use it too, I have to. These niggers
ain't to be trifled with. They tush-hog. ... New York just can't
stand much more of this influx. Problem of finding jobs for them
and feeding the hungry. Chivers Bousefield can tell you how
they're taxing the welfare funds of the city. You ask him about
it tonight. Get him to tell you. It's grim. It's frightening. You re-
alize white folks have to work and eat, too. After all's said and
done, they were here in this city when all these new niggers were
down South picking cotton and grubbing 'taters. You know that.
And, mind you, white folks here are beginning to take measures
to protect their own interest. Do you blame them? These new
niggers don't belong up here. Ain't no cotton to be picked up here.
Then, why in tarnashun don't they stay down South where there's
room and need for them? No, a goddam Hitler-minded nigger like
Solomon Morehouse goes about agitating and urging a pack of
ignorant black fools to leave home and migrate up here where
they can vote for the things he tells them to vote for and nobody's
going to lynch'em if they do. Same conditions you find in the other
big cities, take like in Chicago, Philadelphia, in Detroit, in Los
Angeles and San Francisco. Man, it's a dangerous, potential men-
ace. White people are getting scared. It's getting out of hand. Some-
thing's gonna explode. Brother, I am worried.”
I half laughed. Taz looked at me in helpless bewilderment, as
if he questioned my sanity.
“Don't you see it, Taz? Can't you see he's playing for high
stakes?" I said. “Sounds fantastic, but Morehouse is out to force
the issue of a Negro state. You must know that, Taz."
“I see what he's up to. Sure, I see it,” Taz cried. “It's the way
this rabble-rouser is going about it that I don't like. This keeps up,
us Negroes won't have any white friends left. They'll all turn
against us."
“You mean, they'll be glad to get the Negroes off their hands
and give them their own autonomous state, or whatever it is they
want, just to be rid of us. And Morehouse certainly wants that to
happen. Pressure the white folks, till they in turn pressure Con-
gress to set up a Negro homeland!"
"All I say is: Lord, deliver me! I know Negroes. They'll get to


said.
I was burned up. "The better for what?" I asked.
“The better for me, the better for you, the better for our race,"
he pontificated, keeping his voice soft but firm.
“Then you plan to ignore him?" I said.
"Far as the Examiner is concerned, there ain't, there never was,
and never will be a Solomon Morehouse. Do I make myself clear?"
"What is this-a one-man conspiracy of silence?"
“Call it whatever you like. Don't take my word for it, 'Thello.
I'm not even going so far as to say that there aren't some of our
papers that'll continue to publicize Morehouse."
"You're hinting pretty loud that the biggest ones have already
joined the boycott against him.”
Taz dipped his head evasively, then came right back up with
an arch grin rippling his mouth. He was cute and charming to
watch.
"Well, sir, if you want to put it that way-yes. The white press
and radio are both in on this, too. Jesus Christ, man! We have to
do something! The country's already on the verge of another world
war. Niggers'll wreck the country so we'll all be at the mercy of
Communists. Get this straight, I'm not telling you not to write your
book. I'm only trying to warn you that you may not find your
way into print, so wha's the sense wasting your time on a subject
which is taboo? 'Course, it's your funeral. If you persist in going
ahead, well, tha's your black business!"
"All right, lard-head, but you won't get sore at me if I don't
take your advice?"
"No. But you'll wish you had. You can have your old job back,
anytime you feel that you've had your bellyful of that black mes-
siah. I hope you puke your guts real soon, 'cause I know Biggy
Danbridge'll never do on that overseas job."
I felt like a wayward, unregenerate son toward him.
"I'll see you and Gussie tonight at Sis's place."
“Okay, son.”
"By the way, Taz, how can I contact Solomon Morehouse?".
"Well, I hear–I don't know if it's true-I hear he's out on the
Coast right now. I hear he's a mighty sick man. All kinds of rumors
flying around. I even hear tell he had a nervous breakdown. Went


19
so lightly with rouge. Her hair had been dressed to a high gloss
and ringed in an attractive halo. What a sweet, tiny black angel
she would make, dressed in a white robe and equipped with wings
to fly!
She artfully wriggled herself loose.
“Oh! I'm terribly sorry!" I said.
"I should look where I'm going," she said.
“I should look where I'm going!"
"My fault."
"I looked to read the sign--"
"Oh, that sign! You could pass this place a million times and
wouldn't know it was here," she laughed. “You got to bend way
down to see it."
And that was what she did to prove to me it was so. The cheeks
of her small rump creased the thin dress she was wearing.
"This iron railing is in the way," I said.
"This thing!" She looked at it with an expression of long-suf-
fering annoyance.
Then, I added, “I suppose it has to be here, or somebody'ud
fall and crack his nut."
"We need a better place, all right, one up on the street, but
there's no other place available. And we have to locate in Harlem.
So ... that's that!" She smiled and ran down the steps.
"Hey!" I called after her. She reached the bottom, turned, and
looked up at me like a startled doe. “You work here?" I asked.
She bobbed her head as a little girl would do.
“Tell me—is Mr. Morehouse back?"
This time, she shook her head as a little girl would do.
"Could I talk with his secretary?”.
She wiggled her index finger, beckoning me to come downstairs.
I followed her through a busy front office, where a dozen or more
men and women were too preoccupied with whatever they were
doing to notice me, through a maze of desks, filing cabinets, and
mimeographing machines, to a door with the sign PRIVATB painted
in black on the frosted-glass portion. She opened the door, and
when I was inside she closed it. She brought a chair from a cor-


20
ner of the room and invited me to sit down, then she backed
herself against the edge of Solomon Morehouse's desk, folded her
arms, and regarded me quizzically.
"Secretary? You?"
"I'm Ravenna Snowden,” she said.
“I'm-_"
"You're Mr. King-Mr. Othello King, the writer.”
"That's right. How did you know?"
“I had a hunch.”
"It was a good one!"
“I could have been wrong, though. Biggy Danbridge wrote and
told me that you might be coming in to see us. So-I've sort of been
on the lookout for you."
“So, you know Biggy?"
"He used to go with my sister. She got tired of waiting for
Biggy, so she just upped and married another fellow. What's Biggy
doing over there?” She had the cutest way of hugging herself and
giggling. I was no longer someone she was meeting for the first
time. She could be her bubbling little self with me.
"I know! I know!" she squealed.
“He's running true to form," I grinned.
I'd say Ravenna was twenty-three. She couldn't have been
much older. I think she'd always been a "little woman," from the
day she started to walk. She'd been a rather pert and precocious
"little woman,” butting into older people's conversations, and being
sharply admonished that "little children should be seen, but not
heard."
"I didn't know Biggy'd written to you,” I said. “In fact, I didn't
know that you two knew each other. I don't even recollect my
talking with Biggy about Morehouse. It may have slipped out. I
might have been thinking out loud, and he probably overheard me.
I have that habit sometimes of thinking out loud. Maybe he could
have got the idea from the clipping files I've kept on Morehouse
and the Double-A.I.A.”
"Well, he didn't say exactly what it was you wanted to find
out. You know Biggy. He just says you're a friend of his, and if
you should come in to see us to give you any information we


21
might have. I assumed you might be wanting to do an article about
the Double-A.I.A.”
“Yes, that's partly it. I already know a great deal about the
organization itself, you understand, but what I'm primarily inter-
ested in right now is Solomon Morehouse himself. I want the facts
about him as a man, as a leader, well, a thorough briefing on his
life and struggles.” She was nodding her head to assure me that
she understood my intentions perfectly. "You see, Miss Snowden,
I wish to know as much about him as it is possible to know. Do
you think he'll co-operate?".
“I think he will. I think he'll be glad to."
“Good! I'll be getting around and interviewing other people
who've known him for some time. Anybody who's been in the
limelight as long as he has, and accomplished all he has, must have
made all sorts of enemies and friends. Naturally, I want his story
from his own lips first. I'd like to get together with him as soon
as possible. I understand he's out in California, 'least, I've been
told he is.”
"Yes ... he is."
"When you expect him back?"
"I don't know, Mr. King. I really don't. Mr. Morehouse left on
a speaking tour of the West Coast. That's far as I know."
Ravenna's open, butter-melting countenance was about the worst
place for a lie to hide. It was a dead giveaway.
"Then, he's not ill?"
"Oh, no!"
"How long's he been gone?"
"How long?"
"Yes."
"Well ... uh . . . Well, it's over a month, I would say. Oh,
but that's nothing. He's away from the home office a good deal of
the time, you know. He's traveling about the country, dropping in
on the different branch offices. He's in great demand as a speaker.
Of course, our newspapers haven't been giving Mr. Morehouse
much publicity of late.”
“So I've heard."
"Unless," she went on, with a tang of bitterness in her voice,


22
“it's to belittle or to misrepresent what the Double-A.I.A.'s doing.
Oh, they're great on ridiculing everything that has to do with us.
They send their reporters out to cover all the mass meetings, but
they won't write up a thing about us, unless something bad, like
a fist fight, happens. Would you believe it, they won't even print
the bulletins we send them, even though we offer to pay for the
space? We have to get out all our own notices. They won't run
our things. Won't sell us any space. They're terrible!"
I didn't realize that the door had been opened, until all at once
I heard the thrashing sound of typewriters and mimeographing
machines and noticed the abrupt batting of Ravenna's eyes. Turn-
ing in my chair, I looked up into the cold, fishy eyes of a jaundice-
complexioned, short, and rather chesty man who, I would say, was
in his middle fifties. His face looked as though he had shaved sev-
eral days under the skin and scrubbed all the oil from his pores,
it was so dry and tight. He had the calculating, cautious and, I
thought, squeamish reserve of a professor of social science, or some-
thing that has to do with sizing up people objectively and catalogu-
ing them according to type. His sandy red hair was close-cropped
and slicked down on top with a sticky, mild-scented pomade, but
was kinky about the sides where it had grown too long. I saw imme-
diately that Ravenna put herself on guard. She may have suspected,
as I did, that he had been outside the door for a time listening to
what we'd been saying
Ravenna, in a rather awkward fashion, introduced him to me
as Haskell Sneed, legal adviser and director of research.
"Othello King of the Harlem News Examiner?" he queried. He
seemed overly impressed. "Oh, yes! Did you just recently return
from abroad?”
I smiled. “Just this morning.”
Ravenna spoke up. “Mr. King would like to get in touch with
Mr. Morehouse."
Haskell Sneed raked me with a piercingly cold glance, then
slowly lowered his eyes, focusing them somewhere along my mid-
dle. He had to think for a moment, rubbing his small, daintily clean
fingers along his nether lip.


I turned my head as Dolly peered suspiciously at me. Mercedes
burst out laughing. Dolly let loose a yell. Everybody in the apart-
ment must have heard her and wondered.
We hugged and kissed with savage glee.
"Othello! Othello! Oh! I can't get over you!"
Dolly was from home. She had lived across the street from us
in Atlanta, Georgia. She was pathetically white, so pale she looked
anemic, bony and angular, her small gray eyes set way back in her
head. Her hair was auburn-colored, the grain as fine and soft-look-
ing as the floss silk of dandelions. She was continually fingering
it back off her ears. The one possible giveaway flaw in her physi-
cal whiteness was her wide-spreading mouth. She was pretty, how-
ever, with a prettiness her nickname “Doll Girl” implied.
We raised such a ruckus that we drew all the other guests out
into the kitchen. It was an unpretentious way to be greeted and
welcomed back. And I liked the folksiness of it all.
But Mercedes shooed us all back into the more appropriate set-
ting of the living room. “My Lord! What'll my highbrow neigh-
bors think?" she whispered in an aside to Dolly and me. “All of
us whooping and hollering like Lenox Avenue darkies!"
Dolly had no escort that evening. I offered to see her safely
home. Before accepting, she briefed me with the warning, "I live
in Brooklyn, you know.”
“I know."
"Troop Avenue."
"I don't care."
We took the subway.
“Taz got you sore, didn't he?" I said, as we headed for Brook-
lyn, siphoned through the labyrinthine underground of Manhattan.
Dolly was caustic. She was not, as yet, over her anger and re-
sentment at Taz. "He always tries to make fun of somebody, the
park ape! I can't stand him! I simply can't--!".
“Taz is all right. You pay attention to Taz!"
“He wanted to run down Krisna Deva, and he doesn't know
her."
"He's full of hell."


26
"All he knows is that she and Solomon Morehouse were together
once," she prattled inflexibly. “Tazewell doesn't know what their
relationship was to each other, outside of their business partner-
ship, except from hearsay and gossip. I knew them both, but do
you think I'd go gabbing what I know to Tazewell Odum? Why,
he'd smear it all over his paper. He'd go to town to involve More-
house in a big colored-folks mess. Othello, I'll be truthful, I don't
like Solomon Morehouse, myself. I couldn't, not after the way he
treated my friend Krisna. But that's nothing to do with him as a
leader, you understand. I believe he is a truly sincere fighter for
the race. I believe he's right. I only dislike him because of the
way he treated the woman who loved him and helped him get
where he is. ..."
Without giving me a chance to explain my interest in Solomon
Morehouse, Taz had pounced upon Dolly and figuratively backed
her into a corner. “Tell me this, Dolly. What become of your
girl friend, the crystal gazer, the one who used to tell fortunes?
Tell me, didn't she and Morehouse team up together at one time?
Sure, they did! Before Morehouse branched out to become a labor
organizer. He and this woman ran the Temple of Tranquillity'
Whatever she called herself, I know that it wasn't her real name.
She was no more a Hindu than I am. She was one dream of a
woman, though. Looked just like a little doll in all that oriental
getup. My, my! She was a cute chick.”
“You must mean Krisna Deva,” Dolly said leanly.
"Tha's her. Krisna Deva. Say, what all become of her, Dolly?"
asked Taz, as though it really meant a lot to him, which I knew
it didn't. It was a whim. He couldn't possibly be as interested in
Krisna Deva as I was. Dolly happened just then to be looking at
me. I think she sensed right away that I was extremely interested,
that my interest in her friend was genuine, and that Taz's was not.
“Krisna went out to Chicago. Oh . . . some time ago," she told
Taz in a manner that shut him up.
Doll Girl had been politely rude to Editor Tazewell Odum.
Anybody who has taken the Eighth Avenue subway from Man-
hattan to Brooklyn knows how difficult it is to talk and be heard.
Dolly did the talking, bringing her eyes and hands into play, so,
11
il
-u


in this way, I was able to follow her, even when the words were
dissipated, that is, up until the time the train made its underwater
dash through the tube linking Manhattan to Brooklyn; then, it was
impossible to hear or to think of anything, except the wonder and
the terror of being below a river. I didn't hear or understand Dolly
again until we were coming up out of the station where we got off.
Being an unpredictable person, she suddenly stopped me on
the stairs and stared me into helpless confusion. I felt silly, with her
saying nothing.
“Do you know," she asked, "do you know who Solomon More-
house puts me in mind of?"
"No. Who would you say?" .
"Of course, I really don't know if he has changed much, since
the time I knew him. Well onto fifteen years, I reckon. Othello,
do you know you look enough like him to be his twin brother?"
"His twin?”
"Except for the goatee,” she said.
Going up the steps, she held onto my arm. “As I remember,"
she confided, “Solomon was very nice, very refined, and very soft-
spoken. You know something, too, he came right out and told me
that he loved Krisna. Came right out and said he needed her, that
he'd asked her to come in with him to be his assistant and compan-
ion. I think that's how he put it. He said he could not marry Krisna,
because he already had a wife and that he had no grounds to di-
vorce her. He asked me did I think it was wrong for him and Krisna
to live together as man and wife. I told him I didn't know. I
wouldn't presume to judge in a case like that. Who was I to say?
I said it was entirely up to him and Krisna. ..."
As I think back to this ride to Brooklyn with Dolly, I wonder,
even now, if Tazewell Odum didn't have something like this in
mind when he brought up the subject of the affair between Krisna
Deva and Solomon Morehouse? Taz would do a thing like that,
and there wouldn't have to be a logical reason for his doing it.
He was, in fact, the most illogical, inconsistent person I had ever
known. He may have been mad at Dolly for keeping a secret from
him, and, to get even, he sicked me on Dolly in order to wangle
that secret out of her. Since he couldn't have it, then he'd see to
ULU


30
There was no sign of a train. There was only a handful of
people waiting on the platform. I doubted whether any of them
had noticed Ravenna, or, if they had, felt the concern I had for
her predicament.
When I looked again, a fellow was standing close up to Ravenna.
I couldn't hear what he was saying, but he seemed to be quarrel-
ing with her in a spate of hard, cutting words. Presently, I saw
Ravenna walk abruptly away from him, not bothering to wipe her
eyes. She paid her own way through the turnstile. She nearly
brushed me in passing, going up a ways to a point where the sec-
ond or first car would stop. The young man waited back a while,
then he sauntered through the turnstile, and stood with his evil
eyes sardonically watching Ravenna as though he expected her to
bring herself back to him, to repent and to make up. There was
a vulgar arrogance and presumptuous coldness in the pose he struck.
He seemed much too sure of himself.
Frankly, I didn't know what to make of these two young peo-
ple. Just thinking about them made me feel old and out of step
with the times. I wondered, for instance, how come a personable,
intelligent girl like Ravenna would involve herself with a fellow
who was so obviously inferior to her. To begin with, he was un-
attractive, willowy thin, and he looked tubercular. He was black,
but his blackness had none of the velvet luster Ravenna's had. It
was the coarse, ashen kind. Perhaps it was his worldliness and his
fine instinct for clothes. In fact, he seemed all clothes, from head
to toes. He looked sharp. Reeking with liquor, the sickening sweet-
ness of hair pomade and cigarette smoke, he was sharp, and he
knew it with all the certainty of his baleful arrogance.
Each of us boarded a different car. There were less than a dozen
passengers in mine. I had a seat and the area around me all to
myself. I stretched my tired legs, and, propping my right elbow up
against the windowsill, I used my palm as a headrest. My tiredness
seemed to come down on me all of a sudden. In the midst of think-
ing about Ravenna and her choice of a lover, I dozed off. The wear
and tear of that first day back must have tuckered me out. I'd
simply collapsed.


31
I would have gone to the end of the line, then back to Brook-
lyn, if Ravenna hadn't shaken me back into consciousness.
"Wake up! Mr. King! Mr. King! Wake up-_” I heard her baby
voice, as I was rubbing the sleep from my eyes. "You get off here
... 125th Street. . . . Hurry-_".
"Oh! . . . Oh! ..." I gasped, scrambling to my feet.
She had me by the arm, steering me out onto the crowded plat-
form. I almost got my foot clawed by the twin doors.
"Are you all right?"
I looked at her foolishly and smiled. “Yes, yes. . . . Thanks.”
"You ought to be careful. It's bad business sleeping like that
on the train. You could be robbed, you know."
I sobered instantly and began feeling through my pockets.
Ravenna giggled. “You were lucky this time. I sat beside you
all the way.”
"From Brooklyn?"
"We got on at the same station."
"You don't say?" I pretended not to know.
"I saw you, but you didn't see me.”
There was a bright smile on her face, and she was as cheer-
ful as a lark. Much as I wanted to ask her about the boy friend, I
did nothing of the sort. I let her believe in my ignorance of the
incident in Brooklyn.
“Would you mind, Mr. King, seeing me home?" she asked. "It's
so late, and I don't mind telling you, I'm afraid to walk down that
street by myself.”
"I'll be glad to," I said. "Certainly. ...".
"It's only two blocks. I'm round the corner from 127th and
Eighth Avenue,” she informed me, as we set out for her home.
"This Harlem's bad, especially round here. It isn't safe for a lone
woman this hour of the night. I don't think it's so safe for a man
either. These kids are awful, Mr. King. Oh, they are! They carry
guns and knives. And I've seen them beat up a drunken guy and
then roll him. No policeman in sight. There never is, when you
want one. I think they're afraid. Then, who isn't? Everybody in
Harlem is afraid-more or less. It's awful to live in Harlem. I guess
you can take care of yourself, all right. You look it, anyway.”


34
She shook her head.
"Where is he, then?"
"That I can't tell you."
"Won't you?”
“Now, may I have one of your cigarettes, please?"
"Of course ..."
I knew she would tell me. It was something she wanted me to
share with her. For a selfish reason, perhaps. Because she was des-
perate and afraid and she had no one to turn to for the comfort or
help she needed.
"Mr. Morehouse left here to go to Georgia. Where in Georgia,
I don't know. I don't think he even knew himself where he was
going. You see, he didn't plan this. He was forced to leave. At the
point of a gun.”
She stopped talking and was staring me straight in the eyes.
"You don't believe me, do you?" she asked, after a while.
"First he's in California; now it's Georgia. ..."
"I was with him, I tell you, in his apartment. He was work-
ing on a speech he was going to deliver out in California, when
in walked these three white men. Mr. Morehouse knew one of
them. He was Senator Spruce Salters. You bound to have heard
of him.”
“He's behind the African Colonization Plan.”
"That's him.”
I was incredulous.
"You're fooling! What's this a joke?" I said, laughing.
I saw she was angry at me. “This was no joke. Why would I
joke about a man I love and respect as I do Mr. Morehouse? He's
like a father to me. I tell you, I was right there with him when
this thing happened. I was right there! Ol' Senator Salters even
addressed Mr. Morehouse as "boy," and ordered Mr. Morehouse
to come with him. Mr. Morehouse wanted to know where he was
taking him and what this was all about. Ol' Senator Salters
laughed, and said, 'Don't be scared, boy. We'll tell you all about
it later. There ain't time to explain. I'm going to take you to meet
some friends of the colored race.' . . . Mr. Morehouse said, 'Well,


35
Senator, would you mind just telling me where we're going?' ...
The Senator told him they were driving all the way to Georgia in
his private car to a conference with the Ku Klux Klan.”
I still couldn't believe her. It didn't sound like a thing that
could be true. It sounded like an hallucination-like the wild imagin-
ings of a sick mind blowing its top. She was sick, this girl, mentally
sick, I suspected. Maybe it was only a temporary thing, a state of
mental aberration induced by marijuana. The limpid, glassy eyes
told me nothing. They would not support my suspicions. They
only seemed angered and hurt by my disbelief. They turned from
me,
I watched the small, tragic nape of her neck, my thoughts wholly
detached from her.
Incredible as the thing sounded to me, it set fire to my imagina-
tion. A race leader, whisked away to parts unknown, to meet in
secret with the Ku Klux Klan! Think of that! My God! Could such
a thing happen? I asked myself. What might any Negro and the
Klan have in common to talk about? Was it to make some deal
with Morehouse? We'll do this, provided you'll do that. Whatever
it was, it certainly had to do with Negroes in the South. My specu-
lations pyramided to dizzying heights. Perhaps the Klan will sup-
port his scheme for a Negro state, a buffer state in some no-man's
land between the North and the South. Perhaps it was to win
Morehouse's support of a compromise bill which Senator Salters
had authored, a bill which would underwrite the exodus of Negroes
from the South. Perhaps, I had misgivings, this was the making of
the Great Betrayal-the Negro people being sold down the river,
for somebody was forever selling the Negro short. ...
"You say they forced Morehouse to leave with them?” I asked.
"Yes," she replied, turning her face towards me.
“Did you notify the police or the F.B.I.?"
"Senator Salters warned me not to. He told me I must keep
my mouth shut, if I wanted Mr. Morehouse to stay alive. You're
the only someone I dare to trust. I didn't tell Haskell Sneed or
anybody. I told Haskell he'd left suddenly for California without
explaining why. I don't think Haskell believes me, though.”
Vaal 1 NVDIHRNU LIISSSAINII


36
hone call by the these southern things their own
“How long ago this been?" I asked.
"Wednesday night. Three days almost. I should have had a wire
or phone call by this time unless ...".
“You don't know these southerners. They don't rush. They move
slow. They are always going to do things their own way. I wouldn't
want to be in the spot I think Morehouse is in. The hot air they
can generate is enough to suffocate a man! I picture him sitting
off to himself while they huddle together and talk about their
friendship for the colored people. They always know what is best
for us. Know us better than we know ourselves! They, the only
people who understand us! What else can Morehouse do but sit
there like a brass monkey and keep his thoughts to himself? By
now, he's probably lost so much face that if he looked at himself
in a mirror, he'd only see a speck. A cracker isn't going to grant
a colored man but so much dignity, I don't care who he is."
"What do you think we ought to do?"
“I'm damned if I know, baby. Do nothing. What can you? I
don't know of a thing we can do right now. We don't want to
mess it up by butting in. Maybe, in another day or two, you'll be
hearing something from him.”
It didn't satisfy her. “I'm so scared! Honest to God!” Ravenna
cried. She shivered and laughed uneasily. "I'm glad I have you,
Mr. King. I'd be out of my mind if I didn't have you to turn to."
“How come you trust me so?" I asked her.
“I trust you?” she reiterated.
"Yes.”
“Anybody'd trust you, just by looking at you."
"Ravenna?"
"Sir?”
"That'll never do, now."
"What'll never do, Mr. King?"
"All this formality.”
"Oh. ..."
"Mistering' and 'siring'! You can call me Othello. I won't get
mad, you hear?"
“Agreed! From now on: Othello. Okay?"
"Check!"
"What was it you started to ask me, Othello?"


40
neath she was just a sex-ripened little strumpet, probably carrying
on an illicit relationship with some other woman's husband. She
was probably playing Morehouse, too, for a sucker, the way she
would play me, if I were to get in deep with her. I got sick at my
stomach from thinking the worst about her. My mind became a
cesspit.
I came out into the street and moseyed for a time in front of
the entrance, watching people going in and coming out and get-
ting into cabs and driving off. I tried not to think. There was a
bar and grill diagonally across the street. So I went there.
I immersed myself in the crowd of raucous, animated drinkers
bivouacked around the bar. I came out into a partial clearing in
the rear of the place, which was an enormous room honeycombed
with semi-private booths. I found one that was empty and hid
myself. A waitress spotted me in passing. She smiled hospitably
and tossed her hips. I waited indifferently for her to come back. I
didn't want to eat, but I ordered the fried chicken she recom-
mended along with French-fries and coffee.
“Are you still stopping at the hotel?”
Surprised and quizzical, I looked her up and down. She knew
I was wondering. An amused, impudent smile creased her pretty
face.
"I don't forget a face-not a face like yours," she said.
“Mine isn't much to look at,” I jibed, still wondering.
"I must have thought a lot of it to remember it. And I only
saw you once, getting out a taxi and going by me into the Booker
T. that morning. You passed right by me," she said.
Now I remembered her. "You were talking to Whosis-the bell-
hop?"
"Lester. Now, don't tell me you noticed me!"
"I sure did! Lester asked you to stick around.”
"What did he say about me?"
"Nothing. I heard him ask you to stick around," I said.
"We don't mean a thing to each other. I just know him from
coming in here. I don't have any steady. I think I'm better off
that way, don't you?"
.:"
T


41
"That depends on the company you keep," I said.
“I think you've got something there!” she tittered.
She was alerted by a couple who were preparing to leave. “I'll
see you," she told me, and slid away.
She was busy, back and forth. If she looked my way at all, I
didn't know it. She was hustling, driving herself, and shrewdly
attending strictly to business, keeping an eye on everybody, ap-
parently, except me. I finished eating and wanted my check and
looked around to get her attention. I had a feeling that she was
deliberately ignoring me. I started to get up and walk over to her,
but she had vanished. I settled back, thinking to myself, After all,
I'm not going anywhere, so I may as well . . . I took a cigarette
from my pack, then placed the pack in front of me on the table.
I was fishing about for matches, when a light fickered before my
eyes. I squinted up into the waitress's face. Still holding the match,
she shook loose a cigarette from my pack, lighted hers after mine
was lit, then sat down across from me.
She had removed her apron. The black dress she was wearing
was part of her uniform, but it looked no different from any dress
a woman would wear in the street. On her, it made no difference
anyway. Most anything, a shift or a cheap cotton housedress, would
have looked good on her frame. She had hastily tidied up her face
and hair.
With the cigarette she stretched back and relaxed.
"All through?" I asked.
She nodded, her eyes casually focusing at me. They had an
open, searching look.
"Hungry?"
She shook her head, still regarding me.
"Drink?"
Again she shook her head.
"I'll get you something, if you like,” she said. “I don't drink.”
"No, never mind.”
"Sure you do," she decided. “Be right back. What do you like?
Scotch? Bourbon-->".
"You be the doctor," I said.
She was pleased, and winked at me.


42
She came back with a highball.
"I made it up special for you,” she said.
"What's in it?"
"Scotch, some Bourbon, a little ginger ale."
"What's your name, by the way?"
"Katherine."
“'Katherine Special,'” I said, naming the drink.
I sipped and tasted in the gingerly astute manner of a connois-
seur, which I wasn't. Her cheeks rippled with dimply smiles. She
reminded me of a little tomboy tickled by some mischief she had
cooked up.
"Well, it ought to cheer you up," she said.
"Do I look like I need cheering up?" I asked.
"You sure do!" she came right back.
"I'm the worrying kind."
“I'll listen to your troubles. Might help me forget my own. Do
you want me to listen?"
"To my troubles?"
"Sure!"
"I've got so many!"
"Women?”
"Good Lord, no!"
She looked incredulous.
"If I told you, you might laugh. You probably think I'm crazy.”
"Nothing of the kind. You're not the crazy type. You're too in-
telligent and cultured. You're out of the ordinary. You like books
and good music and good shows, things the average person couldn't
appreciate. Am I right about you?”
"I have a little education. Not too much, not enough, I hope,
to make me a fool. I'm not educated out of my race."
“Doesn't take much for some Negroes to be. The educated
Negroes don't do anything to help the race. They try to get away
from the race as fast as they can. I know the light ones don't stay
in it. The black ones wouldn't either, if they could help it. I'm
like you. I'm neither. We're sepia. We have to stay on this side.”
“Do you mind it?"


45
me inside the sweetly scented room which belonged to her exclu-
sively, closed the door, then turned on a blue-colored light which
cloaked our shamelessness in something resembling a tropical twi-
light.
"We have to be a little quiet, lover. They're hard-working peo-
ple. Both her and her old man get up early and go out to work.
These others, well, they're like me. Night owls who sleep all day.”
I sat down upon the edge of the bed and watched her as she
removed her dress, kicked off her shoes, and slipped on a robe.
She acquired some things she needed, then she left me, after giv-
ing me a peck, saying, “Lover, make yourself comfortable. Know
what I mean?"
"All right, baby," I said. “Don't forget to come back.”
I lit a cigarette and started peeling off my clothes. ...


54
ordinates cringe. He demanded to know who the party was that
was calling him. The man whispered that it was somebody call-
ing from New York, that the party wouldn't give his name, but
that he claimed he wanted to speak directly to the Senator on offi-
cial business.
"Gimme it heah,” the Senator said rashly. “I'll talk to him.” The
"Hello?” was deceptively softened.
"Senator?"
"Speaking."
"I'm a reporter."
"Reporter? I thought you said you was some official of the
United States government? What you mean by calling me heah?
What is it you want?”
"Simply this, Senator. I want you to tell me where Solomon
Morehouse is."
"Solomon who?" he hedged.
"Solomon Morehouse," I enunciated.
I waited. There was no sound, so I knew he hadn't hung up
the receiver. It occurred to me that the Senator was instructing
his man to get to another phone and have the operator trace my
call. I was almost dead sure.
"It won't be necessary for you to trace my call, Senator. My
name is Othello King and I am calling from my room at the Booker
T. Washington Hotel in New York-in Harlem, that is.”
He tore out at me angrily. “I don't know nothing 'bout any Solo
mon Morehouse. I never hear tell of any nigger by this name.”
"Oh?” I said sweetly. "How is it, then, you know he's a Negro?"
"Why, uh-why, uh-_”
"Is it coincidence?".
"I don't know and I don't care! The name suggests a nigger to
me. It's a nigger name. Now, see heah, you've wasted 'nough o'my
time. I'm a busy man. ..."
“Don't hand me that!" I cut in quickly, for fear he'd hang up.
“You forced Solomon Morehouse at gun-point to accompany you
South for some kind of secret meeting with the Ku Klux Klan.
You're holding him a prisoner. I demand to know why you're hold-
ing this man against his will.”


57
It was Solomon Morehouse's study. On the other side of the
room, opposite from where I stood in the doorway, I saw the tele-
vised images of the people whose voices I heard down the hall.
The bottom half of one of the windows was raised flush with the
upper, the drapes winnowing outward through the opening
As if I knew for sure Ravenna was there, I called to her softly,
“Ravenna? ..." and stepped inside. And, sure enough, she was
there. When I looked down, I saw her lying at my feet. Immedi-
ately, I gathered her up in my arms and hustled her into an adjoin-
ing bedroom, thinking she must have fainted. I laid her on the
bed, foolishly calling to her and asking her what had happened.
It was when I slid my hand from under her back that I realized
she was dead. The cuff of my white shirt and the sleeve of the tan-
colored jacket I wore were both stained with her blood.
I was so choked with pity I burst into tears. “Oh, my God! Oh,
God!" I cried. I don't remember how long I was there, or what I
thought or did while there. It was sometime later that I found my-
self back in Morehouse's study, looking out of the window and
down upon a narrow, carefully tended, brick-paved backyard.
In the dusk, I saw the body of a man slumped over the low
iron picket fence which enclosed the rear of the premises. It was
as limp and lifeless as a giant-sized rag doll which it resembled.
The size of the man, the clothes . . . I did not have to see his
face to know who he was. “That crazy lunatic!" I thought in a
rage of pitiless revulsion at his impalement. “Damn fool! What a
mess! What a awful mess!"
A mess I've got myself in! The thought shocked me into a cold
sweat. I don't want to get mixed up in this, I worried. It may not
even look like what I think it is, may not have happened the way
I think it happened. It could be many things, angles the police
could never guess at, the sinister shadow of Senator Salters which
hung over Ravenna, over Solomon Morehouse, yes, and over me!
This thing had the plausibility of murder and suicide. To a
policeman, a Negro going berserk and shooting his girl friend, then
committing suicide by leaping from a five-story window. I remem-
bered Ravenna saying that her boy friend was a knife-toter. He
would have stabbed her. You could not expect the police to know


58
that. Negroes do shoot one another and commit suicide, too. But
this particular Negro was a bad actor, and a bad-acting Negro is
more likely to knife than shoot, and a bad-acting Negro rarely takes
his own life. Such was my befuddlement. I couldn't believe the
suicide. Not him! He would beat it away from New York and
lose himself in the black ghetto of another metropolis, say, Chicago
or Los Angeles, take up with some other woman, and live quietly
unnoted, and perhaps never get into trouble again. There never
is a big 'miration made over one Negro killing another Negro.
There never is. The white newspapers ignore such trivia. And Negro
newspapers give it a merely routine reporting. It's all forgotten
so soon. Lynchings, scandals, and society make much better read-
ing in Negro papers than commonplace murder.
Befuddled though I was, I was not going to call the police
and get mixed up in this-whatever it was! I got out.
"You're leaving us, Mr. King!"
“Yes . . . I'll be leaving here. ..."
“Not for good, we hope."
“I don't think so."
"Well . . . when you come back this way-_"
"I hope you'll have a room for me."
“We most certainly shall! You just wire us when you're com-
ing. We'll take care of your reservation, all right."
"Thank you."
“The man came for your luggage, while you were out.”
"Yes, I know. . . . Your key. Here it is. I'm all set with you?"
"Yes, sir. You're all paid up.”
"I guess that's all!”
"Hope you have a nice trip, Mr. King.”
"Thank you. Take care, now!"
“ 'Bye!"
I was hoping that he wouldn't notice the lady's overnight bag
I was carrying, but notice it he did and it was all he could do to
contain his curiosity. I had borrowed this from Katherine with no
intention of ever returning it. She knew I wouldn't, since the thing
wasn't worth over two ninety-eight, though I had asked to borrow it.


ing. Just stirring
So what! Haven't We their problem,
“Do he mean more to you than us?"
"I don't know."
"Would you risk your life for me?"
"Right now I would!"
She laughed. “I wonder!"
“Katie, did you ever hear of Solomon Morehouse?” I asked.
“I think he's crazy, don't you?”
"Why do you think he's crazy?”
"Well, stirring up all this mess about a 'Negro state, which he
ain't gonna get. There's enough friction between Negroes and white
people as it is without him making the thing any worse. And that's
what he's doing. Just stirring up more trouble. I wish he'd shut up.
I know our race is a problem. So what! Haven't we always been a
problem? Let the white folks worry about it. It's their problem,
anyway. It's up to them to solve it. Did we ask to come here?”
"The white folks want to send us back to Africa,” I said.
“That old Senator Salters of Georgia is behind that,” she said
angrily. “Isn't he the one who's trying to get that bill passed?"
"He's sold a lot of people in the North and in the South the
idea.”
“They'll never pass a bill like that, would they, Othello?”
"Not if we Negroes are united to fight it."
"You mean like Solomon Morehouse want us to be?”
"United, we hold the balance of power in any major election.
That's what has happened already. Morehouse can deliver the
Negro vote. A lot is going on, baby, the public doesn't know about.
Like my friend I told you about who was kidnaped by the Ku
Klux Klan. The South is licked on the Negro issue, and they know
it. They'll either have to secede from the Union and fight a sec-
ond Civil War, or give up enough land from several of their own
states to form a 'Negro state.' My guess is that they will chip in
the land, unless they can persuade my friend to sell out to them.
I don't think they will. There never has been a race leader like
Solomon Morehouse!"
"Was it him? Him?" she gasped.
"Yes! . . . Yes!" I said brusquely, angered because I had told
my secret.


67
I attempted to get up, but she restrained me.
“Katie, I swear to God, you open your mouth about this, I'll
kill you!" I said.
"You mean it, too!" she chided.
“I do so mean it!" I threatened.
She pecked at my mouth with a sensuous monotony.
“And I mean for you to come back to me!" she murmured.


70
hoped this might make them forget about me. The car began to
fill, and soon I was orphaned among a crowd of unconcerned whites.
There was an immense activity, as there always is, just prior
to the time of departure of a train. The restlessness of the people
who have come to see somebody off. The anxiety felt for time run-
ning out. The sameness of all the small talk that goes on at this
time, repeated promises and admonitions, and pantomimes at the
windowpanes.
The conductor, a stoop-shouldered, middle-aged giant, footsied
through the car. His red, homely face had a pleasant, vacant ex-
pression. He conferred for a moment with the porter. Whatever
it was they had to talk about, he spoke with a drawl as thickly
southern as was the porter's. The porter, on his guard, was politely
deferential, addressing the white man as “Cap.” The conductor
said “All right, boy" and went on to the next car. . . . Hucksters
of magazines, confectioneries, soft drinks, and sandwiches hustled
through. Now and then a dining-car man in starched white linen
hot-footed through.
And, finally, “BOARD!” The jerk comes like a tidal wave. Then,
the countermovement of being carried forward. The train pulls out
of the station.
I could relax now, because there was something to see beside
the people around me. The train was out in the open now. I watched
from the window. I watched for a long time, my thoughts lost in
some meaningless abstraction. The passengers seemed content to
ignore me. The two elderly ladies had long dismissed me from
their interest as though I no longer was there to look at and gall
them. Only the porter seemed to be painfully mindful of my pres-
ence. I would happen to look up and see him crane his neck out
through the draped opening of the men's washroom to see what I
was doing. When he pussy-footed past, it was the same furtive
stare of disapproval and curiosity. When he was summoned to
serve someone, he was all smiles, until he glanced at me. Then his
stony displeasure would show. I tried to retaliate, but he never
looked when I was prepared to snub him.
He managed to be very busy when I came into the washroom.


71
When I returned from the diner that evening, most of the beds,
including my own, had been made down.
A Negro is sensitive to the change which comes over the whites
once they are below the Mason-Dixon Line. They instantly take
over. They make it clear to any non-white that they are the supreme
rulers here, that they are a law unto themselves. The line is sharply
drawn, as restrictive as a chalk marking upon a stage set, so that
each actor definitely knows his place. There is no margin for mis-
takes. One becomes increasingly aware that accents are arrogantly
and chauvinistically southern. When I went to the diner the fol-
lowing morning for breakfast, I was intercepted at the entrance by
the white steward. He was tactfully polite, though absolute. A place
had to be found for me, and when I was seated a partial curtain
was drawn.
It was at the end of the car to one side of the door. The table
could accommodate four people, though I was alone for the time I
was there. I could see the people across the aisle from me all the
way up to where the steward stood busily doubling as cashier and
usher. I saw him summon one of the waiters and dispatch him to
my table. The waiter showed up, his bottom lip hanging churlishly.
"I ain't supposed to work dis table. Steward knows dat. I has
to make a trip special all de way down here, when I supposed to be
up front,” he grumbled. “He signed dat Tomin' nigger Charlie
Givens to my table, so I could come down here. I does all de work
of servin'. He collect them people's tips! How you lak dat? Dey 'bout
done through dey eatin'. ... Yessuh!” he changed the subject
“—what you goin' have fuh breakfast?"
He kept looking up ahead at Charlie, his loose lips puckered
with malice.
As he bent over to check off the order form, another waiter
bumped him deliberately. "Git yo' fat ass out de aisle, Papa!" he
soft-pedaled. “Let dis fine lady by.”
The lady was seated at the table across the aisle from me. She
shared the table with a middle-aged couple and their little grand-
son. The waiter held the chair, sliding it under her with a sleight-
of-hand deftness as she sat down.


73
or so ill-mannered as to risk offending a southerner by making an
issue of race segregation.
Oddly enough, I found myself admiring Dolly's flawless per-
formance in the role of a white woman, the way she wisely steered
the conversation along the line of inconsequential generalities, such
as the weather, the trip, the food. The husband was quite taken
with this charming and vivacious Yankee lady, the wife uneasily
affable, while the little boy was too centered in himself and his
grandparents to like anybody else. ...
I was filling a dixie cup with water, when the door was pushed
back all the way and the porter entered huffing and puffing with
his arms and hands full of luggage, followed by Dolly Whisonant.
On seeing me, she haughtily rigged her head to thwart any
impulse I might have had to engage her in conversation. It proved
a wise thing for her to do, for, for that split second, I forgot that
we were not supposed to belong to the same race. Pressing my
back against the wall, I gave her room enough to pass me with-
out touching her.
As I was passing the private drawing room which had been
assigned to her, I overheard the porter telling her, “Yes, ma'am, dey
has to shift the passengers in yo' car to the others, 'count of dey
has to take her off to repair the damage the fire caused in the wirin'.
Anyway, you be much mo' comfortable and private in dis drawing
room all to yosef, yes, ma'am.”
"Thank you, porter.”
"Oh-thank you, ma'am! Thank you very much!"
She had given him a tip, and he was backing out and bow-
ing, as I made my way back to my seat.
He leaned over me, as I sat down, and whispered confiden-
tially, “Gimme whole sawbuck! Man, she sho has class!” He chuckled
and left me without lingering to hear what I had to say.
After dinner that evening, I went to the club car for a drink. The
bar had just opened. There were only two others there besides my-
self and the attendant. The two men were busy at a game of whisk,
their highballs untouched beside them on the table. They didn't
even notice me.


74
-
-
-
-
I asked the attendant behind the bar, “No law against serving
me a drink, is there?”
He was a fellow about my own age and my shade of ginger-
snap brown. He was a hustler, shrewd, poker-faced. He moved fast
and with precision. He looked at me insolently for a while, then
gave me a knowing wink. He laughed with his shoulders, mirth-
lessly.
"You much right here as anybody else,” he said.
“I eat my dinner behind a curtain,” I told him.
"I know. They do the same thing in this club car, wasn't for
the fact that very seldom any colored people come in here. See, an-
other thing, it's mostly all men that come in here. That makes a
difference. White men don't like you close up to their women.”
"White women do come here, don't they?”.
"Some do. Usually pickups-some broad on the make. There's
one now," he indicated with an expressionless stare. “Last night
she come here with a different guy. Got pissy-assed drunk.”
She was a giggly, undulating charmer. She was cloying and
affectedly girlish for a woman of her perjured years. The man and
she were laughing about the jouncing they were getting as they
made their way unhandily through the car. Each tried to help the
other and failed.
"God!" she shrieked. “I'm sittin' down!"
"Not here!” he protested.
"Here is good enough!”
“No!"
“Be a good boy!"
“You really want me to be a good boy?”
"I do."
"On one condition-_"
"Horace! Not with these people round!”
"Oommmmmmm!"
"Horace! You behave yourself!" she tittered shrilly.
"You're my sugar!"
"Oh, stop it! Horace! Now, you sit down 'fore you fall flat on
your face!"


“That's what you think!"
"Horace-are you drunk?”
“No! But, doggone, I'm gonna be, 'fore the night's out! You
gonna git drunk with me!"
"I don't get drunk.”
"That's what you think!"
“Honest! . . . I declare, I don't know what I'm gonna do with
you!"
"I know what I'm gonna do with you!"
“What you gonna do with poor little old me?"
“I'm gonna give you the lovinest time of your life!"
“Horace!" She hit at him across the table, prettily, not unmind-
ful that others were present. He roared with obscene laughter.
“Dare you say such a thing! It's not nice."
"I fixed it with the nigger-_"
"Shhhh!" she reproached, then looked up at the attendant who
had gone over to their table and was waiting with unobtrusive
aplomb. “The boy wants to take your order, Horace.”
"Yes, sir. What will you and the lady have?" asked the attendant.
"I want a double-header of some whiskey and some plain water."
"And the lady?"
"An old-fashioned, I'll have. And I wants a heap of ice in it,
too, you hear?"
She talked fast, spontaneously, in a voice husky and arresting
and all of a piece, having to stop from time to time to clear her
throat and swallow her Adam's apple. Garrulously friendly, as was
the man, she was out to have fun.
As the attendant got busy filling other orders, I moved away
from the bar, went and sat down in one of the lounge chairs off
to myself, leisurely sipped my Tom Collins, and smoked. I was a
distance away from the couple. As the tables near them were being
taken, the woman lowered her voice, leaning over the table to talk
more intimately.
With this repudiation of their own notoriety, I lost all interest
in them. I became concerned about myself, the great loneliness and
ostracism I must endure, while I observed that the chairs about


79
I just got back from Europe. I was away fifteen years. I'm sorta
browsing."
He was listening to me with his mouth wide open, his hands
clutching his kneecaps.
The attendant brought us our drinks, managing to make his
intrusion so inconspicuous that I don't believe the white man even
noticed him.
"Have you anything special in mind?” he queried.
"They tell me it's changed a lot down here," I said.
"Like what, for instance?” He reached for his drink, without
looking, as if it had been there all along. He sipped and smacked
his lips.
"These mass migrations of Negroes to the North. I'd like to find
out what's behind it all. There is a reason.”
“There's a reason, all right, but I should think you could find
that out from the ones tha's already migrated and settled in the North.
You know it as well as I do, they're the lowest and commonest in your
race. They're that shiftless and that no-good sort, them ones who
don't wanna work to make a livin'. So, they go up North where the
relief boards'll take care of them. The best of the nigras remain
right here. There's no nigra problem in the South today. Nigra
who behaves himself and stays in his place gets along all right. Don't
let anybody tell you different. Nigras got nothing to worry 'bout,
so long as they behave themselves. Most of the trouble we have is
with these outsiders who come down here and they try to tell us how
to run things. These Communist bastards and your own lying papers,
they the ones that stir up most the trouble. You know that. Now,
that there fellar Morehouse, that nigger he's doing the colored folks
a lot of harm, boy. The Klan's been burning a lot of crosses lately in
the colored sections in and round Atlanta and warning the colored
folks 'ginst any foolishness like this thing that Morehouse fellar is
calling for. I tell you, it's bad-bad for your people. The South won't
stand for that.”
I hadn't touched my drink. When I noticed him looking at it,
I picked it up and held it, only for a while, then I set it back down.
“Suppose it's true that the big interests in this country have
bought up the pledges of nearly all your southern Senators and


"Yes. Interview him.”
"Interview him how?"
“Ask him questions, of course."
“Kind of questions?"
“Get him to discuss that colonization program.”
"What you want the interview-for your paper?"
“Yes."
“You know they goin' print it?"
"I think so."
"You think so."
"Yes!"
"You know?"
“I don't guarantee ..."
"Well, I happen to know that your papers never print the truth
about anything Senator Salters says. They butcher up his speeches
he makes on the floor of the Senate and they quote him out of con-
text. They make him out to be some devil.”
"I don't think that's done deliberately. They just don't like what
he says. Negroes don't like his back-to-Africa program."
"That's what I mean. They don't like it.”
“But it does make good copy."
“I suppose it does. I read the nigger papers. I know 'bout the
lies you folks print, way you love to run down white people.”
I smiled. “You haven't answered my question.”
"What question is that?”
"The interview.”
He regarded me skeptically and half smiled. He stuck the
burned-out cigar in his mouth, patted his enormous chest until he
was able to locate his pencil. He scribbled the address of Senator
Spruce Salters on the back of his calling card, handed it to me. "It's
twenty-two miles out from Atlanta. Bus passes right by there. You
ask the driver to drop you off. Tell the Senator I sent you. My
name's on this side."
"Flood Norfleet," I read aloud.
"That would be Mister Flood Norfleet when you present your-
self to the Senator.” He grinned and gave me a gentle poke in the
ribs. “Don't forget the title, boy. Down here you must remember to


84
Beasley knew how I felt about him. I made a point of getting my
feeling across to him. And he knew what I was thinking when I came
into the washroom and found him sitting there alone. I coldly re-
sented and spurned his ingratiating smile, though this was the first
time he had smiled at me, the way he looked at me, unashamedly
begging me to bury the hatchet, putting the matter entirely up to me,
as though the “misunderstanding” had been entirely my own fault,
not his. Now he wanted to make up. He had the gall to be indulging
and patronizing, to extend the glad hand of fellowship!
It was the wrong time. I was in no mood to forgive and forget.
What had occurred to me in the club car had demeaned my spirit.
I hated the whole human race for my outrage—the white race in
particular. Now, this despising Negro waits until he's drunk and we
are alone together,out of sight and sound of white folks—and be-
hind the white folks back, he tries to make up to me for his moral
cowardice and denial!
I didn't have to smell the whiskey in order to tell that he had been
drinking. His eyes popped with a glassy brightness. He was fidgety
and alert from the overstimulation. The porter's cap was set back
from his forehead, sweat oozing from the oily surface and dribbling
off his chin, and not seeming to faze him in the least.
He studied me avidly, and, with obnoxious, cunning slyness, see-
ing through my wavering indifference. He waited until I was
brushing my teeth before he said a word.
My back was turned to him, though I could see him in the mirror
about to speak to me.
His voice had a sugary, wooing, almost feminine softness. It
reminded you of all the sweet-talk that had ever been mouthed to
you, the wheedling flattery that had made you so susceptible, that
had persuaded you against your will and better judgment, seduced
you in a moment of weakness when your guard was down.
"Who, now ... now, jes who is it that you puts me in mind of?"
he contemplated out loud. “All de evenin', whilst I'm makin' down
my beds, I been puzzlin' my head 'bout dat. De resemblance. Seem
lak to me, I see a pitcher o' you, or, maybe, I has seen you some-
where befo'.” He stopped, as though to ponder more deeply. He was


91
him! Tot
e the ninth, I thom
send for you to come. Black as you are, James Lee, black as my shoes.
... Do you have to shoot him? Please, don't fault him. Fault me!"
She passed out.
I shook her. It did no good. Her body went limp as though the
life had gone out of her. I was frightened. What if she were dead?
I put my cheek to her face. Yes, I reassured myself, she is all right.
The bosom of her dress exuded a highly scented fragrance of lilac
perfume. Its sticky sweetness blended foully with the whiskey
vapors breathed through her nostrils. She would be like this until
morning, perhaps, until she came to.
She couldn't be moved. I had no place to take her. To move her
anywhere might involve too great a risk-of being discovered with
her in my arms. Outcries and accusations: “Nigger carrying around
a white woman in his arms! ... What's wrong with her? ...
Wrong? . . . You can see he drugged her with knockout drops! He
ravished her! ... Take him! Take him! Take him!" ... I have to
leave her here in my berth, I thought. Got to dress myself quick. Off
this train before the night is over!
Oh, the mess I'm in! I cried.
Watching both ends of the car and dressing like mad, I peeped
in at Beasley to see if he was still asleep. I certainly didn't want him
to know. It was unlikely that he would believe my version of what
had happened. He would only believe what any white man would,
that I had taken advantage of a drunken white woman and she had
passed out on me. In other words, I had run true to form and raped
her.
What I didn't bother to put on I stuffed into the overnight bag.
I tiptoed to the farther end of the car, purposely to get away from
Beasley. I didn't dare chance the door near the men's room, for fear
the noise or the gush of air might waken him.
I had trouble with the door. It was a job to pull open. I had to
twist and yank and yank at the knob. In my concentrated fumbling,
I didn't hear the door of the compartment to my left open. It was a
hand touching my elbow that wheeled me around, startled and
panic-stricken. The violence of which I was capable in that instant
was aborted when I saw it was Doll Girl-Dolly Whisonant.
The fright in her eyes said she knew I was in trouble. Not ques-


"What difference it make to you anyway?".
"It don't make a total of that much difference to me!" she de-
clared, describing the tip of her index finger. “Maybe I'm a whole
lot selfish, but I just don't care. I never did much care."
“Then why don't you quit the race altogether and marry a white
man?"
“Because I'm a fool, tha's why,” she said calmly, as if she had
waited for me, or anyone else, to ask such a question. “Because I
know I just never could be happy. I could never forget some things.
I'd always be sneaking back and taking a peep to see what was going
on, afraid I miss something tha's too good. I be bound to give myself
away. As it is, I have a dickens of a time trying to act white. How
can I lie to you! I care. Trouble is I care too much. Just too much
for my own good.”
"You're almost as crazy as I am. Not quite," I said.
“Almost," she sighed. A smile barely brushed her cheeks and
was gone. I thought she was going to cry.
"I know where to reach you."
"We still at the same old place."
"I'll see you in a day or two, honey. Hear? ... No. Stay where
you are-_” I stepped between Doll Girl and the door and put her
hands behind her and kissed her. “Nothing, nothing is going to
happen to me,” I promised her, with as much assurance as I could
simulate. “I'll be all right. I'll see you."
I was strictly on my own, left to my own devices. Out on the
platform, I methodically executed the escape which I had already
planned. I pinned the heavy outside door back against the wall. I
had to grip the railings with both hands, straddle the trap, while
employing my right foot to get it up and back against the door. It
was like a roaring wind tunnel inside the vestibule. The wind lashed
and bloated my clothing. I held tightly to the railings, sliding my
hands along them, as I made my way down the steps. My face stung
from the vicious pelting of cinders and gravel sucked up from the
roadbed.
There was no point, I told myself, in waiting. There was no
likelihood the train would slow down. I looked for some sign of a
highway-electric lights along the road or a light flashed by a passing


I landed on hands and knees, out of breath, but unhurt. I got up
just as the last car trundled past. In the desolate, eerie darkness I
watched after the red taillight until I could no longer see it.
I lit a cigarette, then held the lighted match above the face of
my wrist watch to see what time it was—3:23 A.M. The damp chill
in the air seemed to penetrate through to the marrow of my bones.
This was a mean climate. I thought of how insufferably hot this
place would be along toward noon. I was aching cold in every member
of my body. I was not going to sit here and wait for it to get light.
A man could freeze to death. The overnight bag which I had dropped
a few yards behind me I recovered, then I set out down the railroad
track, keeping inside the rails and walking as fast as caution would
allow.
My head hummed with the indecipherable code-miming of mil-
lions of invisible crickets and the dry-throated croaking of frogs. I
went along for some time, when, suddenly, the light of an automobile
Aashed across my path. I had reached a grade crossing.
I jumped back to avoid being run over. My panic was unwar-
ranted, because the driver had seen me, had already slowed down
and come to a stop just before the inclination of the crossing.
No other thought came into my mind but that it was somebody
who was offering me a ride, so I came quickly around to take ad-
vantage. The door was already swung open and waiting for me to
hop in.
"No sense to walkin', when you kin ride!" The voice was young
and worldly. Though I could not make out his features in the dark,


97
I knew straight off that he was colored. I got in beside my benefactor,
quickly closing the door to block out the cold.
He could tell by the way I stuttered out my thanks that I was
cold. “Daggone near so to freezin'!” he said. “An' heah 'tis summer!
Sun come out, you burn up. Git so hot an' sticky!"
"You not lyin' either!" I managed to laugh.
The heavy car picked up speed in a hurry. In no time he had her
doing eighty-five. I got to thinking what would happen if this thing
ever had a blowout. The fellow must have sensed my thoughts.
"Say, Daddy, don't be nervous o'me speedin'. Wish I has a dollar
for every time I been over dese ole back roads! I has to make time.
Thas' why Um givin' her the gas. Man, y'oughta be with me when
hit gits all wet an’ slippery! After a good rain! I wrecked mo' friggin'
cars lak dat! Sho a wonder I ain't dead! Um goin' turn now. Um
goin' up thoo dem woods. Den Um stoppin' to pick up some stuff.”
The car shimmied and crawled straight up a steep wooded hill.
The driver, crouching over the wheel in a jackknife position, kept
his eyes peeled on the ticklish road ahead. I could feel his one-
pointed tension as he sucked his breath at each calculated obstacle he
overcame. The road suddenly leveled and I knew that we had
reached a plateau. The driver sank back, relaxed his steering.
Beneath a tree two white men stood waiting. As the car drew up,
the big one sauntered recklessly into its path, as the driver stopped
it within a foot of the big fellow's waist.
"What in hell keep you?" the man asked churlishly.
The driver sank the window on his side, and the big fellow leaned
forward with his two big elbows crammed inside the frame.
The driver just chuckled, parted his thighs, and began rubbing
his groin sensually.
"What keep me?" He begged the question, as though to make
conversation.
"Damn you! Been off somewheres whackin' the bushes!"
“I be damned! You know I ain't have no time atall to mysef dis
evenin'? I swear!"
"Earl—_” The other fellow came up to the side I was on. “You
know that lil ole high-yallar gal who minds them Stiles Bullock
younguns?"


99
I took no part in the conversation. I knew by the way the two of
them eyed me from time to time that they were waiting for Wardie
to explain my being with him. Wardie finally told them that I was
a friend that he had brought along to keep him company. He told
them that I was from Atlanta, but that I had kinfolks who lived in
Butler City. They wanted to know who my people were, and Wardie,
thinking quickly, told them I was related to Cramer Bell, whoever
he was. The men were satisfied and asked me how ole Cramer Bell
was getting along. I said he was fine and chipper.
Wardie nudged me as he slid out of the car. I got out on my side.
I helped him raise the seat in back where he stored gallon jugs of
moonshine whiskey. Earl, the big fellow, took a pint bottle from the
hip pocket of his overalls and gave it to Wardie. "You an' him kill
dis whilst you-all drivin' back. Is you two boys hongrey any?"
“No, suh, we's awright, Mistuh Earl. We jes thirsty an' dis'll take
care dat.” Wardie nudged me and laughed.
"If you is hongrey, jes say so. I git de 'oman rassel you up some
breakfus.”
"No thank you, Mistuh Earl.” Wardie handed Big Earl the en-
velope he took from an inside pocket. It was fat with bills. “Miss
Vergie gimme dis fuh you.”
"O-kay, boy."
Wardie and I got back into the car, and Wardie started the
motor.
“I see yall next week,” he said.
“Membuh what I tell you, Wardie,” said Boone laughing.
"Wha's dat, Mistuh Boone?”
“Don't gi' dat gal too much meat!"
"You see ole Senator Salters agin, you tell him fuh me dat he
better haul ass on back to Washington. He fuggin' round an' we
'bout to have 'nother Civil War on our hands!” Big Earl was looking
at me mean and hard. “Look heah, boy,” he said to me “—you ain't
mixed up wif some dem ’Lanta niggers who advocatin' fuh de South
to turn over a whole new state to dem?"
Before I could reply negatively, as I was surely going to do,
Wardie quickly answered to Earl's satisfaction. "Who? Him! He


100
ain't even done hear o'sich a thing! He worsen me 'bout tail! Das'
all on his mind! Niggers is sho crazy to think dat radical stuff!"
I was glad to get away. So was Wardie.
"Some mean bastards, dese ole back-country peckerwoods! I man-
age wif'um, 'cause I doan't do or say nothin' das’ apt to rile dem. I
talks little an' I keerful what I say. Ain't goin' ketch me driving thoo
heah in de day-not de broad, open daytime-unless Um drivin' wif
white people in de back seat. Dey see me in a car lak dis, an' by
mysef, dey shoot dis thing full o' holes lak a sieve, liable to kill me
to boot!"
Wardie was young, quite young, and he liked to talk. It was
apparent by his loose, racy talk that he had been more exposed to
what passes for experience than a lot of men twice his age. He drove,
he told me, for a rich sportin' woman, who ran a dicty sportin' house
in Butler City and another one in Atlanta. All he did was drive. He
said boastfully, “I takes de Madame wheresomeevuh she wishes to
go. Twice a week me an' huh goes to huh house in Atlanta. She
checks up on huh business there an do's huh bankin' an' shoppin'
round. 'Cose, I has to stick right wif huh, 'cause she won't lemme
outta huh sight when we goes to Atlanta. She know what I do. I find
mysef one o' my own girls. Man, she do hate dat! She threatened to
kill me once; an' twas ovuh a colored girl I was goin' wif in Atlanta.
Don't she have de police pick me up where me an' dis chick was at?
Dey only brung me into the station house an' turnt me ovuh to huh,
an' dat was all dey was to hit-till she gits me home! She sho was
some mad! I loved huh up an' tole huh, ‘Baby, I some sorry whut
I done,' an' I make a promise to huh I ain' goin' do hit no mo. 'Twon't
happen agin, I say. She say awright. I really put de thing on huh dat
night. I made huh moan an' sigh. When us finish, damn if dat evil
woman don't reach unduh huh pillow an' pull out dat lil' ole pistol
o' huh's an' she pints dat thing right at my temple, an' she say,
You sweet-lovin' yaller bastard, I a good mind to blow yo' brains
out! I awmust pissed de bed! Scared? I was one scared nigger! I
keeps my presence o' mind. I copped a plea. I said, 'Baby, if you do's
'way wif me, who gonna love you de way yo sweet papa Wardie do?'
Dat hit huh lak a ton o' bricks! Damn she don't break down an'


101
weep all ovuh me! I gi'n huh some mo' lovin'. ... I be huh man
since I was goin' on eighteen. Um goin' on twenty-three now."
“How old is she?" I asked.
“She old enough, dough she don't look hit. I stick to huh, 'cause
I knows I never will have hit as good as I has hit right now. I don't
have to hit a lick. She takes keer o' me an' I allus has plenty o’
spendin' money. My great weakness is I laks a lil' stray bootie now
an' then wif some one o'my own kind. She knows hit too. Man, do
she git mad! She goin' kill me one o' these days! You read 'bout me!"
I listened, vaguely believing, vaguely discounting the glib-flowing,
unprompted confessions. In transit, we took turns sampling the bottle
of moonshine. It was strong, raw stuff. I could only wet my mouth
with it. It choked me to get it down. But I was cold and it heated
my blood and made me feel good. Wardie gulped and belched it as
though it were no stronger than soda pop. The effect on him was far
from hidden. He grew more voluble and, yet, he seemed now to
drive with greater care and precision than before. He was thoroughly
pleased with himself. He purred with satisfaction over his power, his
power over Miss Vergie in the clandestine sanctuary of her bedroom,
an affair that no one outside of Tannie, the cook, knew about, and
Tannie just giggled and joked about it only to him-in private. The
power which he felt behind the wheel of this enormous car pleased
him no end. He thought he had everything. It was everything he
needed or really cared about. All this, and, once in a while, a stray
piece of bootie from some of his own kind. What more could a man
ask for? He was pleased with himself, this Wardie was. Smug and
pleased. A big shot.
“What kinda racket is you in?” he asked me.
I told him that I was a newspaper reporter, and, since he had
befriended me and could probably help me further, I gave him the
story of the kidnaping and murder and the train episode straight.
He drove the car way over to the side of the road and stopped.
"Wait, now," he said, tipping his hat back from his forehead.
“Does you membuh me tellin' dem two white fellows I took keer de
Senator?"
"Sure, I do," I said.


102
"You know who twus dis Senator?"
“I did wonder,” I said perfunctorily.
"Dat was him! Um a sonavabitch! Dat were Senator Salters his-
sef, man! His estate where he lives ain't fuh from Butler City. Now,
wait a minute. I membuh somethin'. Dis could be a clue to whut
you aftuh knowin' concernin' dis man you speak of -de colored
leader. I do believes ole Senator have dat man deir awright. I doesn't
know fuh certain, you understand? Um jus' surmisin' frum some de
things he say to me. I thunk he outten his head way him talkin',
'cause he pretty well likkered up when I took him home yurly dis
mornin'. He keep tellin' me not to worry 'bout a thing, 'cause him
an' his boys took keer de nigger who causin' all de trouble in dis
country."
“He said that?” I prodded.
“De man who hoped me wif him at de house tell him to shet his
damn mouth. I dunno dis man, but he a guest deir at de Senator's.
He didn't shet ole Senator up, dough. He keeps on blabbin'. I'tended
lak I a total blank to all he say. Um dumb. Don't know nuffin'. Das'
what I wonts’um to think! So, I jus went on hopin' him undress.
Man stay right deir. Ole Senator wonted to punch him in de mouth
fuh tellin' him to shet up. Git real riled. I helt him till he cooled
down. Ole bastard fight de drap o' de hat, ole as he is! Say to me,
'Boy, if I wus obuh deir in Sovie Russia, I be head o' de secret police.'
Would you, sho nuff?' I asked him. De other man gimme a nasty
look. He didn't lak me speakin' up. Ole Senator den say, “Um fuh
makin' de Ku Klux Klan de secret police heah in de United States.
Us awready is de secret police, ain't us, George?' Das dis othuh dude.
'We out to git you, we git you! If a nigger gits too smart, we knows
how to git de smartness outta him! We don't have to lay a hand on
him. We work on his head, till he snap a cord in his brain. He ain't
no mo good aftuh we git thoo wif him!' Den, dis George say to me,
You go 'long 'bout yo business, boy.' 'Um talkin' to dis nigger!
Senator yelled to him. 'Um tellin' him somethin' fuh his own good
an' pertection.' Ole Senator glared at me an' pinted his finger. 'Nig-
ger, long as you live, don't you evuh try to outsmart a white man.
You cain't win. We git thoo wif you, you won't even know yo right


103
name! You won't nevuh be de same aftuh! ... I didn't much like
dat kinds o'talk, specially de way he said hit. Man, I sho wus glad to
git away frum deir! I ain' goin' lie."
Wardie folded his hands upon his lap and was silent for a long
while. Darkness was lifting from the sky and I saw in his face the
pain of what he must be thinking.
“Lord!” I wailed. “I wonder what all they have done to that poor
man? They must have done something or Salters wouldn't have
spoken the way he did. Maybe his conscience was bothering him.”
"I dunno," Wardie muttered. “Um only hearsay."
"I wonder if a man like him has a conscience?"
"I dunno. ..."
I asked him, “There any colored folks out there working for
Salters?"
“No, man,” Wardie was quick to reply. "He nevuh hire no col-
ored to work fuh him. Furthermo', I don't know any o' our folks
who wont to go work fuh him. If he brung dis friend o' yourns
to his place, he mussa brung him in de daid o' night, so's nobody
see him.”
"I wonder could he still be in that house?"
“Um begin to wonder mysef,” Wardie said vaguely.
"Only one way to find out. That's go there."
"I guess we bettuh ease on way frum heah fo' we's seen,” he said,
and started the car. “I git back, I goin' see whut I kin find out. I git
Miss Vergie ʼlone by huhsef I pick huh. I pick huh sho as hell!"
The car bounded forward and tore up the dirt road. Wardie had
her wide open. The assurance and smugness returned to his face as
he steadied the speeding car. He was again pleased with himself.
The Butler City to which we came was not, as the name would
imply, a real city. It was like so many hundreds of small towns all
over America which seem to exist all by and for themselves and
which nobody, except a person who came from there, ever heard
about. Seeing a town like this, a visitor would wonder what its peo
ple do for a living. Lights were on in kitchens and bathrooms of most
of the small homes we drove past. Then we came to a section where
the homes were bigger and farther apart from each other and with-


105
sweetest lil' ole pint-sized 'oman in de state o' Georgia! Tannie, meet
a frien' o'mine--"
Tannie grinned to acknowledge my “Glad to know you.” Neither
she nor Wardie was interested in my name. Wardie had given me no
opportunity to tell him.
"Whut you got on yo hip?" she asked Wardie.
"Huh?” he asked absently, as though he hadn't heard.
"Ain't you brung me somethin' to wake up on?"
"Heah...." Wardie said, giving her the half we had left. She
took it eagerly. “Don't say I nevuh gi' you nothin'."
She tipped the bottle to her lips and had a generous mouthful.
"I sho needed dis! Chile, dem mens was entertainin' heah las'
night, dey drunk up evvything was heah, an'et up evvything, too!
I ain't got no chops y'all kin have. All is heah is bacon an' eggs, y'all
wonts dat.”
"Gimme dat, den, 'cause I sho is famished.”
Wardie sat down gloomily, beckoned me to sit at the other end
of the table, while Tannie prepared our breakfast.
The talk between her and Wardie was mostly banter and mostly
alluding to people and places about which I knew nothing. They
were great “company” to each other, being the only colored in the
house. They gabbed about the girls and their male following, the big
spenders and the cheapskates.
There was a kindly, vacant earnestness in Wardie's doll face and
big dark eyes. It was the face of a girl, soft and light brown, the
straight nose and thin lips shaded by a delicately trimmed mustache
that did not, as he wished it to, give him a look of maturity. His skin
was marred only by what looked like pin scratches that had left
white scars on his forehead and down the sides of his face and neck.
"Wardie, don't you waste too long ovuh dat coffee."
“Um goin' play Mistuh Big today.”
"Who you tellin'?”
"Shoe fits ..."
"Don't fit my feet.”
"Um goin' do nuffin' all day.”
"Bes' you do!"
“Dat be a hint?"


109
Wardie nodded mechanically. I could tell that he didn't think
much of my ruse.
"Well, Um goin' let you off up yonduh where you see dat big ole
tree," Wardie said with an exasperated sigh. "You see de house when
you git deir. Hit sets back off de road a lil ways."


The approach to the house was a winding lane, bordered with
magnolia and dogwood trees. The house itself was an aged, two
storied, white stucco-covered brick edifice with a wide, narrow por-
tico and balcony half hidden behind four Auted Doric columns and
ivy trellises.
Two massive bloodhounds slithered through the dwarf boxwoods
lining the driveway and flanked me on both sides, nuzzling me about
the legs and thighs, as I approached the piazza of the old manse.
Then, having satisfied whatever curiosity they had about me, the
two graceless brutes cut loose and ran ahead of me, leaped to the
piazza, and crouched there waiting, growling their inexplicable
hatred. They defied me to come an inch closer. I waited at the bottom
of the steps, hoping that someone in the house would hear them
and come out.
I heard a voice inside say, "Well, go see who it is.” The big
screen door was flung wide open. It bounded back against Flood
Norfleet as he stepped outside the doorway. He kicked at the dogs
and shooed them off, as he held the door open. They ambled away,
crestfallen.
"Mus’uv skeered hell outta you, didn't they?" he said.
“They sure did," I said.
"Good thing you didn't come up them steps!"
“I guess it was a good thing I didn't.”
“I seen’um jump a nigger who broke from the county jail and
hid out here in the woods. Poor devil was suffering so, why, we had
to shoot him."


112
"Is he all right? ... What you do to him?".
Norfleet stuck his foot under my stomach and tried to raise me.
I caught hold of the banister of the staircase and tried to raise myself.
“Lil' outta breath, that's 'bout all. He tripped and lost his
balance,” Norfleet said.
Getting to my feet, I saw the Senator for the first time. The
sharp, green eyes regarded me with happy, diabolical cunning. He
was a wiry, nervous little man. He kept backing away daintily, as
though he were afraid my nearness might contaminate him. Slivers
of dingy gray hair kept falling down around his temples to annoy
him, and he was continually scooping the unruly strands back in
place with his fingers.
"Say something!” he commanded me.
"What do you want me to say?" I asked.
"Aha!” he exclaimed. “It was you, you black bastard, who called
me on the phone from New York! Thought you could scare me,
didn't you? What? Did you think you had me? Hah? Boy, I got to
hand it to you. For a nigger, you sho has a lotta nerve to come down
here! I think you a durned fool, myself, to come down here. Boy, you
sho got yourself in a mess!"
"Don't you wish, now, you'd stayed in Harlem?" Norfleet
snickered.
The Senator started to laugh, then abruptly he changed his mind.
He waved to Norfleet. “Git him inside here."
"You gonna give him that interview?"
"Call it what you like.”
He went down the hall and we followed him, Norfleet just a
step behind me. “He ain't foolin' 'bout that interview, 'cause one
thing he sure loves to talk!” Norfleet said.
The room we entered had the austerity of a strictly private study.
The walls were serrated with shelves of books which must have come
with the purchase of this old mansion, kept there for no other reason
except that the shelves had been designed for them.
The Senator back-hopped upon the desk and sat there swinging
his legs out and under like a small boy. A third man was present and
a woman was there also, the woman, I recognized immediately,
being the one who had been on the train-the woman from whom I


113
had fled. There she was, as sober and pristine looking as a minister's
wife! I might not have recognized her so easily. It was the way she
avoided my stare that gave her away. She sat poised serenely in a
big leather-upholstered chair, while the man seemed to be favoring
his blubbery weight by remaining in a prone position on the sofa,
his eyes grazing the lofty ceiling. He didn't so much as look at me.
He knew who was there and was content to just listen. Norfleet
locked the door and wandered off to a corner of the room and slouched
lazily in another armchair.
They did not intend for me to sit. The Senator and Norfleet ex-
changed sly, amused glances between themselves. They were going
to have a little fun with me. I pretended not to notice. I could do
nothing but play possum and wait for the showdown. The Senator,
however, was in no hurry.
I suspect they were rather disappointed because they could not
enjoy my helplessness as much as they had anticipated. They knew
that I was under no illusions. And I knew that behind the façade of
amusement was a sinister purpose. I knew that they were people
who would stop at nothing, that I might not leave this place alive,
yet the terror of my knowing was not enough to frighten me. They
saw this, and I sensed their warped hatred of me and of all that I
represented to them.
“Tell me you come all the way down here just to interview me,"
the Senator marveled, as though my presence intrigued him, flattered
him.
"I didn't come just to interview you, Senator," I corrected him.
He glared at me in mock surprise. “Why, I thought you wanted
to ask me what my views and opinions concerning the nigger race.
I thought you wanted to git from me some statement for your paper.
That's what I thought you after.”
“I think the colored people are better acquainted with your
views, Senator, than you give them credit for being," I said.
“No, they are not!" He smacked the desk, bounced to his feet,
and leered at me.
"What makes you think so?” I asked calmly. I didn't back away
from him. He was right up in my face. Finally, I had to back away
to keep from being spattered.


117
into a faint whisper."... Like the little ole fly that walked into the
parlor of the ole cunning Mister Spider."
He froze, then he raised his arm slowly and snapped his fingers.
The men noiselessly alerted themselves, spreading out. They came by
us slowly, cautiously. Josh pushed me down to a squatting position at
the base of the tree. “Stay here," he whispered, as he melted into
the thickness.
There was a burst of gunfire which lasted no longer than a sec-
ond, followed, a moment later, by three single shots spaced seconds
apart.
It sounded a long ways off. The thickness of the woods may have
muffled the noise. I could now hear only the cracking of dry
branches. They had gone way back into the woods and were there
a long time. I stretched my legs and waited and tried to speculate as
to what they might be doing.
They came out of the woods from the opposite direction from
which they had gone.
I got up and went to meet them. By now, my eyes had got used
to the darkness, so that I could move about without stumbling over
chunks of dead branches and pine cones or bumping into trees. For
the first time, I noticed that there were two large automobiles parked
there.
"Is it all right to smoke?” I asked Josh.
“Why not!” he said.
"Have one?"
"No thanks. I got a cigar.”
"How about the other boys?”
"You hang onto your cigarettes. You go passin' em around, you
won't have none."
The fellows laughed. “He shore right, man!” said one of them.
"Les' move out!" Josh ordered.
I got into one of the cars and sat between Josh and the driver,
a big fellow who smelled pungently of pine resin and body musk.
He was a solemn fellow. He didn't talk. He responded, when Josh
gave instructions, with an acquiescing nod. He was wholly pre-
occupied with driving. The three men in the back seat talked in
sluggish snatches of mumbled animation.


118
Our car led off. The other car had trouble starting. It finally
caught up with us when we had advanced about a mile down the
road. I heard it chugging behind us.
Josh sat sidewise, one arm across the ridge of the seat, the elbow
of the other nudged through the window opening at his right,
smoking a cigar.
"We don't do much talking when we're out like this," he told me.
"Most talking we do is when we're making our plans. We got a job
to do, like the one tonight, we go ahead, decide on what we goin' to
do and how we goin' to do it, and then we go ahead and pull it off.
We don't let nobody in on what we do. That's why we sent Wardie
back to town. Wardie don't know nothing. He can't git himself in no
trouble, can't git us in no trouble. You didn't see us doing anything,
did you?"
"No. I heard the shooting," I said.
"You know what the shooting was about?"
"No."
"What else you hear?"
"You fellows moving around.”
"We only wanted one. Three came, so we had to take care of
three. It was you they were after. You know now. You know who
all was the three?"
"Flood Norfleet?"
"Uh-huh.”
“The big fat guy?"
"Hoagy Shibe.”
I hesitated. What I was thinking seemed incredible to me. “Not
Salters? Not him?” A reckless, foolish-sounding question, I thought.
I was flabbergasted when Josh nodded and said simply:
"Yes, we did. We even got the Grand Dragon. Flood Norfleet was
our man, though. He's the one we really wanted-wanted bad. We
had to get him for shooting to death Preacher's oldest boy. That's
Preacher here driving this car. That shooting happened several
months ago, so you see how long we waited. They been killing a
lot of our folks and the Law won't bother to prosecute them, so, in
self-defense, a group of us got ourselves together to do something
about it. So far, we done all right. Nobody talks. They go out look-


120
"I know that.”
“Them people kidnaped him, you say, and they were holding
him up yonder at the Senator's place?"
"I know it to be a fact. They took him there. Whether he's there
still, I don't know."
"Just a minute-_” Josh had Preacher stop the car. "Biddy," he
said to one of the men in the back seat, “go back there and change
places with Ewell. Tell him I want to talk to him."
"He goin' ride wid you-all?" said Biddy.
"You and him swap cars, 'cause I want to talk to him," Josh ex-
plained. “Get Ewell to tell you about some old fellow he saw about a
day or so ago," he prompted me, as Ewell got inside the car to join
us. “Ewell, our friend here would be glad if you tell him about that
stranger you meet up with the other night when you was hauling
that lumber out to Cantey Crossing."
Ewell was a voice that spoke to me in the dark, for I couldn't
see him. He sat directly behind me, between the other two men, in
the back seat. And I was wedged between Josh and Preacher in front,
so that I was unable to turn round. But he leaned forward and talked
close to my ear. Bronchitis had all but snuffed out his voice. It must
have been an ordeal for him to articulate.
"Been a dark night, chances is I nevuh woulda notice de man,
him being way ovuh t'othuh side de road, walkin' long slow, payin'
no ’tention to nothin', draggin' long lak somebody in a complete daze.
I kinda frightened first. I drove up 'longside o' him an' he nevuh so
much as turn round to 'knowledge I'm there. I thought hit mighty
funny and peculiar, so somethin' tell me to 'quire if he was sick an'
if I could hope him. I awready 'tracted his 'tention, when I called
out to him, an' he'd stopped. So, I den 'quired if he sick an' in trouble
an' if I could do anything to hope him, I'd do hit, I says. He was
pleasant an' nice. Didn't seem upset or nothin'. He thanked me an'
he say how glad he was to meet somebody. He tell me he been travel-
in' afoot fuh some time. He didn't jes recollect where he'd been at,
but he wanted to git back to Chicago, so he wanted to know if he was
goin' in de right direction to git deir. He spoke very good English,
lak a man dat is mos' highly eddicated, but ain't jes quite right in de


121
head, you know whut I mean. I tole him he nevuh git to Chicago by
walkin'. I say, 'Brothuh, you has to go by train to Chicago. You
know, he thought he was way out in de suburbs o’ Chicago? He
didn't b'lieve hit when I tole him where he was. No' could he, fuh de
life o' him, make out how he git way down heah in Georgia. He say
he would pay me whutevuh I charge, if I git him to de railroad sta-
tion, so he could git de train goin' to Chicago. I tole him dat dey wus
no train whut goes dis time o' night, but he could stay de night at my
house an' in de mornin' I'd take him to de depot in Butler City an'
he catch a train out from deir. I wusn't aimin' to charge him nothin',
but, in de mornin' aftuh he has breakfus' wif me an' de missus, bless
if he don't hand my missus a whole twenty-dollar bill! Have plenty
money on him. I notice de clothes he have on wus real high class,
'ceptin' dey look lak he slept in them and git them all wrinkled an'
soiled up."
At this point, I asked, “Did you notice any marks or bruises on
him-like on his face and head? Did he look like he'd been beaten
up, I mean?"
"Nothin' dat I noticed, 'ceptin' he sho needed a shave awful bad
an', lak I said, his clothes wus all mussed up. Not raggedy. Jes
mussed up. I offer him my razor to shave, but he said he wanted his
beard to grow back, 'cause he felt naked widout his Vandyke beard.”
"Did he tell you his name?”.
"King Solomon. But I think he mus meant 'Solomon King.' I
don't think he rightly knowed who he wus. He so mixed up an' con-
fused. Whut you call dem people who fuhgit who dey is an' dey
memory is all blank?”
menamnesia victinink he wus." wwee in Chicago. Inow his
“Das' whut I think he wus."
“He say whom he was going to see in Chicago?”
"He said his wife lived deir, but he don't even know his wife's
name! I asked him. He tried to think who huh name is an' he jes
couldn't. Den I asked do he know de address where she lives. He
didn't know. Now, I know muhsef-an' I ain't nevuh wus deir-dis
Chicago is a terrible big place. Now, how he goin' find a wife he
don't know huh name, don't know where she lives at? I reason all


I reached Atlanta without incident.
The long waiting for the bus to come out of Butler City was a
more agonizing experience than was the long, wearisome ride itself.
I was too close to Butler City and the cross-burning for comfort. And
I was alone out on the highway. My rescuers had summarily left me
there to fend for myself. Josh didn't seem to think anybody would
bother me way out there. The troublemakers, he said, were all in
Butler City either watching or taking an active part in the demonstra-
tion. Which was not enough to allay my fears, so I stood way off
in the shadows deflected by a large tree whose spreading top branches
overhung the lamppost and the road, ducking behind the tree out of
reach of automobile headlights.
I waited fully two hours for the bus. My feet and my legs were
numb from standing. For there was no place to sit. I had to stay near
the road for fear the bus might shoot past and I would be stuck in
this place for the remainder of the night. For all I knew, the Klan
might be scouring the countryside for me. They might have grown
impatient and tired of waiting for their Grand Dragon to show up
in Butler City and might have gone out to the Salters estate to find
out what the cause was for the delay. The woman might still be
there. It was possible that she knew that I had escaped and that the
three men had gone after me, and possible also that she might have
heard the shooting. My brain sizzled with fears and speculations.
I had no way of knowing how far from the house the shooting had
occurred. If she heard it, she surely must have phoned into Butler
City and informed the Klan.


130
the one remaining "white street” left. The neighbors thought the
Whisonants were white, until their suspicion was aroused by the
visits of Negroes. Then, one by one, the white neighbors sold their
homes and moved across the park.
I lifted the gate-latch and entered the yard. Dolly must have
spied me from the window, for she was holding the front door open
as I stepped onto the porch. If she was surprised to see me, she
didn't show it. She eyed me critically, the way a mother might look
at a child she didn't quite know how to handle. The outlandishly
gay smock she was wearing over a pair of baggy slacks and the
disarray of her white-folks hair didn't at all harmonize with the mood
she was in.
"You look a mess!" she said.
"I feel the way I look!" I retorted.
"Like something the cat dragged in!"
"Never mind how I look," I said. “I'm damn lucky to be here."
“Between you and this mess last night, I don't know why I'm not
out of my mind!"
"I had nothing to do with last night. Why jump down my
throat about last night?"
“Not with last night, but, Lordy, the night before! I call myself
coming down home here to spend a nice quiet vacation with my folks.
And what happens? I get mixed up plenty in this mess of yours on
the train. I get home, and there's this terrible awful mess the whole
night long! Were you here? Did you see it?".
“I just arrived here."
"Where've you been all this time?"
“Butler City."
"Butler City? What a fool you are to come here! This is no place
for you to be now. You oughtn't to come.”
“I'm here now, and that's that," I said. “Am I welcome in your
house?”
"Don't be sarcastic!"
"I didn't know," I said icily, but I was play-acting. Dolly under-
stood and she laughed, grabbing me by the coat sleeve and pulling
me past her into the hall. “Nerve you have to act hinkty with me!
Nigger, for two cents--!"


131
"Who is it, Doll Girl?” her mother called from the kitchen.
Memory leaped over the years and the sound was identically the
same, so I knew right off it was her mother—“Miss Addie.” I called
to her, “It's me, Miss Addie."
Dolly added: “It's 'Thello King, Ma."
Neither of us expected the old woman to remember me. I don't
think I bore any resemblance to the child she had known. Dolly
took me back into the kitchen. Miss Addie, as I had always called
her, was sitting at the table having her morning coffee. She squinted
up at me through her glasses and smiled as I greeted her.
“Mama, this is 'Thello King,” Dolly said. “Missus Caroline King's
boy. Yonna, this is "Theil. ses and smiled arning coffee. She wys called
I don't think she heard Dolly. She pretended, because she didn't
want me to think that she could have forgotten me. “Oh..." said she.
Her nearsighted little blue eyes twinkled prettily as she fluttered her
dough-white hands. “Quite a stranger!"
The back door opened and in came Dolly's father with a scuttle of
kindling wood. They had a fire going in the ancient kitchen range,
presumably to cook breakfast and to take the early morning chill
off the house.
Rangy and agile for a man who must be over seventy-odd years,
Mr. Whisonant's florid whiteness made him look like an East
European. Both his hair and his full scraggly mustache were black
without a streak of gray visible.
He didn't notice me. He busied himself methodically stoking the
fire. The room was filling with smoke.
Mrs. Whisonant coughed and fanned away the smoke with her
hand. “Mr. Whisonant, don't go making a big fire," she pleaded.
"Ain't a big fire. Make it so to take the chill off," he said.
“I know, but it is summer. It's goin' warm up. The radio man says
he predicts round ninety degrees by noon.”
“Way long time before noon.” He saw me and Dolly and grinned.
“You got a sweater on," he kidded his wife.
"Hello, Mr. Whisonant!" I said.
“How's the boy!” he greeted me cheerily, as though I were some-
one he was used to seeing and talking to every day. The truth was
that he probably thought he should know me, even if he couldn't
HHH


132
place who I was. He was a retired letter carrier, and this fact may
have explained his friendly casualness. “How you been, son?” he
asked.
“Oh, just fine," I said. “Just fine."
Dolly saw no need to reacquaint us.
"How did you folks make out with the fire last night?” he asked.
"I wasn't here,” I said. “I was out of town when it happened.”
“Didn't reach your place? Tha's good to hear.” It was apparent
that he thought I was somebody else. I sort of encouraged the de-
ception. “By the grace of the Good Lord, the wind shifted and tha's
what saved us-all up here. That thing got to goin' so, couldn't nothin'
have saved us, if the wind don't shift. I don't much think them
firemen tried very hard. They was sure a long time gittin' out here."
"Tell me, how'd it start?” I asked him.
Dolly pulled a chair up to the table, then led me to sit down,
while she hustled up breakfast for me. Mr. Whisonant saw what she
was about and obligingly got out of her busy way. He leaned back
leisurely against the sink to talk to me.
“You know, things ain't been the same round here, since the time
that Solomon Morehouse was here and spoke in the auditorium and
the white papers carried his speech he made. That was quite a
while back-I don't know if you remembers it-but it sure made these
white folks think! That fellow stirred up a hornet's nest! And I tell
you what make'em so plague-take-it mad is that they know he's got the
whole country behind him. You know, he said that the South can
only redeem herself for her crime against the Negro one way, and
that is by the immediate creation of a Negro state. “Separate, but
equal! he shouted. I heard him. I was right there when he shouted
it 'cross the hall. Ol' Klan try they level best that night to break up
that meeting. You remember that meeting! A hundred or more o'
them in white hoods stampeded right into the hall and made for
the platform where Morehouse stood speaking. Somebody got to the
basement and switched off the lights. They hustled Morehouse out
the back way, into a car, and got him outta town in a hurry! It was
quick action, all right. They was goin' lynch Morehouse sho as
anything."
“How did this thing last night start?” I again asked.


133
Mr. Whisonant looked surprised. “What! You didn't hear the
President's speech?” There was anger and reproach in his voice.
"Why, it come over all the radio stations and the TV. Where was
you?”
As if I could have known about anything outside the terror and
desperation of the past twenty-four hours of my life!
His censure gave way to a patronizing sense of humor, as he was
amused by the apathy and know-nothingness of the members of his
race. I rather fancied he enjoyed his intellectual isolation. He poised
himself like a great dramatic actor and declared, “The President said
that a state of emergency exists and that the whole country is now
under martial law. Then he read the Proclamation. The Proclama-
tion, son.” He wagged his head. "I'm tellin' you!"
I was astonished. I must have looked awfully funny to him, be-
cause the old man laughed at me.
“Mr. Whisonant, are you serious?" I asked, my voice trembling
with emotion. “What sort of proclamation?"
“You mark my words, son, this proclamation is goin' down in
history as the Second Emancipation Proclamation! The first one
emancipated the colored man from chattel slavery, didn't it?"
"Yes. ..."
“The second one emancipates him from second-class citizenship!"
he declared astutely. “From here on out, son, you and me and all the
rest of the colored people in this country gonna be facing the greatest
challenge to our manhood since Lincoln freed the slaves, 'cause this
will mean that we goin' have to think and work and govern for
ourselves. Yes, we goin' have to stand on our own two flat feet. Son,
we're free at last! We free as any man can ever hope to be. Now, we
got our own place in the sun."
Mrs. Whisonant winced, cutting her husband with a silencing
half turn of her head. She sat prim and upright, looking to catch
Dolly's eye. When she did, she warned Dolly in a whisper she
wanted to be heard, “Fetch him his soapbox!”
Dolly humored her mother and pretended to be laughing at her
father behind his back. The old man understood. He winked at
Dolly. Dolly winked back. There was conspiracy and counter-
conspiracy. It was difficult to tell who was laughing at whom.


134
I had a plate of ham and eggs set in front of me, hot bread and
coffee to my left and right respectively. I had had nothing in my
stomach since the breakfast Tannie had prepared for me and Wardie,
which had been all of twenty-four hours, and I was starved. I
relished every mouthful of that food, and I think Dolly enjoyed
seeing me eat.
"You make these biscuits, Miss Addie?” I asked with butter-
melting sweetness, southern-style.
The old lady smiled. "No, honey. They's Doll Girl's,” she said,
and gave Dolly an affectionate smile, as though she were pulling
for Dolly in my behalf.
“That Negro's hungry, Mama! Anything taste good to him!”
Dolly quipped, as she brought me a second helping of hot biscuits.
She reached between me and her mother and gathered up the pack
of cigarettes and matches that were on the table. She put them back
after she had lit a cigarette, smoke streaming from her thin nostrils.
Mrs. Whisonant coughed, shooing the smoke away.
"Doll Girl!" she reproved.
“I'm sorry, Mama."
“Blowing that ole smoke right in my face! Over this boy's food!”
“Doesn't bother me, Miss Addie,” I said.
"I don't like it blowin' in my face. Besides, you hadn't ought to
be smokin'. I think women smokin' is vulgar. I love the smell of a
good cigar, myself. Tried to get Mr. Whisonant to smoke cigars. He
prefers that ole stinky pipe to a good cigar. ... Doll Girl, who you say
this boy was?” she turned to me.
"He's Othello King, Mama-Miss Caroline's boy."
"Caroline Morris' boy?"
"Yes, Mama.”
"Well, I do declare!" she marveled, taking a good look at me. “He
takes right after Caroline. Looks a whole lot like her brother Grady."
"They all said I took after my Uncle Grady," I told her.
"Just like Grady Morris for the world! I said to myself, when you
come into the room, this boy sure do put me in mind of Grady Morris,
Caroline Morris' older brother!"
"Oh, for Pete's sake, Addie!" Mr. Whisonant moaned. "Grady
been dead so long! You stay in the past! The past! It's all dead and


135
gone forever! This young man don't remember his Uncle Grady.
Grady died when he was too young to remember he had an uncle.
Anyway, it isn't important. My good woman, do you realize that we
are passin' through one of the most-if not THE MOST-critical mo-
ments in the history of the colored race in this country?".
Mrs. Whisonant sighed mockingly: "Oh, Lord! Dolly, it's more
soapbox!"
The old fellow turned his appeal to Dolly and me. "Trouble with
people like Addie is she don't want to face up to facts and reality.
She won't admit it, but she's afraid of what's happening here in
Atlanta. I ain't afraid. I seen all this coming on long time ago.” Then,
before resuming, he paused and relighted his pipe. I watched him,
the sucking motion of his cheeks expanding and contracting like
hand bellows. Toughness and durability showed even in this so
casual act.
"Miss Addie,” he chided his wife, “what you goin' do when they
order you out of your own house?”
“Let me ask you that question, Mr. Whisonant."
"I'll go, tha's what I'll do," he said.
“Go where?"
"Wherever this government orders me."
"You talkin' pure craziness, Mr. Whisonant!"
"I'm the same as anyone else. We all in this boat together. I'll
start a new life.”
"New life nothing! At your age, too. Your life is behind you. This
house is my home and I'm not goin' give up my home, Mr. Whiso-
nant, and go somewheres I ain't sure I'm even goin' have a roof over
my head!”
"Listen to that talk! As if the government was packin' her off to
some foreign country! You'll still be in the United States. In a
brand-new state. Thas all it is, Addie-a new, created state. Do you
know it's goin' to include parts of several states, they say, 'bout one-
third of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, which
will make it just about the size of Tennessee. I'm all set to give it a
name. I've thought up a name to give to our forty-ninth state.”
Miss Addie sniffed. “You've thought up a name!"
“Take the M for Mississippi, the A for Alabama, the G for


136
Georgia, and then you add the INA in Carolina, and put them all
together, you spell M-A-G-I-N-A-MAGINA!"
Beautiful-sounding, I thought! “MAGINA-MAGINA-MAGINA,”
I repeated orally, testing the euphony of the new word. Mr. Whiso-
nant watched me with a pleased expression on his face. “I think
that will be a marvelous name to call the new state,” I said.
"I thought of writing the President and suggesting it to him,” he
said proudly.
Miss Addie was distraught. "We scraped and saved to buy this
house, Mr. Whisonant," she went on, oblivious of our enthusiasm.
"You goin' let a house decide your future for you?" Mr. Whiso-
nant asked.
“I ain't got no future. I just want to live wha's left of my life in
peace.”
Mr. Whisonant wagged his head, his hands fluttered in gestures
of despair. “You can't talk any sense into Addie! No vision! Plague
take it, Addie! You have got to make sacrifices. Tha's the truth as I'm
telling you, girl. Old and young alike got to bring this dream to pass.
We ain't goin' be round long enough to enjoy it ourselves, but Doll
Girl here, her and this young fellow will, and if they have children,
they children goin' look back on us dead and gone and it's goin'
make them feel mighty proud that us old people had this vision. Girl,
I'm telling you!"
The three of us-Dolly, her father, and myself-looked at one
another, touched by our mutual understanding. Then, we looked
hopefully at Miss Addie. Miss Addie shut her eyes tight, defiant-like,
and said, “You go follow after the niggers, then, Mr. Whisonant.
I'm goin' up North and I'll live with Doll Girl and I'll pass myself
off as white! So help me, thas' what I'll do! Do what we both shoulda
did years ago-for Doll Girl's sake. And it was all on account of you,
Mr. Whisonant, that we didn't. You made the race problem for your-
self, you did!”
"Oh, shut up, Mama!” Dolly snapped. I knew she did this out of
consideration for my feelings. “I think it's all foolishness. I don't care
what I am. It doesn't bother me. Never concern me. I'm some of
everything. So's the rest of the human race, they only knew it. I


137
don't say I'm white. I don't say I'm colored. I don't say anything!
Get me?"
Her eyes narrowed into a concentrated hardness, as though to
warn me and her father not to expect her to change her present way
of life.
Later, when we were alone together, I asked Dolly what she
intended to do.
inter. Nothing," she ante a race man" .. white as Papa is. Sod why he
"Your father is quite a race man," I said.
"He is. No put-on about Papa. As white as Papa is, you know,
he's always been proud of being a Negro. I never understood why he
has to be proud about it. I never been one way or the other myself.
How about you, 'Thello? You proud of being a Negro?"
“I have to be proud-in self-defense,” I said, not profoundly.
"Come on, now! What can you be proud of?" she argued.
“I don't know truthfully.”
"What have the white folks got to be proud of either?"
"They have to pretend the same as we do. It's a basic social need.”
I thought we could laugh off our dismay, but Dolly didn't seem
to want to.
“'Thello, I know what is happening for our people is the right
thing, and I'm glad. I want to see it. They're my people. But how I
choose to live and the people I choose to live with is my own busi-
ness. I like the advantages of being white. You know what I mean?"
"Sure," I said. “A white skin pays off. White folks are here to
stay.” I meant to hurt her. I could see that it did hurt her.
Dolly looked long at me without saying anything. We each under-
stood how the other felt, and yet our feelings imprisoned us sepa-
rately. But I really did want to make an exception of Dolly Whiso-
nant, because I knew her heart. You could see through so easily to
her heart. I would not have liked her but for that, because I disap-
prove of any colored person who passes for white. I got away from
Dolly as quickly as I could and was out of Atlanta before the morn-
ing was spent, because I knew that there was not any longer a place
in my world for even a Dolly Whisonant.
The Dolly Whisonants could think white, look white, and act


138
white. If I tried to, I'd only delude myself and probably get into some
serious trouble to boot. I can feel no affinity for those of my race who
can and do pass for white. And, to the ones who can't, like myself, the
Dolly Whisonants are lost and their loss should never be counted.
Dolly had insisted on going to the station with me to see me off,
but I refused to let her come. I told her frankly that she was too white
to be seen on the streets of Atlanta with any man who even remotely
resembled a Negro, and especially at this crucial time. She laughed
in ridicule at my qualms, for Dolly always had a reckless, independ-
ent spirit, but I made it plain to her that I meant to leave Atlanta
without incident and that it was best for me to go my way alone.
Dolly yielded, but she chided me about my being awfully silly
and afraid of my own shadow.
“I'm going back to New York,” she announced. “I'm flying back.
I might do it tonight. I'm going out to the Municipal Airport now
and make reservations."
"What about your folks?" I asked.
"They'll be all right. Things will work out. We've got to wait
anyway and see what happens. I don't think anybody is prepared
for this,” she said.
"I know I'm not,” I said. “I sure didn't expect it to happen so
soon."
"I want you to give me Katherine's address, so I can go by and
see her,” Dolly said.
"Why would you want to see her?" I asked.
"Woman's reason,” she smiled.
"That all?"
“Isn't that enough? Good God!"
"Not where you're concerned!”
"Plague take you, 'Thello King! I'm making it my business to
find out if she's good enough to have you."
“Aren't you rushing this thing a bit? Honey, I don't profess to
be in love with anybody, but if you want to meet Katherine, well,
it's all right by me. She's a swell girl. I know you'll like her.”
"Do you?" she smiled roguishly. "We'll see. What's her address?"
I gave her the full name and the address, and she wrote it down.
“Will you really go by and see Katherine and tell her how I am?"


144
“Yes, Mother?” the young woman queried.
"Is anyone else waiting to see me?"
"Yes, Mother-Mrs. Fowler and Sister Rebecca are waiting.”
“Give them my blessing and, please, dear, will you persuade them
to come back tomorrow? I wish to see no one."
“Are you all right, Mother?"
“My peace is wonderful, dear.”
“Mother, I'm so glad!"
"Thank you, Daughter!"
"I thank you, Mother!"
Mother Serena preceded me up the long, winding stairs of the
sedate old mansion which had been reconverted so as to accommo-
date the particular needs of her prosperous cult. The downstairs
consisted of a consultation room, an enormous chapel where services
were held nightly and all day Sundays, and the banquet room where
the Sunday “Love Feast" was held. Mother Serena's private quarters
and the guest rooms were on the second and third floors. She told
me about her temple as she labored slowly up the stairs.
“All that you see about you is the handiwork of God," she af-
firmed in a dreamy, singsong voice. “I am the overseer. I see to it
that everything here must express some of God. This is a house of
love and devotion. I am the vessel-the channel for Infinite Mind
and Divine Principle. I am not the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary
as my followers insist that I am. I rebuke them for saying this. I do!
I am a manifestation, certainly, but I am not the Virgin Mother.”
"You have a beautiful place," I said.
"Isn't the peace wonderful!” she exclaimed happily.
"Beyond words!"
She smiled approvingly.
The man inside the room we were entering stood with his back
to us before a huge panel of richly curtained windows framed by
thick velvet draperies which hung from a high ceiling down to an
immaculately polished parquet floor. The room, I gathered, had been
transformed from a bedroom into a parlor. The sliding doors of the
closet were closed tight and partially concealed by draperies. The
ponderous antique furnishings must have come with the purchase
of the house, and the whole shebang lifted bodily from downstairs


145
and brought up here to crowd and to junk a space that was way too
small to do it justice.
The man stood with his forefingers locked behind him, his head
bowed in meditation, for he did not seem at all interested in the view
the windows may have given him.
"Darling?” Mother Serena called to him gently. “There is some-
one to see you. A nice gentleman from a newspaper. And he has
come all the way from New York to see you."
Without turning round to acknowledge either of us, or to lift his
head, he inquired, “Does he seek my help?" He seemed a trifle an-
noyed at our intrusion.
She looked at me as though to beg my indulgence, then said,
“Yes."
He sighed heavily, mumbling, “I will help him. Where is he?"
"He is here now."
He described an imaginary arc as he turned himself around.
There was charm and vanity in the way he received us, a smile of
affection for Mother Serena and for me a benign nod. He waved his
hand to us to sit down. As we seated ourselves, he strode back to the
window. I had seen so many pictures of this man in the newspapers
I received while I was abroad, yet I don't believe that a single one I
saw did him justice. For one thing, he was not as dark of skin as he
showed up in those printed reproductions. He was the lightest pos-
sible shade of brown-close to being a "high yaller.” It is the fate
of most pigmented people to photograph either too light or too dark.
For another, he was not in the least flaccid. He had a well-formed
nose and, for a Negro, a small mouth. The eyes were something else.
They were big, poppy eyes, the yellowed, bloodshot eyes of a man
who had difficulty sleeping. His head had been shaved and scrubbed
till it glistened like an amber-colored wax orange. The hair which
had been allowed to remain about his mouth and chin gave promise
of restoring to his features the occult likeness of King Solomon. The
long, high-collared frock of scarlet red, lavishly brocaded down the
front with mystic symbols of gold, and the wide green sash wrapped
tightly round his waist and lapped over once so that the tassels fell
about his knees and bobbled when he moved about, further restored
the likeness.


149
sigh. “How could anyone like me have done the things-the great
things—this man has done? I couldn't read or write my own name
until I was a grown man. My father and my mother were both il-
literate people. My father was an old-time root doctor. He practiced
voodoo and black magic. He was an evil black man. I get my light
color from my mother. She was a mulatto. My father could fix people
and cause them to have fits and spells. They bought his vang-vang
oil, the lucky Mojoe Drops and Mojoe Incense. It was from him that
I learned the secrets of love potions and fortunetelling. I know
voodoo, though I never used it to harm anyone, you understand.
Mother will tell you. . . . She is reposed. I shan't disturb her. No.
It wouldn't be good for her. She is in another world. . . . Let us go
quietly. I will see you to the door.”
He closed the door behind him gently and went with me down
the stairs.
He smiled. “I was on to you all along!” he said.
“On to me how?" I asked.
“I knew you were trying to insinuate that I might be Solomon
Morehouse."
"Insinuate nothing!" I said bluntly. "You are, man! You've had a
terrible thing happen to you. You lost your memory. I've followed
you here to Chicago."
"You claim I was kidnaped and taken to Georgia for a secret
meeting with the Ku Klux Klan, and then they did this terrible thing
to me because I didn't do whatever it was they wanted me to do?"
"Yes. How do you think you got to Chicago? You remember
coming here?"
"It's been so long! I've been in Chicago a long time.”
"How long?"
"I don't remember exactly."
"I can tell you that you haven't been here over two or three days,
because I talked with the fellow who put you on the train in Butler
City."
"It was somebody who looked like me-like yourself. Here. ...
Turn round.” He made me look at myself in the big mirror at the
foot of the staircase. He was smiling as I marveled at our physical
resemblance. “There! Aha! Even with this head of mine shaved