He did not answer; he just stood and started toward the door. I followed him, and then remembered something my father had given me when I first came back to live here. He had gone into his desk and got it out and handed it to me. “This isn’t yours,” he had said. “It belongs to the Calibans. But they’re not ready to have it yet. You give it to them when you think they should have it.” He did not tell me what it was, but I knew as soon as I saw it because I knew the old tall story as well as anyone else; everyone knew it, and enjoyed it, but I doubt if anyone thought it was any more than a story. When my father gave it to me, I was not sure any more. So I went back to the desk and pulled open the drawer and found it under a pile of papers, and a bit dusty, and walking to Tucker, pulled out my handkerchief and it started to shine in the single lamp light. I handed it to him.

He took it from me, and I watched his eyes closely and saw them cloud a bit, the closest I had ever seen him come to tears or, in fact, to any other emotion. He put the white stone in his pocket, turned abruptly and went out the door.

On the way out there with Tucker beside me in the front seat, I realized this was the closest I had been physically and alone with a negro in almost twenty years, since the beginning of the Christmas vacation of my senior year. On that time, Bennett was driving, and talking, talking, as I sat beside him worrying that he would not watch where he was going, would not be able to see even an elephant in time through the dark glasses he had suddenly begun to wear for no apparent reason and we would crack up and not even get a chance to start all the things we planned. Both of us shivering like wet kittens in the cab of that truck. The closest I have been to a negro, yes! in more ways than one.

Perhaps it would have been better if I had not survived that trip. As it turns out, I never accomplished anything anyway. I do not mean, of course, I wish now, at this very second, to be dead. That is a little too melodramatic. I mean only that I have made so many people I loved so unhappy because I did not have the courage to go ahead with my plans. Because I was a coward, I made them all cowards, made them worse than cowards because they waited for a coward to take action.