JOHN G. NORWOOD went to his office at Williston School early and worked all day behind closed doors. His regular work routine had been interrupted enough already by this white supremacy nonsense. The politics were settled for now. They’d lost ground, but they could make it up next time. This election was an aberration. History favored the Republicans.

At three o’clock, he stood in the corridor to watch the children burst out of their classrooms. He was feeling low today, weary of talk and politics and weighty matters, and seeing the children lifted his spirits. Their squealing banter delighted him, made him feel younger, free of all the responsibilities he had taken on. Over the heads of passing children, he could see Gray Ellen Jenks standing beyond her desk, watching out the window.

Against all odds, Mrs. Jenks had proven herself a fine teacher. She clearly had the gift. Partly, the gift was just plain, old-fashioned love. Partly, it was a questioning intelligence. Real teachers had a kind of longing, a searching excitement of soul. They wanted to find out things. They didn’t settle for the old, easy answers. They lived in their minds more than in the world. Real teachers were often disappointed in life.

They had to guard against this disappointment or give in to a deep sadness about the nature of the world. The difficulty of learning anything. The impossibility of knowing anything for sure. That was the risk, and it got them all sooner or later. The thing was to carry on as long as possible, and to seek strength from the Lord.

When you don’t know for sure, you have to go on what you believe.

Or was he only idealizing? So what if he idealized the calling?—it was the key to the future of his race. He knew this as surely as he knew Christ had died on the cross. Ignorance was the enemy. White supremacy was just ignorance made flesh.

In a few years, or a few decades, there would be another kind of white man in the South—a white man as color-blind as Mrs. Jenks. They might still be named MacRae and Taylor and Rountree and even Dowling, but they would have moved beyond the old antagonism. They would understand that The Negro was as mythical as The White Man. There were as many kinds of Negroes as there were Negro people. Color was the least useful way to categorize anybody.

The evil genius of the white supremacy campaign was that it had managed to erase all other distinctions among men. It had created the Black Monolith. Only fear of difference mattered. Like any irrational proposition, it was impervious to logical argument.