“Clem won’t be back in town for weeks. But would you like to have dinner with Martha and me at my place—maybe Sophie, if I can get her? What about tonight?”
His lie to Vestal was almost automatic, this time. But he felt pitifully that he would not again be able to glow with her over her beloved gas-stove. She was a great lady in her assumptions; she was a poor child in her trusting heart.
When he sat with the Davises and Sophie at the table which had popped out from beneath a bookcase and turned all that end of the severe room into a dining-room, he had nothing to say. They belonged to a world that was closed to Our Mr. Kingsblood of the Second National; and the more taboo Sophie was, the more tempting were her soft, seal-brown hands, moving surely as a cabinetmaker’s or lying in peace.
He played with his food (which was plain hamburger steak, after excellent mushroom soup), and he demanded, “What are you three arguing about? Who is ‘the Turk’ and why is he a stinker?”
Sophie said, rather wearily, “He’s a colored fellow named Vanderbilt Litch—a usurer—the only suspected colored Quisling in town. But you wouldn’t be interested.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“How could you take any interest in the fussing of us local busy-bodies? Our sign is ‘For colored only,’ and that lets you out, Captain.”
–-Don’t say it! Don’t tell her you’re colored! Shut up! Don’t say anything! You’ve already told Ash and the Woolcapes—too many. Wait now, wait!
And with that he babbled, “That lets me in, Sophie, because I’ve discovered, here recently, that I’m part colored.”
Her mouth stayed open, her fingers, like brown reeds, stayed motionless in air, holding a cigarette, her breast pulsed, and then her astonishment deepened into a look of tragic commiseration for him. The nurse who had been a small-town-neighborhood girl was tenderly concerned for him, but it was the Broadway singer who spoke:
“No foolin’?”
* * * * *
He heard himself discussed, genially but firmly.
“Why, you smart little devil,” crowed Sophie, “to think that you passed and got away with it, and I never guessed!”
“But I didn’t know till just recently, I tell you!”
“Really he didn’t,” said Ash, like a schoolmaster.
“Come off it!” Sophie gloated. “How could you help feeling that rhythm, little Neil? Why, I tell you, when you’re black, you’re in the groove, you’re in the grove, you got reet, you got meat, you got feet, you can feel that ole mumbo-jum right out of Africa zizzing right through you!”
“That’s enough, Sophie!” from Ash.
“Well, you get the idea, anyway. Maybe I was trying to strut a little Harlem stuff, but honest to God, I don’t see how anybody could have Congo genes in him and think he belonged to those hot-fisted, cold-hearted freaks that call themselves the white race! Anyway, congratulations, pal!”