When the American Credo had thus been outlined, Judd Browler doubted, “I think some of that goes a little too far.”
But Vestal Kingsblood, who had gone to college in Virginia, insisted, “No, I think it’s a fair picture generally.”
Brother Robert, great-great-great-grandson of Xavier Pic of the islands, exulted, “I’d be for a law to make it a crime for any man with a single drop of nigger blood in him to pass for a white man. If one of my girls was deceived into marrying a fellow like that, I’d kill him with my bare hands!”
But the hands that Robert held up were better fitted for signing letters than for garroting.
Neil silently looked at him, looked at his neighbors, good and kind and generous and literate.
Violet Crenway piped up then, with some enthusiasm for herself as a thinker:
“All of you miss the point. The darkies aren’t really so bad. Some of the educated ones are just like us—practically. But where they are all going haywire is in wanting to rush their advancement too fast, instead of taking it naturally and depending on their own honest, unaided efforts to so develop that eventually, some day, they’ll make us whites recognize their evolution.
“I always say to my colored friends, ‘Yes, yes, I know there are some talented members of your race who don’t get their due. I’m a regular rebel myself, and I believe in you coons grabbing all you can get. But let me remind you of something maybe you haven’t noticed. There’s just been a war on. Europe isn’t settled yet, and there’s a lot of labor trouble and so on and so forth in the United States, and so, while I’m all for equal rights and maybe social equality some day for you darkies, when the time is right, can’t you see that now isn’t the time for it?”
Neil knew, without having been instructed, that this was the most vicious thing that had been said, and the most foolish.
Chapter 32
The gold was gone, the streets were mud, and November was near, when Neil lunched with Randy Spruce of the Chamber of Commerce, Lucian Firelock, who had come from a Georgia newspaper to be advertising manager of Wargate’s, and Wilbur Feathering, who had also migrated North, but more after the fashion of Morgan’s raiders.
Wilbur was the newest business sensation in town; small, trim, forty-five and full of twenty-dollar bills. He had been born in Mississippi, the son of a bankrupt grocer, but he thought that it would be much nicer if you supposed him to be the scion of a plantation-owner. Randy said, in a Boosters Club speech, “Wilbur may be as Southern as a hot tamale but he’s also Northern as a blizzard and as streamlined as a flying torpedo.”
After six years in Grand Republic, Wilbur had added to his Delta accent the virile phrases of Chippewa Avenue, and he was now more likely to say “That’s for sure” than “Ah declare,” and not Randy himself more often crowned a sentence with “Or what have you.”