Neil suggested, “Will you go to hell?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Quit acting supreme court. Maybe I would have shut up and never told, if Dad hadn’t summoned this inquisition and you hadn’t appointed yourself referee, but since you have, the question is, shall I be plain honest and tell the world the truth about what we are? Oh, Mom, I’m so sorry you got dragged into this!”
* * * * *
The comments of the distressed tribe did not come so clearly and patly as they are here given, but together, and all mixed with wails, curses, protests, interdicts from Oliver, something like laughter from Pat Saxinar. Dr. Kenneth asserted, “Neil, I think we are all agreed that if you continue to say nothing to outsiders, we’ll try to ignore this whole business.”
Since he had already told the Woolcapes, Ash, Sophie, Evan, Neil had nothing handy with which to answer, and his father soared on, “You claim you revere the truth, but do you call it the truth to make your own mother, that bore you, into a nigger, when obviously she isn’t?”
“I don’t–-”
“Why, her and your daughter and your grandmother and your brothers and sisters are the last people living that any intelligent man would ever call niggers,” Dr. Kenneth insisted. “I suppose it would tickle you to see your own Biddy a low-down nigger tramp!”
“Negro! And she wouldn’t be low-down; she’d be just what she is now. She won’t change; it’s your ideas that have to change. And will you please quit saying nigger? Least you can do!”
“And the least you can do, that want to torture your own family, is not to be frivolous and quibble about mere words!” snapped Oliver Beehouse.
Dr. Kenneth was laboring on, “Boy, none of us has to tell all he knows. Suppose I were a dope-fiend. I wouldn’t expect you to go around blabbing that I–-”
Pat Saxinar piped, “But you aren’t, Uncle Kenneth. Or are you?”
“Shut up!” contributed her father, Uncle Emery, son of Gramma Julie, who was in no exhilarated mood at having been nominated a Negro. Pat’s mother (a Pedick of Winona) added, “This is no time for you to be impertinent and saucy, Patricia. I wish I’d never let you join the WAVES.”
Neil’s brother, Robert, simple-heartedly denied the whole thing.
Neil, he ventured to say, had gone batty from his war-injury, and even if this disgusting story could be true—but it was merely the addled recollection of an old woman like Gramma Julie—there was no proof. Nobody could pin it on them. A letter from Xavier Pic? Why, a forgery!
Charles Sayward suggested, Forget the whole thing. Cheer up. There was no law that they had to incriminate themselves. He led thus to a set speech by Oliver Beehouse: