He needed their comfort, for no day in late January went by without someone, with a feeling of being very original about it, reminding him that he was “colored.”

Tom Crenway, as he could not think of anything reproving to say, just looked it. Cedric Staubermeyer tried to stare like a white man staring at a Negro. But Rose Pennloss, in the next block, waved her hand with a timid cordiality. Shirley Pzort, in the kitchen, got a little mixed-up and thought it was Vestal who was the Negro, and was extra friendly to her, as to a fellow immigrant. Dr. Cope Anderson, a chemist colleague of Ash, came calling, with the Reverend Lloyd Gadd, liberal clergyman; while in the bank, Lucian Firelock went out of his way to be seen shaking hands with Neil in public.

Then he saw the person who for years had been known to the household only as “the little man who comes to the back door.” He frequently showed up with a basket in the early evening, to sell them a juicy chicken, cherry marmalade, eggs, or a rococo coffee cake that his wife had made at their farm, out beyond Dead Squaw Lake. This time his fumbling ring at the back door came after eleven, and they heard it anxiously, thinking of Curtiss Havock drunk, of the hostile Mayor Fleeron and his policemen. Vestal went to the door with Neil, as stoutly as though she were two bodyguards with automatics.

The Little Man, standing in half-darkness on the cement back porch, piped, “Mr. Kingsblood—Neil—I haven’t brought anything to sell tonight, but I’ve just heard about how much nerve you showed, and I want to thank you.”

But again: on a bus, a small and unknown old woman flared at Neil, “My young nigger friend, do you know what God is going to do to you for having set yourself up against His plain commandment that Ethiopia shall stay in perpetual bondage in the kitchen and not go riding in no public buses with no decent white folks? Oh, he that heedeth not the words of God, he shall go down to hell and gnashing, and that’s the Bible-truth, that’s God’s truth, praise His merciful name!”

That was the prelude to the letters.

Grandfather Edgar Saxinar wrote from Minneapolis that Neil was a lying ingrate, that there never had been a Xavier Pic.

Berthold Eisenherz, lord of the manor, wrote from his winter villa at Palm Beach that while he prized his acquaintanceship, he could make it to Neil’s financial advantage if he would move away.

Drexel Greenshaw wrote regretting that a white gentleman like Mr. Kingsblood should call any attention at all to his unfortunate race, and so merely make it the harder for them.

Then the anonymous letters, those wry tributes to glory, written in painful ecstasy by neurotics who spend the rest of their time in sneaking along back alleys, after midnight, poisoning small cats.