When they had trudged over the necessary bridge-approaches of conversation, Neil wanted to know: “How about engineering school? Going to be able to go back?”

“I haven’t had the nerve to tackle it—to start all over again on that magnificent career that works up through study to officer-and-gentleman to chamois-rag. I feel too segregated. When I started to look for a job, I found that my having been an officer was against me. The white engineers said it had been an impertinence.

“So I took the long trail of the Negroes. I hope you never have to follow it: city to city—Omaha to Dallas to Seattle to Pittsburgh—always hearing that in the next town they’re hiring the brownskins, hustling there by boxcar and finding that they aren’t. I got lonely for Garnet and the home town. You know it’s my home, too, and I love the hills and the rivers. So I’m back, and I’ll save up a few dollars and start off again—school or the trail.

“You know, in every machine shop I had one test demand: will you give me the chance to set up any job you pick out on a turret lathe? And they always said the same thing: do you think we’re going to ruin an expensive rig like that to please a nigger garageman? Oh, well, so geht’s.”

He was looking at Neil resentfully, but when Neil said simply, “Phil, I’m also a Negro, and I’ve also been fired for it,” the defiance went out of him and, after most carefully wiping his hand on a piece of waste, Phil shook hands with his fellow captain, his fellow penniless job-hunter, his friend.

After work-hours, after Neil had been refused another job, Phil and he went out for a cup of coffee at an Automobile Row diner, where the proprietor, with so many greasy-faced customers, had given up trying to decide which of them were “colored” and which were “white.”

Phil said, “You must have seen my dad, old Cloat Windeck, running an elevator at the Blue Ox National Building. The poor old boy is broken-hearted about my decline and fall. He always insisted that I inherited my flying technique from him—running his elevator up to a twelve-story altitude.”