Not the departing Ash himself had more greeters among the Negro crowd than Neil. How many of them he had come to know on first-name terms in these six months: all the Woolcapes and Davises and Brewsters, Phil Windeck—who was now a bootlegger and overdressed in zoot-suit fanciness, Axel Skagstrom, Borus Bugdoll, Wash, Hack Riley, Dr. Darius Melody, Sugar Gowse. As for Sophie, Neil twined his arm with hers so naturally that he did not know he was doing it.

They were all crying to the Davises, “Gosh, we’re going to miss you, Professor,” and “Kiss Harlem for me, Ash,” and “Oh, Martha, we need you!” and “Oh, come back soon, Nora.” But as Ash turned away from them to go through the train gate, the portal through which he would never return, his eyes had no hope in them. He was leaving not only his friends but the one place—in America—where, for a time, the whites had permitted him to pretend that he was a scientist and a responsible citizen.

The last thing Neil saw of Ash, as he started down the stairs to the train-platform below, his hand in Nora’s, was the apology in his face as a fat white woman cursed him because she had jostled him.

Behind him Neil heard a white man explaining to a friend, “That guy they were saying good-bye to was this educated nigger that was a draftsman or something at Wargate’s. Well, every nigger that leaves here makes this burg just that much better!”

The two men laughed, for they did not hear the earth moving.

* * * * *

When the telephone rang, at home that evening, a woman’s voice, entirely unknown to him, said “Neilly?”

“Yes?”

“So your friend Ash has sneaked out of town and your friend Drexel got the axe. It’ll be your turn soon, sweetie!”

“Who is this?”

“Don’t you wish you knew! But I wouldn’t want a bunch of niggers and perverts to know my nice name! Say, is it true that Vestal has nigger blood, too, on her mother’s side? Why don’t you two unspeakable fakes get out of town? Nobody wants you here!”

Neil hung up; he told Vestal nothing.

Later in the evening, when they were reading, he heard Vestal say, low and urgent, “Don’t look up, but there’s somebody staring in through the window.”

He sprang up, he hobbled rapidly outside, but he found no one.

* * * * *

Mr. Cedric Staubermeyer demanded of Dr. Cortez Kelly, his neighbor, “Wouldn’t you say that Kingsblood absolutely broke his father’s heart, and killed him by his misbehavior?”

The Kelly who had once denied that fine theory agreed: “Yuh, you might put it that way.”