–-Captain, aren’t you kind of overdoing your glee in becoming a colored boy?

–-Okay. I am.

* * * * *

Under a decayed newspaper in the desk he found one sheet of Swanson-Grand letter-paper, with a half-tone of the hotel and the name of the proprietor in flourishing 1890 type, but with practically no space for writing, an accomplishment apparently not expected of the guests. He turned it over, took out his bankerish gold-mounted fountain pen, and drew up an altogether bankerish table of one branch of his ancestors:

Xavier Pic, possible French and Spanish elements but counts as 100% Negro

Sidonie, his daughter, who married Louis Payzold, was ½ Chippewa and ½ Negro

Alexandre Payzold, their son, Gramma Julie’s father, ¼ Negro

My Grandmother, Julie Saxinar, an octoroon, 1/8 Negro

Her daughter, my mother, 1/16 Negro

Myself, 1/32 Negro

Biddy, 1/64 Negro

–-Well, I finally do have something interesting about our royal ancestry to report to Dad!

Chapter 15

It was late, but he did not go down to dinner at the Swanson-Grand Coffee Shop. He could not endure sitting there and wondering whether he was being stared at. He had already discovered that the Negroes do not stay by themselves so much because they love the other Negroes as because they cannot stand the sheep-faced whites and their sheep-like gawking.

In a stilled panic he rode out to Excelsior and to the decent bungalow of Grampa Edgar Saxinar. As he came in, the old gentleman, in a voice like the squeak of his patent rocker, greeted him, “Welcome, young man! ‘Tain’t often we get a chance to see your cheerful face twice in one season!”

It was Gramma Julie who demanded, “What’s matter, boy?”

Standing rigid and large in the center of the room, which smelled of pine-needle cushions, Neil said earnestly, “Gramma, are you sure that your forbears, going back to Pic, were just French and Chippewa?”

“I told you not to talk about Pic!” Grampa Edgar wailed.

She looked drawn into herself. She knew!

Neil pressed it, “Are you sure we haven’t a little Negro blood, too?”

She screamed, “What do you mean, you young scamp? I never heard such a thing in my life!” But her wrath was too facile, and too facile was Grampa Edgar’s fury. He was no longer a comic old griper sitting by the fire. His face was terrible, the unsparing and murderous face of a lyncher. Neil had once seen a German captive look like that, and once, a drunken American military policeman. Edgar raged, “Just exactly what do you think you’re hinting at, heh? Mean to say you’ve got some crazy idea your gramma’s folks had nigger blood? Or are you stinking drunk? Are you trying to make me out the father of part-nigger kids—make your Uncle Emery and your own mother into niggers?”

Neil had always been chatty and tender with his grandfather, as he was with all pleasant old people, but there was no chat nor tenderness in him now. “I hope not, but I’d like a little truth, for once. What is the truth?”