“Hiram Revels or B. K. Bruce,” said Dr. Kamber.

“Who? What makes you think those niggers could be Senators?”

“They were!”

“Oh, I get you. Wasn’t that in Reconstruction days? Feathering explains that. It was because those niggers were just out of slavery, where they’d been trained in industry and obedience. But since then, with all this loose freedom, the colored folks have simply gone to hell in a hack intellectually, to say nothing of their immorality, and today there isn’t one of them that’s fit to hold down any appointment higher than cityhall janitor.”

Neil was brooding:

–-What’s the use? I shall never tell anybody. That’s settled! It was as simple as that.

Chapter 16

June the twelfth was all brightness and lilacs and new leaves, as was required, for June the twelfth was Biddy’s fifth birthday. It was fit for the birthday of a little white lady, with white blossoms, white dresses, and all the white children in the block admiring her and the new roller skates and the toy theater, gold and white.

Neil came home early. The half-dozen girls and the four screaming but attentive young gentlemen of Biddy’s age were playing hide-and-seek in the back yard, around the cement fish-pond and Biddy’s playhouse, of white clapboards thick-covered with vines. All the children, especially Peggy Havock, were fond of Neil, and they danced about him affectionately, crying, “Oh, Mister Capten Kingsblood—oh Mister Capten Kingsblood!”

Vestal came out of the house, tall and benign as an angel, in a long sage-green dress, gold-girdled, and she bore the maple layer-cake of the day, on which, in white on yellow icing, was handsomely engrossed, “Our Biddy—5.” The six pink candles (one to grow on) were steady in the calm, happy summer afternoon.

To receive the cake, the histrionic Biddy popped into her playhouse and came out wearing her gilt Christmas crown. But if she insisted on being a queen, she was a popular constitutional monarch, and she cut and distributed the slices of cake with royal justice. Neil watched her, and remembered that not for many days had he thought of the Blood Royal. She had it, clearly, but was it from the old lecher, Henry VIII, or from Xavier Pic, regent of the wilderness?

Biddy romped up to him, her eyes diamonds for happiness. She reached up to hug his waist. “Daddy, I never did have such a lovely birthday, not in all my life. Am I always going to have lovely birthdays like this?”

He kissed her roughly.

Prince, erstwhile “Nigger,” who all along had assumed that this was his birthday party and that it was his social duty to welcome his little friends by yelping at them and pushing them over, came hysterically bounding up, licking Biddy’s face, knocking off her crown and laughing at her, and Biddy forgot her royal dignity in a shrill, “Now you bad ole dog, you stop it and be good now or I’ll rule you right out of my cas-tel, you bad ole dog you, Nigger!”