Suddenly, to Neil, it wasn’t so; the black soldiers had not been like that; and as to the rebellious sergeant whom Rod had sportingly wanted to murder—“It could be me!” thought Neil.

He was most civil to Rod at parting.

Chapter 17

If he could not believe that many of his own race were as Rod Aldwick had found them, he had to see something of what they actually were. Where could he look at a gathering of them? In a movie theater? In a church?

There must be a Negro church in Grand Republic, now that it had a couple of thousand black inhabitants; there must be Negroes who went to church, wouldn’t you think? (His mother did!)

When he was having his shoes shined in the basement washroom of the Hotel Pineland, he looked down more gently than had been his custom at old Wash, the shine-boy, whose name was not Wash, but George Gray, and who was not a boy but a man aged and tiny and infinitely patient. He was the one Negro whom Randy Spruce most favored, as “knowing his place and taking his cap off to us white gents.” He was also the grandfather of Belfreda Gray.

There was something shameful in Wash, bent and spiderlike and more gray than black. He peered up at Neil and out of his ancient dusty memories he picked an unclean one about Belfreda, and he sniggered tinily, “Well, Cap’n, suh, you suttinly done right when you kicked Belfreda’s tail outa yo’ house. She’s a little slut. I can’t do nothin’ with huh.” He giggled. “She sleeps with every no-count niggah in town. Can’t do nothin’ with these biggity young No’th’n niggahs, no suh!”

Neil said genially, as the young prince, “Oh, Belfreda wasn’t so bad. She’s just young. Uh, Wash—uh—where is there a colored church in this town?”

Wash turned rigid. He looked up painfully, his filmy eyes were grim and discerning, and most of his “cullud” stage dialect dropped as he demanded, “What you want to know for?”

“I’d like to attend one.”

“We don’t like white folks coming to laugh at us—not when we’re praying.”

“Honestly, Wash, I had no idea of laughing.”

“What else man like you want to come for?”

“I just felt I ought to understand your part of town better.”

“We don’t like gang of people slumming.”

“I’d be alone, and perfectly reverent, I hope.”

Neil was not conscious of how humble he had become to this venerable elder of his race. Wash said grudgingly, “Well, Mister, they’s fo’ or five, but you might try the Ebenezer Baptist—Reverend Brewster’s church—in the Five Points, Mayo Street and Omaha Avenue. I go there. We think Reverend Brewster is real smart.”

Neil knew vaguely that the Darktown of Grand Republic was called the “Five Points,” and had Mayo Street as its principal thoroughfare. His bank held mortgages there, and he had driven through it, but eyelessly. Of “Reverend Brewster” he had never heard, and with a white man’s matey joviality, as Wash returned to shining his shoes, Neil crowed, “Isn’t Brewster kind of a Yankee name, for a colored preacher?”