“He is a Yankee.”

“Oh!”

“He’s what they call a Doctor of Philosophy.”

Neil could not but chuckle at this darky malapropism. “You mean Doctor of Divinity.”

Something of Wash’s professional Dixie dialect crept back into humble speech as he insisted, “No, suh! He got one these Doctor Philosophy degrees from this Columbia University, in Harlem.”

“And Doctor Davis. Has everybody on Mayo Street got a college degree?”

“No, suh, there’s a few of us come along too early.”

The white man in Captain Kingsblood wondered, “Is this old devil kidding me?”

* * * * *

He had lied to Vestal.

On that June Sunday morning he had told her that he was going to lunch with a Veterans’ Association in the South End. He recalled the fictions he had produced at the State Historical Society, and reflected that he was becoming only too good a liar.

He went by bus to the Five Points, and walked westward on Mayo Street. It was like any other lower-middle-class shopping center, in its flabby look, its tawdry wooden store-buildings plastered with home-painted signs. In the block between Denver Avenue and Omaha, there were two drugstores not so unlike the domestic treasure-houses of Sylvan Park in their displays of waterbottles, prayer-books, aspirin, douches, and piles of the Sunday Frontier-Banner. The Co-op Food Store, the Old English Grocery, the Electric Shop, with “reconditioned radios” in the show-window, all reminded him of that Anglo-Saxon city, Grand Republic, and so did the Lustgarten Meat Market, which was in an old residence with a new shop-front carelessly slapped on the ground floor and family washing still flourishing above. Yet this familiar huddle became strange to Neil as he realized that he did not see one white face on the crowded sidewalk.

In front of shuttered doors, over each of which was the sign “Beds 75¢,” were groups of burly Negro workers staring at him as though he was the intruder that he was, and most of them were talking in dialect from the Deep South so thick that he could not understand them. He saw a young blade in a zoot-suit: yellow sports-jacket, flaring lavender trousers, toothpick-toed shoes, and a broad black hat edged with white. He saw a couple rolling up the middle of the Street, arms entwined, singing, and, as advertised, he saw one “colored mammy,” fat ebon face grinning under a red and yellow bandanna.

And when he looked down a side street he saw that behind neat stucco cottages, with tidy small lawns, there was such a diminutive jungle slum as he had not known could exist in the enlightened Northern States: shacks one behind another, three deep, in the center of the block, tilted doghouses such as no truly enterprising dog would have endured, each with a couple of inches of stove pipe for chimney. The whole ground between the shacks was a maggot-heap of dogs, chickens, and bare brown babies.

That frightened him. “How would I like turning black, and having to bring Vestal and Biddy down here?”