And he was more certain that he could never become “colored” when he passed the Beale Street Bar-B-Q and saw the dark cloud of Negroes looking hatefully through the steamy window at the slumming white man; when he came to the Jumpin’ Jive night club which, he thought, belonged to Belfreda’s friend, the sardonic Borus Bugdoll, who had made light of the Kingsbloods in their own kitchen. It had been a store; the show-window was now filled with a gilded plaster seashell decked with silvered pine-cones and poison-green ribbons, framing the blown-up photograph of an almost naked black dancing-girl.

The street was more alien to Neil than Italy in wartime, and it seemed to him that every dusky face, every rickety wall, hated him and would always hate him, and he might as well go home.

But all of this had taken only five minutes of slow walking, and in the sixth minute the sorcery was lifted and he was among people who, though their faces were more beloved of the sun, were like any other group of middle-class church-going Americans.

They were Dr. Brewster’s congregation, enjoying their weekly gossip before the church bell should summon them in: placid and well-shaven men, wearing the kind of Sunday clothes that people do wear on Sunday; Mothers in Zion, nervously thin or comfortably buxom, talking about their sons in the service; supernaturally Sunday-neatened small boys restless in tight shoes and little girls flaunting Sunday splendor; elders with a long good life recorded in their etched faces; voluble babies who had not yet heard that they were Negroes and who assumed that they were babies.

The voices of that half of them who were Northern-born sounded like the voices of any other Minnesotans; and while they looked at Neil with a slight doubtfulness, they did not make him feel like an intruder as had the derisive loafers at the Bar-B-Q.

The Ebenezer Baptist Church was a small tidy oblong of brick, with an absurd dwarf steeple. The clear glass windows, rather narrow, with wooden frames rising to peaks that tried to suggest Gothic arches, had inserts of colored glass displaying Bible texts in script. With that, the Gothic revival ended.

The little bell quacked, and the amiable crowd bobbed slowly up the steps, shyly followed by Neil.

Inside, the church seemed to Neil less like a place of worship than a lodge room. It was lined with gray wallboard, neatly fastened with red-topped thumb-tacks, and neat and gray the straight lines of pews. Texts, gold-embossed on black placards, were on the walls, with a portrait of a black St. Augustine of Carthage. On a platform in front was a choir of nine girls in black gowns and mortar boards. Two of them were creamy white.

The surprise to Neil, himself a Baptist and brought up to denounce the heathen gauds of Rome, was that against a pathetic little reredos of wooden latticework stood a homemade altar with a lace-edged cloth on which was an imitation jeweled cross.