* * * * *

Evan Brewster—and he really was a Ph.D. of Columbia—had also attended Harvard College and the Union Theological Seminary, where the students believe in a trinity of Father, Son and Sociology—the Father as a symbol, the Son as a poetic myth, and Sociology with a pink halo. But after that, Evan got religion and race.

He had been born in a Massachusetts village of elms and white steeples, his father a tailor with white patrons. He was something over forty now, with a quiet wife, a daughter named Thankful, and a son named Winthrop, who now in high school was showing talent for physics. When he had first come to Grand Republic, as a missionary to his people, his church had been a shanty in Swede Hollow. In his dozen years here he had seen the Negro island expand from three or four hundred to two thousand; had seen over-timid or over-bumptious dark immigrants from the Carolinas and Texas turn into citizens; seen the young people going to college, becoming army officers, writing for the Defender, the Courier, the Spokesman.

Swede Hollow became overcrowded with Finns and Poles and Scandinavians; rents were grossly raised (by favorite customers of the Second National Bank); and Dr. Brewster led his own flock and most of the other Negroes from Swede Hollow to the brickfields and swamps where the Five Points was to rise. When his new church was built, he worked with his members in laying brick, while his doe-like wife, Corinne, served coffee and brought the hymn-books to the men and lent her lipstick to the sisters.

Judge Cass Timberlane had once said that Dr. Evan Brewster was the most intelligent person in Grand Republic. That was doubtful, when you considered Sweeney Fishberg or Dr. and Mrs. Kamber or a couple of Wargate chemists named Ash Davis and Cope Anderson, or possibly Judge Timberlane himself. But none of these competent people had Evan Brewster’s love for all suffering human beings.

Neil Kingsblood’s friends had never heard of Dr. Brewster.

* * * * *

During the hymn, which the congregation sang with neither a comic swing nor any of the richness fictionally associated with spirituals, but like any other evangelical Americans, Neil looked at the people about him.

Except for four or five of whom he was in doubt, they all seemed “colored.” He recognized only two: Wash, the bootblack-sage, who now, in a double-breasted blue jacket, looked like a tiny, secret, fatherly old Jewish international banker, and Judge Timberlane’s cook-general, Mrs. Higbee.

When they had finished singing and sat listening to the gospel, Neil discovered that his sense of their being “colored,” being alien, being fundamentally different from himself, had evaporated. Their similarity to one another in duskiness and fuzzy hair was so much less than their individual differences that they had already ceased being Negroes and become People, to wonder about, to love and hate.

Evan Brewster was no longer ugly to him, in his thick virility, but noble as a grizzly is noble, and Neil saw dimly what a piece of impertinence it had been for the Caucasians to set up their own anemic dryness as the correct standard of beauty.