He was not an amused tourist; it was desperate for him to know his own people. His vision was magnified, and he was able to see how these Negroes varied in complexion, from black-glass to vellum and cream and copper and lemon-yellow; and there was one man, pale and heavily freckled and almost as red-headed as Neil himself, about whom you nevertheless felt certain that he was a “Negro.”

He began to identify them with the white people he knew. The large and probably bad-tempered woman who had been singing with such powerful unction was unquestionably Mrs. Boone Havock. The dashing lady, slender, amiable but aloof, whose face was shadowed by a tilted black hat dripping with lilac net, with pearl earrings clear against her dark neck, was Mrs. Don Pennloss, and a proud woman who was more white than any white person and yet obviously was not “white,” could be no one but the exclusive Eve Champeris.

The workman beside him, who had smiled and offered him an opened hymn-book, was the old Scotch-Irish carpenter who used to give him, as a small boy, the long sweet shavings for use as beards and wigs and kindling for Indian campfires.

Neil had never seen how beautiful hands can be till now, when he was sensitively aware of the carpenter’s palms. The backs of his hands were dark-gray, a weary color, but the palms were worn pink as Neil’s own, except in the creases, where there still clung a dark tint, and his nails were pink as Neil’s. They were hands competent to rip off old boards, to grasp a hammer, to guide a chisel, to bless a child.

“Maybe hands like that do something better than make figures in ledgers,” sighed Neil.

* * * * *

He tried to find out whether they did smell like that.

Like most Americans, he had always touchingly believed that all Negroes have an especial and detestable savor, and he could be seen now earnestly sniffing. He did catch a distinct odor, but it was the aroma of soap, moth balls, and laundry which is peculiar to all church congregations, white, black, yellow, or magenta, on any warm Sunday morning. Indeed his exploration into the mysteries of his own people was a failure insofar as he expected to find them different from that other caste, equally his own people, who were called whites.

He, the customary even if not very credulous Baptist, felt at home in this Baptist church.

As he had begun to find in Dr. Brewster the harsh beauty of a rough bronze statue and the spiritual beauty of a Coptic saint beneath the desert sun, so he began to relish the leopard beauty in the woman with the pearl earrings, and the healthy, flapper-and-bobby-sox beauty of these appallingly typical American schoolgirls about him.

Chapter 18

The sermon of Dr. Brewster was long and stately. Under divine law and divine love, he lectured, there can be no corruption save by the will of the corrupted.