* * * * *

The audience were softly moaning, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” and they leaped to sudden cheerful jazz in “Just a little talk with Jesus makes it right, all right!” and Neil saw a turpentine camp and men molded in copper and ebony singing slow and stopping to laugh under the chains of the white men as they swaggered, bound, into the swamps, into the sunrise.

–-This is my history, thought Neil; this is my people; I must come out.

Chapter 19

During the sermon, Neil had noticed, in the pew across the aisle, a family of father, who was a man of sixty or so, mother, a son who was in uniform as a captain, a young woman holding a baby who was being extraordinarily good, and a girl of perhaps seventeen. All of them were serious, capable-looking people, and all of them, except for the darkish young wife and her baby, might unquestionably have been taken for white, if they had not seemed so habitual here.

Where had he seen that captain?

He realized that this was the “colored boy” who had been in his class all through school, respected and ignored. Some of the white girls had even pretended to like him, and he had once been elected class secretary. Now what was his name? Oh. Emerson Woolcape.

Neil had heard that the fellow had become a dentist, with an office in the Five Points, with a regular chair and X-ray outfit and even a uniformed girl assistant, just like a regular practitioner. As the son of a real dentist, Neil had found this slightly comic.

He did not, just now, find it so comic, nor the fact that Woolcape should be pretending to be a captain, like himself, and that on his collar there was no suggestion of gentlemanly guns for killing people, but merely the caduceus with a D which indicated nothing more warlike and noble than saving their teeth.

Neil recalled that as a boy he had once seen the whole Woolcape family picnicking on the bluffs of the Sorshay River, about a red and white tablecloth spread on the rocks. They had all been singing, and he had enviously thought that they were having more fun than his family ever had. He was sure that he had seen the Woolcape father around that crazy Mermaid Tavern Building, with its phony half-timbering, as janitor and handyman. But there was nothing apparent of the mop and furnace-dust about him now. His gray suit was easy, his tie was well knotted, and his face of a Roman Senator, crowned with gray-shot sable hair, was proudly back as he listened to the sermon.

Staring at the grave competence of John Woolcape, Neil felt a premonitory chill about his own future in a world, his own world of Pruttery, which had nothing more than a dirty and half-servile job for a man who looked like that. He warmly assured himself that however sympathetic he might be with these Negroes, it would not be a very bright notion financially to announce himself as one. But, “I wish I had that man’s dignity,” he sighed.