They looked more cordial. “What can we tell you, Captain Kingsblood?” asked Emerson.

(How did they know he had been a captain? Was it true, as some people said, that the whole dark world was a conspiracy planning the destruction of all the white people, viciously clever yet jungle-mad, wild as smoke-blackened midnight fires for human sacrifice; a cabal that spied on every white person’s acts and noted them in little books audited by witch-doctors and Communist agents?)

Now the one thing he yearned to say was “Shall I, who am a Negro, become a Negro?” While he struggled to phrase it, he looked about.

There was no reason why a man of average perception should have been astonished that the house of middle-class Negroes with ordinary good taste and neatness should be exactly like the house of any other middle-class Americans with ordinary taste and neatness. What, Neil taxed himself, did he expect? A voodoo altar? Drums and a leopard skin? A crap-game and a demijohn of corn liquor? Or an Eldzier Cortor painting and signed photographs of Haile Selassie, Walter White and Pushkin? Yes, probably he had expected something freakish.

But, if they were janitors, instead of lawyers and salesmen, he and all of his friends would have living-rooms exactly like this: the same worn carpet-rug, tapestry chair with foot-rest, love seat, ornamented ash-trays, satinwood radio-cabinet, women’s magazines, and not very good reproductions of not very good floral pieces!

–-Vestal would approve of this room and point out that Mrs. Woolcape keeps it better than Shirley does ours.

Then he stopped lying to himself and with a pang he admitted how impossible it would be to conceive of Vestal as ever being here and being natural with these, his own people.

Well, they were waiting, and he tried to speak out.

“What I wanted to ask—I don’t quite know how to express it, but certain things have happened, and they make me feel that I ought to know you, uh–-”

“‘Negroes’ is the word,” said John Woolcape.

“Or ‘colored people.’ We don’t mind either,” said his wife, and they were both suave about it and rather tolerant.

“What Mother means,” Emerson explained, “is that we dislike both terms intensely, but we consider them slightly less ruffling than ‘nigger’ or ‘coon’ or ‘jig’ or ‘spade’ or ‘smoke’ or any of the other labels by which white ditch-diggers indicate their superiority to Negro bishops. We expect it to take a few more decades before we’re simply called ‘Americans’ or ‘human beings.’”

“Don’t be so damn smug!” Emerson’s father threw at him. “You’re right about the unpleasantness of the labels, but when did a ditch-digger get to be so inferior to a bishop? I’m an ash-shoveler myself! But if Captain Kingsblood would like to ask about the Negroes—that’s the word that I happen to use—we’d be glad to tell him anything we can.”

Emerson hastened, “Of course we will. I didn’t mean to be smug. I just don’t like being branded as a kind of barnyard animal. But Captain, if you’d really enjoy a red-hot race-talk, wait till my brother Ryan comes in. He’s only twenty-three, but he can be as wonderful and wrong as if he were ninety. He’s on leave—hopes to be out soon, but he’s still in the service, as I am; he’s a sergeant, and how he does look down on us captains! Ryan’s been out in India, and way he tells it, he was hobnobbing with Gandhi and Nehru, though they may not have noticed it. And Burma.”