“John!” said Mrs. Woolcape.

“And so,” her husband continued, “I would—well, to tell the truth, Captain Kingsblood, I’m hanged if I know whether, if Phoebe wanted to marry a white boy, I would lock her in, or throw up my janitor’s cap and shoot anybody who tried to interfere with her rights!”

“Now John, stop being so racial,” said Mrs. Woolcape, but in a strictly routine way.

Emerson’s wife had taken the baby and gone home—somewhat pointedly. Neil knew that they were waiting for him to leave.

“I mustn’t stay any longer but–-Tell me. Is it hard to be a Negro? Here in the North, I mean—in Grand Republic? I’m not just being curious. I want terribly to know.”

The older Woolcapes and Emerson took wordless counsel, and Emerson answered for them:

“Yes, it is hard, unceasingly.”

His mother corrected him, “Not always. Most of the time we forget we are classed as pariahs, and go about our business without thinking of race, without thinking of ourselves as anything special. But occasionally it is intolerable, not so much for yourself as for the people you love, and I can understand the young men who talk so wildly about machine-guns—wicked talk, but I understand.”

Neil worried it, “But—I’m honestly not trying to argue, Mrs. Woolcape, but I want to know. I have no doubt it’s tough in the South, but here in the North there’s certainly no prejudice—oh, maybe some individuals, but no legal bars. Why,” with pride, “I even understand there’s a Civil Rights law in this state, so Negroes can go into any restaurant! And your son and Phoebe, the way they look, they don’t seem to have suffered from any discrimination!”

“Captain,” said Emerson, “we were classmates. I thought then, and I see now I was right, that you were a frank, good-hearted fellow. You made a point of being pleasant to most of the boys, and you and I had common interests—track, mathematics, civics—and yet in twelve years, you almost never spoke to me except to say ‘Good morning’ as if you were doubtful about it.”

Neil nodded. “Yes. And too late to apologize. I wish I could. But Phoebe, her generation is different. She seems as unself-conscious as my sister.”

The quiet mother, Mary Woolcape, cried out, “That child is just beginning to learn the humiliation that every Negro feels every day, particularly in our self-satisfied North Middlewest. In the South, we’re told we’re dogs who simply have to get used to our kennels, and then we’ll get a nice bone and a kind word. But up here we’re told that we’re complete human beings, and encouraged to hope and think, and as a consequence we feel the incessant little reminders of supposed inferiority, the careless humiliations, more than our Southern cousins do the fear of lynching. Humiliation! That’s a word you white people ought to know about!

“Especially we who look white get humiliated here. We’re constantly meeting people who don’t know about It and who take to us, so that we drop our defenses—like fools. Then one day they snub us or glare at us or run away from meeting us, and we know that they know, and the pleasant times with them are over.