“But those who are visibly black–-No discrimination in the North? No, merely looked at like rattlesnakes by all the mean-tempered people on trains and buses and in stores. Rarely get jobs better than the kitchen, no matter what our ability. Ambitious colored boys becoming gamblers or hoboes because no one will try them at responsible work. Admitted grudgingly to restaurants because of the law, and then insulted or neglected there, so that next time we’d rather go hungry—so that we’d rather walk the streets all of a winter night than ask for a room in what you’d call a good hotel. So that John and I, who would be admitted, hate to take a hotel room when we travel, with our own brothers driven to the streets.

“Humiliated till we get broken or else, like John and me, prefer to stay home, always, always, and not take a chance on meeting any white man, any time. And we’re not bad, oh, we’re not, and when I think how good and courageous my husband is, and my children, and my father, the zoologist that–-

“Oh, sorry. Being sentimental. I know you white people think it’s very funny for a black woman to praise her men like that!”

“No—please!” Neil was extraordinarily moved and shaky.

“Don’t you read the humorous stories about pretentious darkies in the magazines, hear the jokes about Mandy and Rastus at banquets? And Phoebe—you spoke of her new generation. Just the other day, a fifty-year-old white garage attendant, and Phoebe is much whiter than he is, told her that he would be willing to sleep with her, if he could only get used to her being a nigger. That’s not as bad as the South, where a friend of ours, a colored woman, was hurt in an automobile accident, bleeding to death, and they turned her away from white hospital after hospital, and she died in the Street—murdered.

“But still, when Phoebe went out for the school play, at your own Hamilton High, before she had a chance to read at the try-out, they told her the cast was already chosen, but they told a white friend of hers that nobody had been chosen. And one of her teachers this year keeps looking at her and at the Greek and Italian and Russian youngsters, and then she says something like ‘those of us who have New England ancestors will not need to be told that so-and-so is a point of honor.’

“But that won’t break her bones, as it did her father’s. He was our oldest son, Bayard. He would have become a fine economics teacher. He graduated from Carleton—earned his way through, doing chores, but he was summa cum laude—and he married a wonderful girl.

“He was brought up entirely in the North—yes, yes, I know I’m inconsistent; I admit the South is worse, even worse! He was brought up here, and he’d never experienced one minute of legal segregation, and he just couldn’t believe that a decent, educated Negro would ever run into violence in the South.