“He went to teach in a Negro college in Georgia, where his great-grandfather had been a slave. The first time he saw that hideous sign ‘For colored only,’ he wrote me, he felt so angry and so scared, as if a man were coming at him with a knife, that he had to draw the car up beside the road and be sick.

“But he tried to do what his Southern acquaintances advised and to ‘play the game’—a game in which the other side always makes the rules. Then when he’d been there only a month, a policeman stopped his car and acted as if he’d stolen it. This man had seen Bayard around the college—he knew that though he was so pale, he was classed as ‘colored.’ He was so vicious that Bayard forgot and talked back, and they took him to the police-station and said he was drunk—he never even touched beer—and he got angry and they beat him. They beat him to death. My son.

“They beat him a long time. Till he died there on the cement floor. He was a handsome boy. And they told his wife that she’d better keep still or she’d never get to bear her baby—who was our Phoebe.

“After the baby came, she escaped North, all day and all night in the jimcrow coach, and she died within a year. He really was a handsome boy, and they kept kicking his head, on the cement floor, all dirty and bloody, and he died there.”

Mary Woolcape was crying, and it was the more racking that she was not hysterical but hopeless. Neil wanted to make her the greatest offering he could, and he heard himself saying, “I understand, because I’ve found out that I am part Negro myself.”

–-Good Lord, I’ve done it! How could I be such a fool?

Chapter 20

“You say you’re part Negro? That’s not our idea of a joke.”

John Woolcape, who was less ruddy than Neil and therefore more “white,” was stern.

“It’s not my idea of a joke, either! I never knew it till recently.” He felt trapped. Oh, these Woolcapes were admirable people, but he did not want to be in their power. He urged them, “Maybe I shouldn’t have blurted it out. Nobody knows it, not even my parents or my wife, but I’m afraid it’s true. Only a small percentage, but legally, so many places, I’m afraid I’m a colored man.”

He was surprised that they did not look more surprised. They looked, indeed, rather hard. He tried to be airy:

“Well, I suppose I’ll just have to face it.”

John Woolcape said evenly, “Don’t be so sorry for yourself. Don’t be so childish. I’ve ‘faced’ being a Negro for sixty-five years now, and my wife and children and a few million other decent folks have managed to ‘face it’!”

They glared at each other, but it was Neil’s arrogance that was broken.

“You’re entirely right, Mr. Woolcape. I guess I’ll have to apologize again. It’s just that the idea is so new that I haven’t been able to get used to it. Not even Dad and Mum know it. I was looking up my ancestry and I ran into a—well–-”