“You white folks would call it a ‘touch of the tar brush,’” Emerson said sardonically. “Not so easy, eh?”

“Well, God Almighty, you two ought to know whether it’s easy or not!” Neil snarled.

“John and you, Emerson, both of you, you quit badgering that boy!” Mary Woolcape’s voice had a mother’s tenderness and a mother’s sharpness. “Of course he’s upset. Poor boy!” Her arm was about Neil’s shoulder and she lightly kissed his cheek. It was his own mother comforting him.

“How old are you, son?” she murmured.

“Thirty-one, nearly, Mrs. Woolcape.”

He had almost said “Mum.”

“It’s tough to wake up to what the world’s really like as late as that. We colored have to understand both our own world and the white folks’ world, to be safe. But I tell you what!” Mrs. Woolcape sounded practical and bustling. “You stay and have dinner with us. Will your wife let you? You sit right down and telephone her.”

Vestal said Okay, and was he enjoying his spree with the veterans?

* * * * *

He found that Mary Woolcape carried out the myth of the “typical Negress” in one detail: she was an excellent cook. But he was still novice enough to marvel that they did not have fried chicken and watermelon for Sunday dinner, but a quite Aryan roast of beef.

Emerson had gone to his own house for dinner. He had said, “I won’t repeat anything at all about—uh—about what you told us, Captain, unless or until you want me to. But welcome to our club. Swell membership, even if we haven’t a pool.” They shook hands. They were friends, as they might have been twenty years before.

John sighed, “Ryan late again. These young revolutionists are going to be late at the barricades. We’ll start without him…. Mary! Let’s feed!”

So for the first time Neil sat down and ate with his new friends: that most ancient and universal symbol of equality.

He thought that it was to make him feel at home that the Woolcapes told him their stories.

John Woolcape was a “colored man,” and he was entirely “white,” which means pink and brown and gray, and he had never in his life been south of Iowa or east of Chicago. He was born in North Dakota, his family the only “Negroes” in their county. His father was a railroad section-gang foreman; his father’s father had been a slave in Georgia and, after the Civil War, had been a farmhand in Florida, which he had apparently not viewed as a paradise of roulette wheels and beach umbrellas.

John himself had worked on farms, had hoped for college or school of agriculture, but when he was a freshman in the village high school, his father had been killed by a runaway boxcar, and he had apprenticed himself to the local barber. As a barber, he had come to Grand Republic, in 1902, and there, at twenty-two, he had first learned what it is to be a Negro.