Till then he had known little more of the diplomatic art of being colored than had a Neil Kingsblood. Perceiving that his father was a good Baptist and a good boss of Irish and Swedish section-hands, John had never heard the news that he was biologically inferior, and his untutored white playmates, boys and girls, had not known that the touch of his hands was pollution.

Especially the girls.

There had been a few people in that Dakota village who had muttered something unpleasant about “tar-brushes,” but they had been “cranks” and “grouches,” and to John their venom had been incomprehensible.

Accepted in Grand Republic as a white man and a sound barber, he had forgotten the infrequent hints from his father that connected with his family was a mystery called “the race problem.” At that time it would have seemed to John just as reasonable for anyone to say to him “You’re a Hydrangean Polypus” as to say “You’re a black man.” Not being black. And not caring a hang whether he was “black” or “white,” so long as his customers and his Swiss sweetheart liked him.

But a man moved in from his boyhood village in North Dakota and whispered something to the boss barber, who said to John, “Why, you’re part-nigger, ain’t you?”

“I suppose so. What of it?”

“Don’t know ‘s it makes any difference to me, personally, but the customers don’t like it. They’ll all kick, and leave me.”

“Have any of them kicked yet?”

“No, but they might. Can’t take no chances. I will say for you, you’re the best barber I got, but can’t take no chances.”

Back in 1904 they were already using this formula of caution which, unchanged in its massive dignity, imbecility and cowardice, was to go down to the middle of the Century of Democracy and Enlightenment.

John was discharged from shop after shop, and never because he was incompetent or because the customers disliked him—at least, they never disliked him till the Great Fact was whispered to them. Sometimes John himself flung the Fact at them, for he had no taste for the rancid butter of uncle-tomming, and in that two minutes of accusation by the first boss barber who had fired him, he had become “Negro” and “race-conscious.”

His Swiss girl, a rosy chambermaid to whom he had been teaching English, had thought nothing about it when she learned the Great Fact, but her Irish and Scandinavian colleagues taught her that if she was to belong to this Land of Democracy, she must drive him away.

John was the first raceman in Grand Republic to hear of the founding of the N.A.A.C.P.—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Grand Army of the Negroes—and at its convention in Minneapolis, he met Mary, who, like himself, was imperceptibly “colored.”

She was a graduate of Oberlin College, the daughter of a prosperous and rather scientific experimenter with turkeys and chickens and geese in Iowa. John and Mary disliked each other when they met, because they were both white and resented the swank of whiteness. But the fact that both of them refused to be anything so tyrannical as white drew them together. What had kept them together since was a common liking for integrity and humor.