John set up his own barbershop, and it failed, not because he was a Negro, since few of the customers seemed to object to his Ethiopian touch, but because he would not jimcrow it and bar out Negro customers, and the whites felt they had a social duty to be nasty about that.

Then, with his natural skill with tools, John had tried to become a mechanic. But he had little training, and technical schools then were distant and segregated. Mary and he wanted to go off to a larger, more mechanized city, where he could learn, but they had been so foolish as to believe the white real-estate men’s slogan that a community honors any worker who shows his faith in it by buying his own home and having a nice little family.

They had bought the home, and they had the nice little family in the person of Bayard, and so they were stuck here, and always would be, and John became a janitor and was glad to get the job, and Mary helped him out by baking cakes for sale and by working as extra-waitress at party-dinners.

“Yes, I’ve seen you several times, Captain, when I’ve helped wait on table at the Havocks’ and Mrs. Dedrick’s, but you never saw me, I imagine,” she said, and though she was too maternal and sensible to mean it that way, Neil was shamed.

He was certain that with white for a label and some Morton Beehouse as father-in-law, John Woolcape might now be president of the Second National Bank, and that with an equal adjustment, John William Prutt might be a janitor. But while it would work out admirably, in so far as Mr. Prutt would be a methodical furnace-tender and a passionate sweeper and remover of old bottles, Mr. Woolcape would be less happy and certainly less dignified in flattering large depositors than he was now.

Through most of dinner, they discussed, with few reticences, the propriety of the Negro Neil becoming a Negro.

“The only thing I’m sure of is that you mustn’t do anything hasty, Mr. Kingsblood,” said John.

Neil felt as near to them as to his own father and mother, of whose lives and purposes he now knew less than of the Woolcapes’. He would have been comforted if they had called him “Neil,” but they had only softened the Captain to Mister, with an occasional affectionate Son.

“Don’t take martyrdom as a game,” John insisted. “Before you can know what you ought to do, or at least want to do, you must read the great books about my race, as I’ve been trying to do, with my defective education, these thirty years. But I reckon I’m lucky. A janitor’s chair by the furnace is the perfect place for study.

“When you have read a lot and thought a lot, you may decide you don’t want to come over. It might not do any good to our race, and it might be horrible for your mother and wife and little girl. I’m proud of being a Negro. I know so many plain, ordinary folks among my race that are like the great poets and heroes in the Bible. But white businessmen don’t like it when humble people are heroic—black or white. They claw us down. Anyway, you have no right to expect your ladies to enjoy sharing your sacrifices. I wonder do many women enjoy martyrdom? Maybe they got too much sense.”