Mary complained, “I never can make John understand about Joan of Arc—or, to take a much more sensible person, Harriet Tubman. He just won’t get the feminist point of view. It’s that old barbershop training.”

Neil meditated, “As a matter of fact, I never have thought of coming out as a Negro. Do you despise Negroes that give up the fight and pass?”

The elders sighed. John pondered, “No. We’re sorry to lose them, but we know how hard they’ve found it, and I’d say there’s a general rule that if your old friend goes by you on the Street, with white folks, and doesn’t know you, you don’t even wink—not public. Just as we’d cut our tongues out before we gave your confidence away. So will my younger son, Ryan, if you meet him and feel like telling him. Yes, he’d be the loyalest of us all, even if he is the most leftwing and gets awful ornery, sometimes, with you white folks!

“Maybe you’d like to come here next Friday evening. Clement Brazenstar of the Urban League will be here, and Ash Davis, a chemist–-”

“I’ve met Dr. Davis. In the bank.”

“And maybe Sophie Concord. She’s a very pretty colored lady, a city nurse, real smart. Those folks are all terrific race-talkers, even worse than I am. Maybe, for an evening, it might be more interesting than pinochle, or whatever game of cards it is you play.”

“Bridge!” said the more fashionable Mary.

“I’ll come,” said Neil.

John went on, “You won’t need to tell ‘em you’re colored. In fact, Mr. Kingsblood, I don’t know as I’d go around saying that, except here with us, who feel kind of like your family—Emerson used to tell us about you, when you and him were in school together. He admired you so much.

“If you come next Friday, you’ll learn something from Clem Brazenstar. He’s as black as Tophet; by birth, he’s a real, low-down Mississippi Delta Nigra fieldhand, and he never went to college, but I doubt if there’s any of these fancy college professors that reads as much as him.

“And then Ash and Martha Davis, they’re kind of betwixt and between. They aren’t black and born between the cotton bolls, like Clem, nor yet white and born in a blizzard, like Mary and me. They’re high yella in color and border-state by family, and you know how these border white folks, Tennessee and Kentucky, never quite make up their minds. They appoint a colored fellow to the police force one day and lynch him the next and have a lovely obituary about him in the Courier-Journal the third.”

Neil sighed, “I’m not sure my own record with the Negroes is any too good.”

“Hm?”

“We recently had a colored maid, Belfreda Gray, and I got awfully prejudiced against her. I thought she was slovenly and sullen—I almost hated her, almost hated all Negroes, because of her. Do you know her?”

“Oh, yes, we know the little tart,” Mrs. Woolcape said serenely, and Neil was as shocked as if his official mother had said it.