Mr. Woolcape was equally placid. “Yes, Belfreda is bad medicine, a bad example for our young people. I don’t think we’ll hold that prejudice against you, except as, like most white folks, you concluded that all of us are like her. And there’s some excuse for Belfreda. Her parents are dead, her grandfather, Wash, is pretty weak, and her grandmother is a tough old devil. Belfreda is a real slick-chick. She likes to tell the Polish girls how much smarter she is than they are. Still, that’s better than being a Topsy and clowning around and eating dirt to amuse the white folks. Or getting sloppy and lazy and thieving, as the Southerners claim their colored servants do. (Why wouldn’t they, when they have no hope at all except the kitchen!) Oh, there’s a lot of excuse for Belfreda.”

“You,” said his wife, “make me tired! I’m sick of all these environmental excuses. A cause isn’t an excuse. All these murderers, black and white, smirking, ‘It’s not my fault, because my parents didn’t understand me.’ Whose parents ever did understand them? Everybody excusing themselves that way for drinking and whoring, even here in the Five Points. I’m sick of it! I don’t think Borus Bugdoll, who sells dope and girls, is justified by having been born on a bankrupt farm!”

Her husband flared back, “Even Borus feels the discrimination against him–-”

It was the first of the debates, the “race-talks,” that Neil was to hear in the Five Points: debates that continued all night, contradictory and emotional, learnedly and sometimes ungrammatically carried on by Negro tailors and waiters and oilers who never, like Oliver Beehouse or John William Prutt, bought a ranked regiment of books and put them up on oak shelves, but borrowed them, one at a time, from the public library.

Neil tried to get into the talk with an offering of “I don’t think many white people are really vicious. I don’t believe most of them know there is any discrimination.”

Behind him, an unknown voice, somewhat youthful but somewhat basso, jeered, “Then who are the mysterious guys that start the discrimination?”

“Mr. Kingsblood, this is our son, Ryan,” said Mrs. Woolcape.

“Our son Ryan, who is always late,” said Mr. Woolcape.

“Your loving son Ryan, who is damn near always right on racial issues too. And who may our friend be?”

Chapter 21

Sergeant Ryan Woolcape, in uniform, could have been taken for a typical Anglo-Saxon collegian in the Army. He was six-two or -three, with a proud back and a head rearing as haughtily as his father’s. He was snarling, “What is all this junk about you pinks not wanting discrimination?”

John spoke sharply: “That’ll do, Ryan. This is a friend of ours—Captain Kingsblood, of the Second National Bank.”

“I’m aware of that noble fact, Dad. I’ve seen him captaining in the bank…. Cap, excuse me for my bumptiousness. I have some reason for being in a temper. I’ve just been in God’s holy temple, listening to the Reverend Dr. Jat Snood, that Kansas Fundamentalist Evangelist and all-around bastard. I doubt if I’d ever have gotten in if the ushers had known I’m a spook, blast their worm-eaten souls and slimy handshakes. But I did, and I heard Snood explain that Jesus wants the frozen-toed Christians up here in Minnesota to chase all us niggers back to Georgia. So the Captain must excuse me if I get rough when I find one of the pious ofays here in this low shack.”