“Oh, uh—good evening,” said Neil, with a sound of guilt and idiocy.

Belfreda’s face was very dark, with round little cheeks and a mouth of humor, but it was rigid as she looked at them, and they fled to their bedroom.

Neil mumbled, “She was plenty sore at our snooping. Do you suppose she’ll burn a wax image of us? The lives and ideas of these niggers are certainly incomprehensible to our kind of people.”

“Neil, I think they like you to say ‘Negro,’ not ‘nigger.’”

“Okay, okay! Anything to oblige. These Negresses, then.”

“But Belfreda says that ‘Negress’ is the one word that you must never use.”

“Oh, for God’s sake! Why are all these—uh—Negroes so touchy? What difference does it make what they’re called? As I say: we don’t know where Belfreda goes or what she does—rug-cutting or witchcraft or maybe she belongs to some colored leftwing political gang that’s planning to take this house away from us. One thing is obvious: the whole biological and psychological make-up of the Negroes is different from that of white people, especially from us Anglo-Saxons (course I have some French blood, too).

“It’s too bad, but you have to face facts and it’s evident that the niggers—all right, the Negroes—don’t quite belong to the same human race with you and me and Biddy. I used to laugh at the Southern fellows in the Army who said that, but I guess they were right. Look at that trapped-animal glare that Belfreda gave us. Still, I’m glad that in the North there’s no discrimination against ‘em—going to the same public schools with our own white kids. Some day I suppose Biddy might have a desk right next to a little pickaninny.”

“I don’t know that it will hurt that little snob particularly!” sniffed Vestal.

“No, no, sure it won’t, as long as it’s only in school, but how would you like it if your own daughter married a Negro?”

“Well, so far, even at the enticing age of four, I don’t notice that she’s bothered by any very big gang of dusky suitors!”

“Sure—sure—I just mean—I mean–-”

The struggle of the honest and innocent Neil to express his racial ideas was complicated by the fact that he had no notion what these ideas were.

“I mean, up North here, we been proceeding on the idea that a Negro is just as good as we are and has just as much chance to be President of the United States. But maybe we’ve been on the wrong track.

“I met a doctor from Georgia in the Army, and he assured me—and good Lord, he certainly ought to know, he’s lived down there among the darkies all his life, and him a doctor and a scientist—and he told me that it’s been proven that all Negroes have smaller brain-capacity than we have, and the sutures in their skulls close up earlier, so even if they start well in school, pretty soon they drop out and spend the rest of their lives loafing, and if that isn’t inferior—Oh, nuts! I guess the fact is I hate to hate anybody. I never hated the Italians or the Krauts, but I do hate Belfreda. Damn her, she’s always laughing at me, right here in our own house. Doing as little as she can and getting as much as she can out of us, and sneering at us for giving it to her; never taking any pride in cooking decent meals, but just thinking how many evenings she can get off, and always watching us, and snickering at us and trying to get something on us, hating us!”