But Neil did not know that there was any Best Colored Society for Martha Davis to dislike. He was making the inevitable mistake of all converts and assuming that Negroes cannot be as smug and trivial as the whites. Why, bless their souls, they can put on frilled shirts and a thirty per cent. solution of a London accent and be just as tedious as Park Avenue any time. Neil had so much to learn about colored people and then, under this revelation, about white people.

* * * * *

The Woolcapes and the Davises and Neil sat around and sat around and picked up pieces of conversation and looked at them and dropped them. Everyone was being too polite for comfort when the door banged and into the room came a man like a skilled and enchanting little comedian, and they all yelled, “Hey, Clem!”

Clement Brazenstar, the notorious field-agent of the Urban League, was the son of a dirt-common, black, Mississippi Delta sharecropper, whose very surname came from that of a plantation. Clem had had no college. He snatched his books (but so many of them!) out of the air when, as a youngster, he had flashed all over the country as bell-boy, cook, fertilizer-salesman, newspaperman, organizer. His mission now was to find more tolerable jobs for Negroes, to denounce black farmers who were too lazy to study gas motors and co-operative buying and (the office did not assign him to this; it was just his own notion) to bedevil white college presidents who approved of jimcrowing. He was a lover of whisky, peanuts, Tolstoy, and prizefighting. His French, which he got in Marseilles during World War I, was fair, but his Italian and Yiddish were only utilitarian.

If the Woolcapes were de-ebonized Northerners and the Davises just pleasantly brown, suggesting Arabs and the Alhambra gardens, in Clem Brazenstar the astonished Neil saw everything that the missionaries of hate meant by “a little Delta nigger clown.” He was a small man, grinning, monkey-faced, popping up like a jack-in-the-box. He was midnight-black; he was black and lustrous like a fresh sheet of black carbon paper; he seemed to be black not just on the surface, like Evan Brewster, but clear through to his bones. His lips were almost purple, there was a shine of black inside his ears, to his eyes there was a tint of yellow, and even the palms of his hands were darker than pink. His face was always comic, especially when he was serious, because then he laughed at himself as well as at the world.

His small but puffy mouth was always moving in derisive parentheses, his forehead was an agitated whirlpool of wrinkles. He was as enchantingly ugly as a Boston bull, yet his skin was so darkly brilliant, he had so gay and confident a manner, that he was as beautiful as a blackbird airy on a swaying reed.