“I taught for a year in the Deep South, after college. I believed the story that the whites liked to have the colored teachers be extra clean and neat as an example to the children. I had a funny, rickety little old car, and I painted it white, myself. One Saturday I was coming into town, and I washed the car—it was like glass—and I was so proud of my new white suit and white shoes. And new white gloves! I got out at a drugstore, and there was a horrible old peckerwood farmer—yellow as an angleworm—and he walked over and deliberately spat a huge gob of tobacco juice right on the door of my clean car. And the other white men all laughed. Then I knew that Hell has the sign ‘For colored only.’”

Chapter 24

Clem Brazenstar insisted that if they spoke only of these trivialities, if they did not mention the more lusty violence in the South, such as a returned Negro soldier’s having his eyes gouged out with a policeman’s night-stick, their new white friend would be bored, and Clem’s own virility as a Southerner would be slighted.

They all laughed again, but now Neil shuddered.

He insisted, “But there’s no such violence against the Negroes in any Northern state.”

“Sure there is, in race riots,” Clem said placidly. “But the job-ceiling is more important; trained brownskin teachers and stenographers flatly told they can’t have the job, not because they’re incapable but because they’re beige. And restaurants that, in this state, are compelled by law to admit Negroes, so a lot of them either keep the smokes waiting or else salt their food so much that they can’t eat it. And Negroes doing war-work in factories not allowed to drink from the same bubbling fountains as the sacred whites. It certainly makes an ardent patriot out of a guy who happens to like bathing every night to be told he can’t even share the same running stream of water with a Yankee farmer or a Tennessee hillbilly who earnestly believes that a bathtub was invented to keep angleworms in.

“No, get it straight, Little White Father; in this democratic Northern town, they don’t lynch Negroes—not often—but they tell us every day that we’re all diseased and filthy and criminal. And do they believe it? Hell, no! But they make themselves believe it and then they make other people believe it and so they get rid of us as rivals for the good jobs that they’d like themselves.

“But what inspires us here in Grand Republic is that the vile Ethiope is not allowed to join the Y.M.C.A., the very well-endowed association to spread the example of Christ, so that his brown body won’t contaminate the swimming pool and poison the feeble little sons of sons of so and so of white contributors to African missions. The Y.M.C.A.! The Yes-Men’s Crawling Arena!”

“I didn’t know there were discriminations like that in Grand Republic,” said Neil meekly.