* * * * *

“The thing that got me most,” said Ryan, “was that when I was a little kid in school here, I was friendly with all the whites, boys and girls; swam with ‘em and built mud forts and skated and went on the same toboggan, and so I came to believe they really were my chums, and then when we got to puberty, they discovered I was ‘colored,’ and said so frankly, and when I went to see a girl with whom I’ve played for years, right in their front yard, I was told she ‘wasn’t home,’ and then I saw her come out of the house with a white pimple-face that we all despised. Segregation here, Cap? No. Just quarantine!”

* * * * *

John Woolcape said gently, “Mary and I don’t run into much discrimination. It does irritate me sometimes, in my basement, to have some twelve-year-old white child bellow, ‘Here you, Johnny, where the hell are you?’ But that’s what any janitor expects. And as far as having our feelings hurt in restaurants and movie theaters goes, we just feel it’s better not to take a chance on them. We stay home evenings and read or listen to the radio or play cards with our friends, and never, never go outside. Mary and I don’t like squabbling and screaming, and we feel it’s safer so. Then nobody can say we’re bad people, and try to run us out of our home. Yes, we love our home, and here we’re safe.”

“So far you are!” said Clem rudely. “But the South is getting better—less lynching, more of us voting, equal pay for teachers in some places. So the North is getting worse, very obligingly, just to keep my job going.”

“Yes,” said Ash Davis, “the Northerner has a great future as a synthetic Lee. Take Mr. Pete Snitch, of the Snitch Brothers Steel Company of Illinois. He buys a winter home in South Carolina, and inside of two years he is more Southern-born than any born Southerner.

“He’s been an iron-puddler but now he has a million, and so he and the little woman long for an aristocratic tradition, the real Walter Scott pawing charger and ivy. And there in the South he has it—magnolias and mocking birds and white columns and the glen where the gallants used to duel and the respectful poor—at least they sound respectful. The only known living descendant of the family whose house the Snitches cuckooed into is working on a newspaper in Birmingham, so Mr. Snitch feels he’s taken over the family ghosts, in crinoline, along with the title-deed.

“He’s a gent by purchase and a Southerner by linguaphone. But he has to prove his gentility, and the best way to do that, obviously, is to be insulting to his inferiors, and as we Africans lack his fine, Anglo-Saxon beer-flush, we’re elected as the inferiors, and he yells at us even louder than a Carolina jailer, and in any conversation at Bollington Hall, Colonel Peterborough Snitch will be the first to be heard screaming, ‘You wouldn’t want your daughter to marry a nigger, would you?’ Oh, yes, you Northerners have a great future in the chivalry and blacksnake business.