Sophie Concord, Alabama-born and Neil’s own age, was tall, like Vestal, and frank-faced like her, but more endowed with curves and long sweet lines that interested even a sober carthorse like Neil. She had a generous mouth and a skin nearly as dark as Ash Davis’s, a rich brown skin that was incredibly satin-smooth, and her bare arms were the color of a polished dry fig against the white rayon of her rather ancient party-dress.

Sophie had once been a torch-singer in minor night clubs in New York; she had been accepted in sequin and champagne circles in Harlem; but she had resented having to clown for gap-mouthed white patrons. She had turned flippantly pious, taken a knight’s oath sung to jazz, and after three hard years had become a nurse, well trained, patiently consecrated, and very pert.

She preferred, she mockingly asserted, the care of infants afflicted with nits to the care of white gentlemen patrons with leers. The exacting Ryan Woolcape admitted, “Sophie is a hardboiled nurse even if she does look like Cobra perfume and lace pillows.”

* * * * *

“Our new white friend seems to be a good guy,” Clem explained publicly to Sophie. “We’ve been giving him Second Year Subversive Doctrine, and he hasn’t blinked yet. He must have a little drop of chocolate in him, I guess!”

Everybody laughed—except the Woolcapes, and Neil, who felt frozen.

“You would drag out the propaganda, to entertain a poor man that wants to know about Joe Louis. He must by this time be as sick of your racial soapboxing as I am,” protested Sophie, climbing on her own soapbox. “Tell me, Mr. Kingsblood, are you another white slummer, or a real friend of our race?”

“You have no idea how real!” said Neil.

“He is a sweet, fine man,” insisted Mother Woolcape.

“Goody, goody!” Sophie’s voice, Neil thought, even when she was lamentably trying to be cute, was like summer dusk quick with fireflies. “Lots of white people think we’re suspicious and hard to get acquainted with. And maybe we are. We’ve all had the most shaming experiences with apparently friendly whites who come around and tell us ‘You’re just dandy’ and then go home and make a funny story out of it.

“For one white like Sweeney Fishberg or Cope Anderson, that never even notices your color if you’re a friend, any more than he especially notices whether you’re black-headed or red-headed, there’s ten ofays who pretend they want to be chummy but are either on the make, trying to sell us something—a sewing-machine or a church or Communist doctrine—or else they’re taking up Social Equality for the Poor Colored Brethren, in between Bundles for Britain and Thomas Wolfe, between Dali and Monsignor Sheean. Or else they’re failures in their own white world, frustrated women and reporters without a job and preachers without pews, who believe they can be important and get loved hot in our world, which they think is just panting to be patronized by some gray that once read a life of Booker T. Washington. They make us awful leery of our dear white friends. So you see, Mr. Kingsblood, we’ll be examining you as cautiously as you will us.”