While she was lecturing as a missionary, Neil was looking at her as a woman. She was a soft-moving cat, a bronze cat whose bronze would turn into soft flesh under the fingertips. Her breasts were firm like bronze and softer, he speculated, than the sides of a cat.

Then he shook his head fretfully.

–-Don’t you think you could love the race without wanting to pet its representative, Kingsblood, you frustrated white man?

Sugar Gowse got up, lunch-pail in hand, and drawled, “I reckon I like the white fellows I work with better than the biggety guys Miss Sophie talks about. At the factory, they either divvy their beer and bolony with you, or they hate you and tell you so with a crow-bar. Good night.”

Sugar’s pronunciation was as thick as gumbo; he said “excusing” for “except,” and he remarked that when the foreman “lowrated him,” he had “paid him no mind.” But Neil saw that Sugar had ceased to be a Nigra, a half-human creature who, had he remained in the South, would by even the kindliest whites have been rated as “pretty decent, for a darky.” He had become a human being here, like Webb Wargate or John Woolcape. Only, more gay!

Neil noticed that he had not heard tonight the wild picturesqueness of speech that he had found in fiction about Southern Negroes, nor the gilded perversions of the stories about Harlem and dope and creepers. Except for an occasional self-consciously used word like “ofay,” these people—it was another shock—talked like the people he knew, like all the people he had ever known, in the bank or the army or the university. Only, more gaily!

* * * * *

Clem was holding forth:

“Uncle Bodacious—I want to tell Mr. Kingsblood about Uncle Bodacious. He’s the guy—he’s white but he has some cullud cousins across the tracks—he’s the clothhead that first invented ‘Some of my best friends are Jews’ and I’m all for unions but I hate these outside agitators.’ And Uncle Bodacious is the authority who explains that the reason for segregation is that otherwise the blues would marry all the white women, and with a jackass like that, there’s no use pointing out that most of us sables would rather marry a gal like Sophie than a chalkette.

“My own frau, bless her, is none of your high yallas. She’s a high patent-leather. But if I wanted to marry a pink who wanted to marry me, I sure would.

“When anybody hollers that there’s any importance to the amount of marriage between blacks and whites, you can be sure that he’s trying to find a good, pious, obscene reason for low-grading his colored help, so he’ll feel virtuous in underpaying them.

“But Uncle Bodacious’s prime cackle is, ‘There is no solution of the Negro Problem.’ That sounds learned and ethnological as hell, but all it means is that there is no solution, this side of a nice tomb in Forest Lawn, for Uncle Bodacious!… And now, for the Lord’s sake, Mary, do we get coffee and doughnuts?”