“Now, dear Mr. Kingsblood, don’t try to find any of us romantic. We’re a bunch of hard-working people who believe in just one thing—getting the job-ceiling raised for the whole race, so that a highly competent colored girl will have a chance at a $32.75 job as a filing-clerk instead of working in the laundry all her life. That’s all we are!”

But as she said it, they were friends.

He was at last noticing what she wore: a white long dress with a barbaric gold jacket, a huge topaz ring that questioned her plain-talk.

“I must be sure and remember what she has on, to tell Vestal,” he had dutifully recorded before he realized that he was unlikely to tell Vestal about Sophie’s costume or anything else regarding that statistical hoyden.

* * * * *

When the race-talk, which was resistless to them as a ball of paper to a kitten, started all over again, Neil learned that whenever a well-meaning white asks, “Wouldn’t the Negroes be satisfied with–-” the answer is No. He learned that a Southern Liberal is a man who explains to a Northern Liberal that Beale Street has been re-christened Beale Avenue.

He heard of colored judges, surgeons, war correspondents for the Negro press. Odd things he heard of: black Buddhists and black Orthodox Jews, colored Communists and colored Masons and Oddfellows and Elks and Greek-letter fraternities, lowly Negroes who hated all Jewish shopkeepers and Negroes so highly placed that they hated all lowly Negroes.

They came, inevitably, to the Second Question, and Neil said awkwardly to Dr. Davis, “It’s probably old stuff to you, but what about this argument that the Negroes must be inferior because they didn’t build a lot of cathedrals and Parthenons in Africa?”

Everybody laughed, but Dr. Davis answered gravely:

“Did you ever try building a Parthenon among the tse-tse flies? As a matter of fact, our people have built their share—along with the other slaves in Egypt and Rome. And who do you suppose built our plantation-houses? The owners? And do you know how many young colored architects there are now?

“Mr. Kingsblood, you can’t count on the Negroes remaining less architectural than the whites, despite the eloquence of the pecker-wood preacher who talks, in an unpainted plank chapel, about ‘The Nigras that the myster’ous han’ of God done fix so they cain’t nevuh build no Pa’thenonses.’ It’s one o’clock! I’m going home!”

* * * * *

He felt that he had come on a new world that was stranger than the moon, darker than the night, brighter than morning hills, a world exciting and dangerous.

“I love these people!” he thought.

Chapter 25

“I wouldn’t know about you millionaires, but I’m a working woman and I have to go home,” said Sophie Concord.

–-I’ve heard Vestal say that!