“It ain’t Christian, is it?” mocked Harriett. . . . “White folks!” . . . And she shrugged her shoulders scornfully. Many disagreeable things had happened to her through white folks. Her first surprising and unpleasantly lasting impression of the pale world had come when, at the age of five, she had gone alone one day to play in a friendly white family’s yard. Some mischievous small boys there, for the fun of it, had taken hold of her short kinky braids and pulled them, dancing round and round her and yelling: “Blackie! Blackie! Blackie!” while she screamed and tried to run away. But they held her and pulled her hair terribly, and her friends laughed because she was black and she did look funny. So from that time on, Harriett had been uncomfortable in the presence of whiteness, and that early hurt had grown with each new incident into a rancor that she could not hide and a dislike that had become pain.

Now, because she could sing and dance and was always amusing, many of the white girls in high school were her friends. But when the three-thirty bell rang and it was time to go home, Harriett knew their polite “Good-bye” was really a kind way of saying: “We can’t be seen on the streets with a colored girl.” To loiter with these same young ladies had been all right during their grade-school years, when they were all younger, but now they had begun to feel the eyes of young white boys staring from the windows of pool halls, or from the tennis-courts near the park—so it was not proper to be seen with Harriett.

But a very unexpected stab at the girl’s pride had come only a few weeks ago when she had gone with her class-mates, on tickets issued by the school, to see an educational film of the undersea world at the Palace Theatre, on Main Street. It was a special performance given for the students, and each class had had seats allotted to them beforehand; so Harriett sat with her class and had begun to enjoy immensely the strange wonders of the ocean depths when an usher touched her on the shoulder.

“The last three rows on the left are for colored,” the girl in the uniform said.

“I—But—But I’m with my class,” Harriett stammered. “We’re all supposed to sit here.”

“I can’t help it,” insisted the usher, pointing towards the rear of the theatre, while her voice carried everywhere. “Them’s the house rules. No argument now—you’ll have to move.”

So Harriett rose and stumbled up the dark aisle and out into the sunlight, her slender body hot with embarrassment and rage. The teacher saw her leave the theatre without a word of protest, and none of her white classmates defended her for being black. They didn’t care.

“All white people are alike, in school and out,” Harriett concluded bitterly, as she told of her experiences to the folks sitting with her on the porch in the dark.