“Do you feel that you’re prejudiced?”

“Against the Negroes?”

“Yes.”

“No, certainly not. You know that. Tom, that isn’t what you think, is it?”

“But you believe it’s wrong for them to go to our schools.”

“Of course! So do you!”

He could not blame her for saying it: all she knew of his feeling on the matter was what she read in his editorials. And his editorials were and had always been pro-law and pro-segregation. “What do you think should have been done?” he asked.

“Instead of this?”

“That’s right. I mean, you don’t think things were very fair before, do you?”

“No. But—well, they should have raised the money to improve the schools.” She paused. “And the homes, and jobs.”

“Then it would be fair?”

“Tom, I don’t see what you’re getting at, really I don’t. This is just what everybody thinks, isn’t it?”

He forced the words out. “You still haven’t said why you believe it’s wrong for the Negroes and whites to go to the same school together. You’ve said it’s a terrible thing, but I still haven’t heard why.”

Ruth was silent.

“You’re not prejudiced, but you don’t want them in the same school with Ella. Do you have a reason?”

“Of course I have a reason!”

“Honey, please; I’m not arguing. We’ve simply got to get these things out, or talking won’t mean much. Now—what is the reason?”

“I—” She fumbled with a handkerchief. “For heaven’s sake, Tom, you know as well as I do. There’ll be intermixing for one thing . . .”

“And you object to that.”

“Intermixing? Why—”

He hoped she wouldn’t ask how he’d like his daughter to marry a Negro.

“Are you being serious? Are you really asking me if I object to it?”

“Yes.”

“I certainly do,” she said in a firm voice. Then she said: “I think you’d better talk now.”

The wound of hearing what, in fact, he’d known, hurt badly; but he feared the moments that were coming. I’m a coward! It was something he’d only suspected before, and had been able to bury beneath a routine of work and diversion. . . .

“Tom, are you in favor of integration?”

The question stunned him, silenced him for moments. Then he heard his voice say: “Yes.”

He began to tell her, then, in the slow, hesitant tones of a confession, everything. How he had been raised the way most people in the South had been, had taken segregation for granted in the way that you take the elements or mother love for granted, how in high school he had met Paul Strauss and, through this friend, had begun to think about the question.