“That’s why it’s so important,” the visitor said.

“Uh-huh. Well, I own the newspaper in town—I guess you know that—and we fought the thing right straight down the line. Then we got a delegation together and put in appeals and did, well, everything under the sun, but we might just as well have kept our mouths shut for all the good it accomplished.” It was beginning to come back now. For a while he had been a little steamed up, a little annoyed; but the battle was hopeless, it always had been. “The way I figure, though, is like this. There’s close to four thousand people in Caxton, and out of that four thousand, there’s maybe three hundred and fifty nigras. See, they don’t move in here any more because we don’t use them at the mill any more, except as janitors, and what else is there for them to do? I mean, you know people don’t have domestics like they used to. Can’t afford it. So what’ll happen? The same thing that’s been happening—they’ll drift off to Oakville. That’s government oper­ated, I suppose you know that; and they can get work there. But that’ll be the end of it.”

The young man shook his head. The gesture made Verne Shipman glad of his desk, suddenly. “If you don’t mind my saying it, sir, there’s a lot more to the problem than that. Don’t you see? The government is using Caxton as a sort of test-tube case. If integration works here, then they’ll order it everywhere in the South.”

Shipman removed his pipe. “I don’t—”

“If it works here, that will be the beginning of the end, believe me. We’ve studied the question and talked to people in Washington, and that’s the way they’re thinking. You say it will stop with the high school? You’re wrong. Next will come the grade school. Pretty soon separate facilities will start disappearing everywhere. You know niggers as well as I do, better, even, and you know what happens when you give them an inch. Look at Alabama, and that bus business. Or just look at the whole picture in the North. Is it pretty?”

“Well, now, that’s a good deal different.”

“Certainly it is. Why? Because of all the niggers in America, only fifteen per cent of them are in the North. I don’t imagine I have to tell you what trouble that fifteen per cent has caused . . .” The young man’s voice was level and calm, but something was happening to his words. Shipman couldn’t tell what it was. But he felt it.

He started to remark that he was quite familiar with the consequences of the situation, but again he was interrupted.