Jane greeted him cordially enough, her eyes shining with pleasure at seeing him again. Kenneth, however, felt a vague disappointment. He had let his thoughts run riot while she had been away. So far as he was concerned, the only things necessary were the actual asking of the all-important question and the choosing of a wedding-day. As he followed her to his car, he turned over in his mind just what it was that disappointed him so in her greeting. He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly, but she would have greeted Bob or any other man just as warmly and he would not have felt jealous at all. Maybe she’s tired from the ride in that dirty and noisy car? She’ll be quite different when I go over to see her tonight, he thought.
He inquired regarding her trip—was it pleasant? “Ugh, it was horrible!” she replied, shuddering at the memory of it. “I had a Pullman as far as Atlanta, but there I had to change to that dirty old Jim Crow car. There was a crowd of Negroes who had three or four quarts of cheap liquor. They were horrible. Why, they even had the nerve to offer me a drink! And the conductor must have told everybody on the train that I was up front, because all night long there was a constant procession of white men passing up and down the coach looking at me in a way that made my blood boil. I didn’t dare go to sleep, because I didn’t know what might happen. It was awful!”
She sat silent as she lived over again the horror of the ride. Then, shaking off her mood, she turned to him with a cheerful smile. “Thank Goodness, it’s over now, and I don’t want to think of it any more than I can help. Tell me all about yourself and what you’ve been doing and everything,” she finished all in a breath.
He told her briefly what had been going on, of his plans for the hospital, of the meeting at Reverend Wilson’s, and other items of interest about life in Central City, until they had arrived at her home. He waited for an invitation to come in, but in the excitement of seeing her mother and father again, she forgot all about Kenneth. Placing her bags on the porch, he turned and left after promising to run over for a while that evening.
The time seemed to go by on dragging feet that day. It seemed as though evening never would come. It did at last, however, and as soon as he finished with the last patient, he went over to Jane’s home. Refreshed by a long rest, she greeted him clad in a dress of some filmy blue material. They seated themselves on the porch, shaded by vines from the eyes of passersby. Over Kenneth there came a feeling of contentment—life had not been easy for him and he had been denied a confidante with whom he could discuss the perplexities he had experienced in Central City. The talk for a time drifted from one topic to another. Before he knew it, Kenneth was telling Jane of his ambitions, of the plans he had made before coming back to Central City, of the successes and failures he had met with, of his hopes for the future. Jane listened without speaking for some time. Life among coloured people is so intense, so earnest, so serious a problem in the South, that never do two intelligent Negroes talk very long before the race problem in some form is under discussion. Jane interrupted Kenneth in the midst of his recital.
“Kenneth, did you really believe that you could come back here to Central City and keep entirely away from the race problem?”
“I don’t know that I thought it out as carefully as that, but I hoped to do something like that,” was his uneasy reply. He had the feeling that she didn’t altogether approve of him. Her next words proved that she didn’t.
“Well, you can’t do it. Just because your father got along all right is no reason why you should do the same things he did. You are living in a time that is as different from his as his was from his great-grandfather’s.”
“But—” he attempted to defend himself.
“Wait a minute until I’ve had my say,” she checked him. “Only a few years ago they said that as soon as Negroes got property and made themselves good citizens the race problem would be solved. They said that only bad Negroes were ever lynched and they alone caused all the trouble. But you just think back over the list of coloured people right here in Central City who’ve had the most trouble during the past two years. What do you find? That it is the Negro who has acquired more property than the average white man, they are always picking on. Poor whites resent seeing a Negro more prosperous than they, and they satisfy their resentment by making it hard on that Negro. Am I right—or am
