Though it was a balmy October afternoon, the air languorous and caressing, Bob shared none of the atmosphere’s lazy contentment. All this riot of colours and odours served in no manner to remove from his face the dissatisfied look that covered it. He listened to Kenneth’s rhapsodies of what he intended accomplishing with what was almost a grimace of distaste. He was taller than Kenneth, of slighter build, but of the same rich colouring of skin and with the same hair and features.
In spite of these physical resemblances between the two brothers, there was a more intangible difference which clearly distinguished the two. Kenneth was more phlegmatic, more of a philosophic turn of mind, more content with his lot, able to forget himself in his work, and when that was finished, in his books. Bob, on the other hand, was of a highly sensitized nature, more analytical of mind, more easily roused to passion and anger. This tendency had been developed since the death of his father just before he completed his freshman year at Atlanta. The death had necessitated his leaving school and returning to Central City to act as administrator of his father’s estate. His experiences in accomplishing this task had not been pleasant ones. He had been forced to deal with the tricksters that infested the town. He had come in contact with all the chicanery, the petty thievery, the padded accounts, that only petty minds can devise. The utter impotence he had felt in having no legal redress as a Negro had embittered him. Joe Harper, their father, had been exceedingly careful in keeping account of all bills owed and due him. Yet Bob had been forced to pay a number of bills of which he could find no record in his father’s neatly kept papers. These had aggregated somewhere between three and four thousand dollars. Various white merchants of the town claimed that Joe Harper, his father, owed them. Bob knew they were lying. Yet he could do nothing. No court in South Georgia would have listened to his side of the story or paid more than perfunctory attention to him. It was a case of a white man’s word against a Negro’s, and a verdict against the Negro was sure even before the case was opened.
Kenneth, on the other hand, had been a favourite of their quiet, almost taciturn father. Always filled with ambition for his children, Joe Harper had furnished Kenneth, as liberally as he could afford, the money necessary for him to get the medical education he wanted. He had not been a rich man but he had been comfortably fixed financially. Starting out as a carpenter doing odd jobs around Central City, he had gradually expanded his activities to the building of small houses and later to larger homes and business buildings. Most of the two-story buildings that lined Lee Street in the business section of Central City had been built by him. White and coloured alike knew that when Joe Harper took a contract, it would be done right. Aided by a frugal and economical wife, he had purchased real estate and, though the profits had been slow and small, had managed with his wife to accumulate during their thirty-five years of married life between twenty and twenty-five thousand dollars which he left at his death to his wife and three children.
Kenneth had been furnished with the best that his father could afford, while Bob, some ten years younger than his brother, had had to wait until Kenneth finished school before he could begin his course. Bob felt no jealousy of his favoured brother, yet the experiences that had been his in Central City while Kenneth was away had tended towards a bitterness which frequently found expression on his face. He was the natural rebel, revolt was a part of his creed. Kenneth was the natural pacifist—he never bothered trouble until trouble bothered him. Even then, if he could avoid it, he always did. It was not strange, therefore, that he should have come home believing implicitly that his father was right when he had said Kenneth could get along without trouble in Central City as long as he attended to his own business.
Kenneth talked on and on, unfolding the plans he had made for the extending of the influence of his hospital throughout the South. Bob, occupied with his own thoughts, heard but little of it. Suddenly he interrupted Kenneth with a sharply put question.
“Ken, why did you come back to Central City?” he asked. He went on without waiting for a reply. “If I had had your chances of studying up North and in France, and living where you don’t have to be A afraid of getting into trouble with Crackers all the time, I’d rather’ve done anything else than to come back to this rotten place to live the rest of my life.”
Kenneth laughed easily, almost as though a five-year-old had asked some exceedingly foolish question.
“Why did I come back?” he repeated. “That’s easy. I came back because I can make more money here than anywhere else.”
“But that isn’t the most important thing in life!” Bob exclaimed.
“Maybe not the most important,” Kenneth laughed, “but a mighty convenient article to have lying around. I came back here where the bulk of coloured people live and where they make money off their crops and where there won’t be much trouble for me to build up a big practice.”
“That’s an old argument,” retorted Bob.
