Thank Goodness, there’s Ashland! Next stop’s Central City. Be home in an hour. Guess I’ll go home first and take a bath and put on some clean clothes. Feel dirty all over and there are a thousand cinders down my back. Ugh, but this is a nasty ride! Hope Bob’ll be at the train with the car. …
Kenneth descended from the train and looked for Bob. He wasn’t there. He looked around for some other coloured man to drive him home. He knew it was useless to try and get any of the white taxi-drivers to take him home—they would have considered it an insult to be asked to drive a Negro. He thought it strange that there were no Negroes to be seen. Usually there were crowds of them. It formed the biggest diversion of the day for white and coloured alike to see the train come in. It was the familiar longing for travel—adventure contact with the larger and more interesting things of the outside world, though none of them could have given a reasonable statement of the fundamental psychological reactions they were experiencing when they went to the station. They never thought of it in that light—it was simply a pleasurable item in the day’s course. That was enough.
When he found no one around, Kenneth picked up his bag and started down the platform to the street. He noticed, but paid little attention to, the silence that fell over the various groups as he passed. He heard a muttered oath but it never occurred to him that it might have any possible connection with himself. Intent on reaching home, seeing the folks, telephoning Hiram Tucker that his wife had passed safely through her operation and was resting well—eager to get freshened up and go over to Jane’s, he cut across a field that would save a half-mile walk instead of going the longer route through Lee Street and town. Swinging along in a long, free stride reminiscent of his army days, he continued the musing he had done on the train.
He thought nothing of the fact that his house was darkened. He rang the bell but no one answered. Thinking his mother and Mamie were out visiting in the neighbourhood, he dug down in his bag, got his keys, and let himself into the house. His mother was coming down the stairs, an oil lamp in her hands. As he went up to kiss her, he noticed her eyes were sunken and red. Anxiously he inquired the reason.
“Oh, Kenneth, my boy—my boy—haven’t you heard?”
She burst into a torrent of weeping, her head on his shoulders. He took the lamp from her hand perplexedly and placed it on the table.
“Heard what, mamma? What’s the matter? What’s happened? Why are you crying like this? What’s wrong?”
The questions poured out of him like a flood. For some time his mother could not speak. Her sobs racked her body. Though she tried to control herself, every effort to do so but caused her to weep the more. Kenneth, puzzled, waited until she could gain control of herself. He thought it funny she carried on this way—she’d never acted like this before. She had always been so well poised. But his alarm and feeling of impending disaster increased to definite proportions when the flood of tears seemed endless.
“Where’s Bob?” he asked, thinking that he could find out from his brother what had gone wrong. At this a fresh burst of weeping greeted him. He led her into his reception room and sat her down on the lounge and himself beside her. At last, between body-tearing sobs, she told him.
“Great God!” he shouted. “No! No! Mamma, it can’t be true! It can’t be true!” But even as he demanded that she tell him it was not true, he knew it was. …
Mrs. Harper’s lamentations were even as those of that other Rachel who wept for her children because they were not. Kenneth sat stunned. It was too terrible—too devastating—too cataclysmic a tragedy to comprehend! Mamie—his own dear little sister—torn, ravished, her life ruined! Bob—with all his fire and ambition, his deep sensitiveness to all that was fine and beautiful, as well as his violent hatred of the mean, the petty, the vicious, the unjust, the sordid-Bob-his brother—dead at the hands of a mob! Thank God, he had died before they laid hands on him!
He laughed—an agonized, terrible mockery that made his mother look at him sharply. He had been a damned fool! He thought bitterly of his thoughts on the train a few hours before. Good God, how petty, how trivial they seemed now! Surely that couldn’t have been just hours ago? It must have been centuries—ages—aeons since. He heard the crickets chirping outside the window. From down the street there floated a loud laugh. His wilted collar annoyed him. Cinders from the train scratched his back. He wondered how in such a circumstance he could be conscious of such mundane things.
He laughed again. His mother had ceased her loud wails of grief and sat rocking to and fro, her arms folded tightly across her breast as though she held there the babe who had grown up and met so terrible a fate. Low, convulsive sobs of anguish seemed to come from her innermost soul. … She anxiously touched Kenneth on the shoulder as he laughed. It had a wild, a demoniacal, an eerie ring to it that terrified her. …
What was the use of trying to avoid trouble in the South, he thought? Hell! Hadn’t he tried? Hadn’t he given up everything that might antagonize the whites? Hadn’t he tried in every way he could to secure and retain their friendship?
