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Updated: June 9, 2025
Of all Niggertown, Caroline was the most unforgiving because Peter had wounded her in her pride. Every other negro in the village felt that genial satisfaction in a great man's downfall that is balm to small souls. But the old mother knew not this consolation. Peter was her proxy. It was she who had fallen. The only person in Niggertown who continued amiable to Peter Siner was Cissie Dildine.
This opposition shunted more of Peter's thought to the topic in hand. He paused interrogatively. "Racially," said Cissie. "Racially?" repeated the man, quite lost. Cissie nodded, looking straight into his eyes. "You know very well, Peter, that you and I are not are not anything near full bloods. You know that racially we don't belong in Niggertown."
He, Peter Siner, would be grouped with the boot-leggers and crap-shooters and women-chasers who filled Niggertown with their brawls. As a matter of simple fact, he had been fighting with another negro over a woman. That he was subjected to an attack without warning or cause would never become a factor in the analysis. He knew that very well.
Somehow she seemed just as "nice" a girl, just as "good" a girl, as ever she was before. Moreover, every other darky in Niggertown held these same instinctive beliefs. Had it not been for that, Peter would have thought it was his passion pleading for the girl, justifying itself by a grotesque morality, as passions often do. But this was not the correct solution. The sentiment was enigmatic.
The lightness with which Niggertown accepted the moral side glance of a blanket search-warrant depressed Siner. Caroline called her son to dinner, as the twelve-o'clock meal is called in Hooker's Bend, and so ended his meditation. The Harvard man went back into the kitchen and sat down at a rickety table covered with a red- checked oil-cloth.
In some corner of this dark oaken library his philosophies would rest comfortably. Then it occurred to Peter that he would have to continue his sleeping and eating in Niggertown, and since his mother had died and his rupture with Cissie, the squalor and smells of the crescent had become impossible. He told the old Captain his objections as diplomatically as possible.
"Thought I'd step over to Niggertown." Jim Pink's humorous air was still upon him. "What's doing over there? What were the boys raising such a hullabaloo about?" "Such me." "Why did that boy go running across like that?" Jim Pink rolled his eyes on Peter with a peculiar look. "Reckon he mus' 'a' wanted to git on t'other side o' town." Peter flattered the Punchinello by smiling a little.
The coughing and rattling of an old motor-car as it rounded the Niggertown curve delayed Tump Pack's act of violence. Instinctively, the three men waited for the machine to pass before Peter walked out into the road. Next moment it appeared around the turn, moving slowly through the dust and spreading a veritable fog behind it.
He would make his industrial institution such a model of neatness that the whole village of Hooker's Bend would catch the spirit. The white people should see that something clean and uplifting could come out of Niggertown. The two races ought to live for a mutual benefit. It was a fine, generous thought.
The ethical engine that Peter had patiently builded in Harvard almost ceased to function in this weird morality of Niggertown. Whether he were doing right or doing wrong, Peter could not determine. He lost all his moorings.
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