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Updated: June 9, 2025
Peter stood in the doorway, steadying himself by the jamb. The world still swayed from the blows he had received on the head. "What girl would you be willing for me to go with?" he asked in faint satire. "Heah in Niggertown?" Peter nodded. The movement increased his headache. "None a-tall. No Niggertown wench a-tall.
On the eastern edge of Hooker's Bend, drawn in a rough semicircle around the Big Hill, lies Niggertown. In all the half-moon there are perhaps not two upright buildings. The grimy cabins lean at crazy angles, some propped with poles, while others hold out against gravitation at a hazard. Up and down its street flows the slow negro life of the village.
With that his mother who had been so near to, and so disappointed in, her son was blotted from his life. The other events of the funeral flowed by in a sort of dream: he moved about; the negroes were speaking to him in the queer overtones one uses to the bereaved; he was being driven back to Niggertown; he reentered the Siner cabin.
He passed over the deed, and the two negroes moved on their way to Niggertown. Tump trudged forward with eyes glued to paper, his face puckered in the unaccustomed labor of reading. His thick lips moved at the individual letters, and constructed them bunglingly into syllables and words.
He had never realized so clearly the open sore of Niggertown life and its great need of healing, yet this very episode would further bar him, Peter, from any constructive work. He foresaw, too plainly, how the white town and Niggertown would react to this fight. There would be no discrimination in the scandal.
Hooker's Bend warmed with pleasure that half of its population was ineducable. White sentiment in Hooker's Bend reacted strongly on Niggertown. Peter Siner's prestige was no more. The cause of higher education for negroes took a mighty slump.
All the scare-heads on his walls had lapsed into a common obscurity. As he rose slowly, so as not to start his head hurting again, he heard three rapid pistol shots in the cedar glade between Niggertown and the white village. He knew this to be the time-honored signal of boot-leggers announcing that illicit whisky was for sale in the blackness of the glade.
Doors in Niggertown never open straight away to visitors. A covert inspection first takes place from the edges of the window-blinds. Peter stood in the whipping dust, and the caution of the inmates spurred his impatience to see Cissie. At last the door opened, and Cissie herself was in the entrance. She stood quite still a moment, looking at Peter with eyes that appeared frightened.
The commotion of the constable's passing died in his wake, and Niggertown resumed its careless existence.
The sound quivered through the sunshine over Niggertown. At its signal the poor procession moved away through the dust. At intervals the bell tolled after the vanishing train. As the negroes passed through the white town the merchants, lolling in their doors, asked passers-by what negro had died.
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