Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 3, 2025
The tall, carefully tailored negro spread his wide nostrils, vacillating whether to sniff it out with disfavor or to admit it for the sudden mental associations it evoked. It was a faint, pungent smell that played in the back of his nose and somehow reminded him of his mother, Caroline Siner, a thick-bodied black woman whom he remembered as always bending over a wash-tub.
Here the old ex-attorney spat and renewed the tobacco in a black brier, then proceeded to draw the parrallel between dogs and horses and Peter Siner newly returned from Harvard. "God'lmighty has set his limit on dogs, horses, and niggers, Mr. Tomwit. Thus far and no farther. Take a nigger baby at birth; a nigger baby has no fontanelles. It has no window toward heaven.
But high above the legal phase of interest lay the warming fact that Peter Siner, a negro graduate of Harvard, on his first tilt in Hooker's Bend affairs had ridden to a fall. This pleased even the village women, whose minds could not follow the subtle trickeries of legal disputation. The whole affair simply proved what the white village had known all along: you can't educate a nigger.
The octoroon, perhaps, had other criteria by which to judge a man than his success or mishaps dealing with a pettifogger. Two or three days after the catastrophe, Cissie made an excursion to the Siner cabin with a plate of cookies. Cissie was careful to place her visit on exactly a normal footing. She brought her little cakes in the role of one who saw no evil, spoke no evil, and heard no evil.
Peter was surprised and amused at her attitude and at her precise voice. "No, I'm rather inclined toward Mr. DuBois's theory of a literary culture than toward Mr. Washington's for a purely industrial training." Peter broke out laughing. "For the love of Mike, Cissie, you talk like the instructor in Sociology B! And haven't we met before somewhere? This 'Mister Siner' stuff "
Peter Siner stood at the fence, licking his dry lips, with nerves vibrating like a struck bell. He pushed himself slowly away from the top plank and found his legs so weak that he could hardly walk. He moved slowly, back down the unseen street. The dog he had disturbed gave a few last growls and settled into silence.
The negroes might be called the black recording angels of the South. If what they know should be shouted aloud in any Southern town, its social life would disintegrate. Yet it is a strange fact that gossip seldom penetrates from the one race to the other. So Peter Siner sat in the Jim Crow car musing over half a dozen villagers in Hooker's Bend. He thought of them in a curious way.
Farquhar had tried to persuade Peter to remain North and take a position in a system of garages out of Chicago. "You can do nothing in the South, Siner," assured Farquhar; "your countrymen must stand on their own feet, just as you are doing." Peter had argued the vast majority of the negroes had no chance, but Farquhar pressed the point that Peter himself disproved his own statement.
His eyes were popped, and seemed all yellows and streaked with swollen veins. "I'll git you fuh dis," he wheezed, spitting dust "You did n' fight fair, you " The black chorus rolled their heads and pounded one another in a gale of merriment. Peter Siner turned away toward his home filled with sick thought.
Now and then into the Jim Crow window whipped a blast of coal smoke and hot cinders, for the engine was only two cars ahead. Peter Siner looked out at the interminable spin of the landscape with a certain wistfulness. He was coming back into the South, into his own country.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking