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Updated: May 3, 2025
Peter Siner had known all along that the unread whites of Hooker's Bend and that included nearly every white person in the village considered black men as simple animals; but he had supposed that the more thoughtful men, of whom Captain Renfrew was a type, at least admitted the Afro- American to the common brotherhood of humanity. But they did not.
Peter Siner stood in the sunlight just outside the entrance, watching his old mother clean the bugs out of a tainted ham that she had bought for a pittance from some white housekeeper in the village. It had been too high for white people to eat.
It was war then; you were fighting for your country." At Jackson, Tennessee, the two negroes were forced to spend the night between trains. Tump Pack piloted Peter Siner to a negro cafe where they could eat, and later they searched out a negro lodging-house on Gate Street where they could sleep.
Put to it like that, Siner concocted a sort of allegory, telling of a negro who was shiftless in the summer and suffered want in the winter, and applied it to the present high wage and to the low wage that was coming; but in his heart Peter knew such utilitarianism was not the true reason at all. Men do not weave tapestries to warm themselves, or build temples to keep the rain away.
"I suttinly don' want no light-fingered hussy ma'yin' my son," proceeded the voice, "an' de whole Dildine fambly 'll bear watchin'." "Won't you have a seat?" asked Peter, exquisitely uncomfortable. Cissie handed him her plate in confusion. "Why, no, Mr. Siner," she hastened on, in her careful grammar, "I just ran over to "
They supposed themselves heartbroken over the death of Caroline Siner. Amid this din Peter Siner sat in his room, stunned by the sudden taking off of his mother. The reproaches that she had expressed to old Captain Renfrew clung in Peter's brain. The brown man had never before realized the faint amusement and condescension that had flavored all his relations with his mother since his return home.
During Peter Siner's four years in Harvard the segregation of black folk on Southern railroads had become blurred and reminiscent in his mind; now it was fetched back into the sharp distinction of the present instant. With a certain sense of strangeness, Siner picked up his bags, and saw his own form, in the car mirrors, walking down the length of the sleeper.
It seemed to Peter Siner that some horrible compulsion kept the old Captain repeating over and over the fact that Cissie Dildine was a thief, a thief, a thief. The word cut the very viscera in the brown man. At last, when it seemed the old gentleman would never cease, Peter lifted a hand. "Yes, yes," he gasped, with a sickly face, "I I've heard that before."
It was for the most part a purely technical discussion of blows and counters and kicks, and of the strange fact that a college education failed to enable Siner utterly to annihilate his adversary.
And, strange to say, it was this fall of his white townsmen that moved Peter Siner with a sense of the greatest loss. It seemed fantastic to him, this sudden land-slide of the mighty. As Peter and his mother came over the brow of the river bank, they saw a crowd collecting at the other end of the street.
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