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Updated: May 3, 2025
When the launch came in sight of Hooker's Bend toward the middle of the afternoon, Peter Siner experienced one of the profoundest surprises of his life. Somehow, all through his college days he had remembered Hooker's Bend as a proud town with important stores and unapproachable white residences. Now he saw a skum of negro cabins, high piles of lumber, a sawmill, and an ice-factory.
Also, he thought that young Arkwright, being white, was really not within the sphere of his ministry. He, Peter Siner, was a worker in the black world of the South. He was part of the black world which the white South was so meticulous to hide away, to keep out of sight and out of thought. A certain vague sense of triumph trickled through some obscure corner of Peter's mind.
Peter turned, and caught an alcoholic breath over his shoulder, and the blurred voice of a Southern negro called out above the rumble of the car and the roar of the engine: "'Fo' Gawd, ef dis ain't Peter Siner I's been lookin' at de las' twenty miles, an' not knowin' him wid sich skeniptious clo'es on! Wha you fum, nigger?"
But now that he had arrived at the actual composition of his defense, he sat biting his penholder, with all the arguments he meant to advance slipped from his mind. He could not recall the points of the proof. He could not recall them with Peter Siner moving restlessly about the room, glancing through the window, unsettled, nervous, on the verge of eloping with a negress.
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.
Presently Bobbs came angling across the street toward the Siner cabin. As he entered the rickety gate, old Caroline called out: "Whut is you after, anyway, white man?" Bobbs turned cold, truculent eyes on the old negress. "A turkey roaster," he snapped. "Some o' you niggers stole Miss Lou Arkwright's turkey roaster." "Tukky roaster!" cried the old black woman, in great disgust.
I means I 's gwine to leab dis place." "Now look here, Rose," protested the lawyer, with dignity, "Peter Siner occupies almost a fiduciary relation to me." The old negress stared with a slack jaw. "A relation o' yo's!" The lawyer hesitated some seconds, looking at the hag.
"Iuch solt' iur wirt erbarmet han, An dem Got wunder hat getan, Und het gevraget siner not, Ir lebet, und sit an saelden tot." "Do der trurege vischaere Saz ane froude und ane trost War umb' iren niht siufzens hat erlost."
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.
Old Rose is such a thief and a liar." "Nope," declared the constable, "the old nigger never would of made up a lie like that, never would of thought of it. Old Cap'n Renfrew's gettin' childish; this nigger's takin' advantage of it. Down at the liver'-stable the boys were talkin' about Siner goin' to git married, an' dern if old man Renfrew didn't git cut up about it!"
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