Birthright Part 3

Bobbs turned cold, truculent eyes on the old negress. "A turkey roaster," he snapped. "Some o' you n.i.g.g.e.rs stole Miss Lou Arkwright's turkey roaster."

"Tukky roaster!" cried the old black woman, in great disgust. "Whut you s'pose us n.i.g.g.e.rs is got to roast in a tukky roaster?"

The constable answered shortly that his business was to find the roaster, not what the negroes meant to put in it.

"I decla'," satirized old Caroline, savagely, "dish-heah n.i.g.g.e.rtown is a white man's pocket. Ever' time he misplace somp'n, he feel in his pocket to see ef it ain't thaiuh. Don'-chu turn over dat sody-water, white man!

You know dey ain't no tukky roaster under dat sody-water. I 'cla' 'fo'

Gawd, ef a white man wuz to eat a flapjack, an' it did n' give him de belly-ache, I 'cla' 'fo' Gawd he'd git out a search-wa'nt to see ef some n.i.g.g.e.r had n' stole dat flapjack goin' down his th'oat."

"Mr. Bobbs has to do his work, Mother," put in Peter. "I don't suppose he enjoys it any more than we do."

"Den let 'im git out'n dis business an' git in anudder," scolded the old woman. "Dis sho is a mighty po' business."

The ponderous Mr. Bobbs finished with a practised thoroughness his inspection of the cabin, and then the inquisition proceeded down the street, around the crescent, and so out of sight and eventually out of hearing.

Old Caroline snapped her chair back beside her greasy table and sat down abruptly to her spoiled ham again.

"Dat make me mad," she grumbled. "Ever' time a white pusson fail to lay dey han' on somp'n, dey comes an' turns over ever'thing in my house."

She paused a moment, closed her eyes in thought, and then mused aloud: "I wonder who is got Miss Arkwright's roaster."

The commotion of the constable's pa.s.sing died in his wake, and n.i.g.g.e.rtown resumed its careless existence. Dogs reappeared from under the cabins and stretched in the suns.h.i.+ne; black children came out of hiding and picked up their play; the frightened Ophelia came out of Nan's cabin across the street and went her way; a lanky negro youth in blue coat and pin-striped trousers appeared, coming down the squalid thoroughfare whistling the "Memphis Blues" with bird-like virtuosity.

The lightness with which n.i.g.g.e.rtown 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. On it were spread the spoiled ham, a dish of poke salad, a corn pone, and a pot of weak coffee. A quaint old bowl held some brown sugar. The fat old negress made a slight, habitual settling movement in her chair that marked the end of her cooking and the beginning of her meal. Then she bent her grizzled, woolly head and mumbled off one of those queer old-fas.h.i.+oned graces which consist of a swift string of syllables without pauses between either words or sentences.

Peter sat watching his mother with a musing gaze. The kitchen was illuminated by a single small square window set high up from the floor.

Now the disposition of its single ray of light over the dishes and the bowed head of the ma.s.sive negress gave Peter one of those sharp, tender apprehensions of formal harmony that lie back of the genre in art. It stirred his emotion in an odd fas.h.i.+on. When old Caroline raised her head, she found her son staring with impersonal eyes not at herself, but at the whole room, including her. The old woman was perplexed and a little apprehensive.

"Why, son!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "didn' you bow yo' haid while yo' mammy ast de grace?"

Peter was a little confused at his remissness. Then he leaned a little forward to explain the sudden glamour which for a moment had transfigured the interior of their kitchen. But even as he started to speak, he realized that what he meant to say would only confuse his mother; therefore he cast about mentally for some other explanation of his behavior, but found nothing at hand.

"I hope you ain't forgot yo' 'ligion up at de 'versity, son."

"Oh, no, no, indeed, Mother, but just at that moment, just as you bowed your head, you know, it struck me that--that there is something n.o.ble in our race." That was the best he could put it to her.

"n.o.ble--"

"Yes. You know," he went on a little quickly, "sometimes I--I've thought my father must have been a n.o.ble man."

The old negress became very still. She was not looking quite at her son, or yet precisely away from him.

"Uh--uh n.o.ble n.i.g.g.e.r,"--she gave her abdominal chuckle. "Why--yeah, I reckon yo' father wuz putty n.o.ble as--as n.i.g.g.e.rs go." She sat looking at her son, oddly, with a faint amus.e.m.e.nt in her gross black face, when a careful voice, a very careful voice, sounded in the outer room, gliding up politely on the syllables:

"Ahnt Carolin'! oh, Ahnt Carolin', may I enter?"

The old woman stirred.

"Da''s Cissie, Peter. Go ast her in to de fambly-room."

When Siner opened the door, the vague resemblance of the slender, creamy girl on the threshold to Ida May again struck him; but Cissie Dildine was younger, and her polished black hair lay straight on her pretty head, and was done in big, s.h.i.+ning puffs over her ears in a way that Ida May's unruly curls would never have permitted. Her eyes were the most limpid brown Peter had ever seen, but her oval face was faintly unnatural from the use of negro face powder, which colored women insist on, and which gives their yellows and browns a barely perceptible greenish hue. Cissie wore a fluffy yellow dress some three shades deeper than the throat and the glimpse of bosom revealed at the neck.

The girl carried a big package in her arms, and now she manipulated this to put out a slender hand to Peter.

"This is Cissie Dildine, Mister Siner." She smiled up at him. "I just came over to put my name down on your list. There was such a mob at the Benevolence Hall last night I couldn't get to you."

The girl had a certain finical precision to her English that told Peter she had been away to some school, and had been taught to guard her grammar very carefully as she talked.

Peter helped her inside amid the handshake and said he would go fetch the list. As he turned, Cissie offered her bundle. "Here is something I thought might be a little treat for you and Ahnt Carolin'." She paused, and then explained remotely, "Sometimes it is hard to get good things at the village market."

Peter took the package, vaguely amused at Cissie's patronage of the Hooker's Bend market. It was an att.i.tude instinctively a.s.sumed by every girl, white or black, who leaves the village and returns. The bundle was rather large and wrapped in newspapers. He carried it into the kitchen to his mother, and then returned with the list.

The sheet was greasy from the handling of black fingers. The girl spread it on the little center-table with a certain daintiness, seated herself, and held out her hand for Peter's pencil. She made rather a graceful study in cream and yellow as she leaned over the table and signed her name in a handwriting as perfect and as devoid of character as a copy- book. She began discussing the speech Peter had made at the Benevolence Hall.

"I don't know whether I am in favor of your project or not, Mr. Siner,"

she said as she rose from the table.

"No?" Peter was surprised and amused at her att.i.tude and at her precise voice.

"No, I'm rather inclined toward Mr. DuBois's theory of a literary culture than toward Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton'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--"

The girl's face warmed under its faint, greenish powder.

"If I aren't careful with my language, Peter," she said simply, "I'll be talking just as badly as I did before I went to the seminary. You know I never hear a proper sentence in Hooker's Bend except my own."

A certain resignation in the girl's soft voice brought Peter a qualm for laughing at her. He laid an impulsive hand on her young shoulder.

"Well, that's true, certainly, but it won't always be like that, Cissie.

More of us go off to school every year. I do hope my school here in Hooker's Bend will be of some real value. If I could just show our people how badly we fare here, how ill housed, and unsanitary--"

The girl pressed Peter's fingers with a woman's optimism for a man.

"You'll succeed, Peter, I know you will. Some day the name Siner will mean the same thing to coloured people as Tanner and Dunbar and Braithwaite do. Anyway, I've put my name down for ten dollars to help out." She returned the pencil. "I'll have Tump Pack come around and pay you my subscription, Peter."

"I'll watch out for Tump," promised Peter in a lightening mood, "--and make him pay."

"He'll do it."

"I don't doubt it. You ought to have him under perfect control. I meant to tell you what a pretty frock you have on."

The girl dimpled, and dropped him a little curtsy, half ironical and wholly graceful.

Peter was charmed.