Birthright Part 4

"Now keep that way, Cissie, smiling and human, not so grammatical. I wish I had a brooch."

"A brooch?"

"I'd give it to you. Your dress needs a brooch, an old gold brooch at the bosom, just a glint there to balance your eyes."

Cissie flushed happily, and made the feminine movement of concealing the V-shaped opening at her throat.

"It's a pleasure to doll up for a man like you, Peter. You see a girl's good points--if she has any," she tacked on demurely.

"Oh, just any man--"

"Don't think it! Don't think it!" waved down Cissie, humorously.

"But, Cissie, how is it possible--"

"Just blind." Cissie rippled into a boarding-school laugh. "I could wear the whole rue del Opera here in n.i.g.g.e.rtown, and n.o.body would ever see it but you."

Cissie was moving toward the door. Peter tried to detain her. He enjoyed the implication of Tump Pack's stupidity, in their badinage, but she would not stay. He was finally reduced to thanking her for her present, then stood guard as she tripped out into the grimy street. In the suns.h.i.+ne her glossy black hair and canary dress looked as trim and brilliant as the plumage of a chaffinch.

Peter Siner walked back into the kitchen with the fixed smile of a man who is thinking of a pretty girl. The black dowager in the kitchen received him in silence, with her thick lips pouted. When Peter observed it, he felt slightly amused at his mother's resentment.

"Well, you sho had a lot o' chatter over signin' a lil ole paper."

"She signed for ten dollars," said Peter, smiling.

"Huh! she'll never pay it."

"Said Tump Pack would pay it."

"Huh!" The old negress dropped the subject, and nodded at a huge double pan on the table. "Dat's whut she brung you." She grunted disapprovingly.

"And it's for you, too, Mother."

"Ya-as, I 'magine she brung somp'n fuh me."

Peter walked across to the double pans, and saw they held a complete dinner--chicken, hot biscuits, cake, pickle, even ice-cream.

The sight of the food brought Peter a realization that he was keenly hungry. As a matter of fact, he had not eaten a palatable meal since he had been evicted from the white dining-car at Cairo, Illinois. Siner served his own and his mother's plate.

The old woman sniffed again.

"Seems to me lak you is mighty on.o.bsarvin' fuh a n.i.g.g.e.r whut's been off to college."

"Anything else?" Peter looked into the pans again.

"Ain't you see whut it's all in?"

"What it's in?"

"Yeah; whut it's in. You heared whut I said."

"What is it in?"

"Why, it's in Miss Arkwright's tukky roaster, dat's whut it's in." The old negress drove her point home with an acid accent.

Peter Siner was too loyal to his new friends.h.i.+p with Cissie Dildine to allow his mother's jealous suspicions to affect him; nevertheless the old woman's observations about the turkey roaster did prevent a complete and care-free enjoyment of the meal. Certainly there were other turkey roasters in Hooker's Bend than Mrs. Arkwright's. Cissie might very well own a roaster. It was absurd to think that Cissie, in the midst of her almost pathetic struggle to break away from the uncouthness of n.i.g.g.e.rtown, would stoop to--Even in his thoughts Peter avoided nominating the charge.

And then, somehow, his memory fished up the fact that years ago Ida May, according to village rumor, was "light-fingered." At that time in Peter's life "light-fingeredness" carried with it no opprobrium whatever. It was simply a fact about Ida May, as were her sloe eyes and curling black hair. His reflections renewed his perpetual sense of queerness and strangeness that hall-marked every phase of n.i.g.g.e.rtown life since his return from the North.

Cissie Dildine's contribution tailed out the one hundred dollars that Peter needed, and after he had finished his meal, the mulatto set out across the Big Hill for the white section of the village, to complete his trade.

It was Peter's program to go to the Planter's Bank, pay down his hundred, and receive a deed from one Elias Tomwit, which the bank held in escrow. Two or three days before Peter had tried to borrow the initial hundred from the bank, but the cas.h.i.+er, Henry Hooker, after going into the transaction, had declined the loan, and therefore Siner had been forced to await a meeting of the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence. At this meeting the subscription had gone through promptly.

The land the negroes purposed to purchase for an industrial school was a timbered tract tying southeast of Hooker's Bend on the head-waters of Ross Creek. A purchase price of eight hundred dollars had been agreed upon. The timber on the tract, sold on the stump, would bring almost that amount. It was Siner's plan to commandeer free labor in n.i.g.g.e.rtown, work off the timber, and have enough money to build the first unit of his school. A number of negro men already had subscribed a certain number of days' work in the timber. It was a modest and entirely practical program, and Peter felt set up over it.

The brown man turned briskly out into the hot afternoon suns.h.i.+ne, down the mean semicircular street, where piccaninnies were kicking up clouds of dust. He hurried through the dusty area, and presently turned off a by-path that led over the hill, through a glade of cedars, to the white village.

The glade was gloomy, but warm, for the shade of cedars somehow seems to hold heat. A carpet of needles hushed Siner's footfalls and spread a Sabbatical silence through the grove. The upward path was not smooth, but was broken with outcrops of the same reddish limestone that marks the whole stretch of the Tennessee River. Here and there in the grove were circles eight or ten feet in diameter, brushed perfectly clean of all needles and pebbles and twigs. These places were c.r.a.p-shooters'

circles, where black and white men squatted to shoot dice.

Under the big stones on the hillside, Peter knew, was cached illicit whisky, and at night the boot-leggers carried on a brisk trade among the gamblers. More than that, the glade on the Big Hill was used for still more demoralizing ends. It became a squalid grove of Ashtoreth; but now, in the autumn evening, all the petty obscenities of white and black sloughed away amid the religious implications of the dark-green aisles.

The sight of a white boy sitting on an outcrop of limestone with a strap of school-books dropped at his feet rather surprised Peter. The negro looked at the hobbledehoy for several seconds before he recognized in the lanky youth a little Arkwright boy whom he had known and played with in his pre-college days. Now there was such an exaggerated wistfulness in young Arkwright's att.i.tude that Peter was amused.

"h.e.l.lo, Sam," he called. "What you doing out here?"

The Arkwright boy turned with a start.

"Aw, is that you, Siner?" Before the negro could reply, he added: "Was you on the Harvard football team, Siner? Guess the white fellers have a pretty gay time in Harvard, don't they, Siner? Geemenettie! but I git tired o' this dern town! D' reckon I could make the football team? Looks like I could if a n.i.g.g.e.r like you could, Siner."

None of this juvenile outbreak of questions required answers. Peter stood looking at the hobbledehoy without smiling.

"Aren't you going to school?" he asked.

Arkwright shrugged.

"Aw, h.e.l.l!" he said self-consciously. "We got marched down to the protracted meetin' while ago--whole school did. My seat happened to be close to a window. When they all stood up to sing, I crawled out and skipped. Don't mention that, Siner."

"I won't."

"When a fellow goes to college he don't git marched to preachin', does he, Siner?"

"I never did."

"We-e-ll," mused young Sam, doubtfully, "you're a n.i.g.g.e.r."

"I never saw any white men marched in, either."