The negro shrugged away such thoughts, and with a certain effort replaced them with the constructive idea that was bringing him South once more.  It was a very simple idea.  Siner was returning to his native village in Tennessee to teach school.  He planned to begin his work with the ordinary public school at Hooker’s Bend, but, in the back of his head, he hoped eventually to develop an institution after the plan of Tuskeegee or the Hampton Institute in Virginia.

To do what he had in mind, he must obtain aid from white sources, and now, as he traveled southward, he began conning in his mind the white men and white women he knew in Hooker’s Bend.  He wanted first of all to secure possession of a small tract of land which he knew adjoined the negro school-house over on the east side of the village.

Before the negro’s mind the different villagers passed in review with that peculiar intimacy of vision that servants always have of their masters.  Indeed, no white Southerner knows his own village so minutely as does any member of its colored population.  The colored villagers see the whites off their guard and just as they are, and that is an attitude in which no one looks his best.  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.  Although he was now a B.A. of Harvard University, and although he knew that not a soul in the little river village, unless it was old Captain Renfrew, could construe a line of Greek and that scarcely two had ever traveled farther north than Cincinnati, still, as Peter recalled their names and foibles, he involuntarily felt that he was telling over a roll of the mighty.  The white villagers came marching through his mind as beings austere, and the very cranks and quirks of their characters somehow held that austerity.  There were the Brownell sisters, two old maids, Molly and Patti, who lived in a big brick house on the hill.  Peter remembered that Miss Molly Brownell always doled out to his mother, at Monday’s washday dinner, exactly one biscuit less than the old negress wanted to eat, and she always paid her in old clothes.  Peter remembered, a dozen times in his life, his mother coming home and wondering in an impersonal way how it was that Miss Molly Brownell could skimp every meal she ate at the big house by exactly one biscuit.  It was Miss Brownell’s thin-lipped boast that she understood negroes.  She had told Peter so several times when, as a lad, he went up to the big house on errands.  Peter Siner considered this remembrance without the faintest feeling of humor, and mentally removed Miss Molly Brownell from his list of possible subscribers.  Yet, he recalled, the whole Brownell estate had been reared on negro labor.