“Mother,” asked Peter, thickly, through his swelling mouth, “do you want to know what did happen?”

“I knows.  I tol’ you to keep away fum dat hussy.  She’s a fool ’bout her bright color an’ straight hair.  Needn’t be givin’ herse’f no airs!”

Peter stood in the doorway, steadying himself by the jamb.  The world still swayed from the blows he had received on the head.

“What girl would you be willing for me to go with?” he asked in faint satire.

“Heah in Niggertown?”

Peter nodded.  The movement increased his headache.

“None a-tall.  No Niggertown wench a-tall.  When you mus’ ma’y, I’s ‘speckin’ you to go off summuhs an’ pick yo’ gal, lak you went off to pick yo’ aidjucation.”  She swung out a thick arm, and looked at Peter out of the corner of her eyes, her head tilted to one side, as negresses do when they become dramatically serious.

Peter left his mother to her stare and went to his own room.  This constant implication among Niggertown inhabitants that Niggertown and all it held was worthless, mean, unhuman depressed Peter.  The mulatto knew the real trouble with Niggertown was it had adopted the white village’s estimate of it.  The sentiment of the white village was overpowering among the imitative negroes.  The black folk looked into the eyes of the whites and saw themselves reflected as chaff and skum and slime, and no human being ever suggested that they were aught else.

Peter’s room was a rough shed papered with old newspapers.  All sorts of yellow scare-heads streaked his walls.  Hanging up was a crayon enlargement of his mother, her broad face as unwrinkled as an egg and drawn almost white, for the picture agents have discovered the only way to please their black patrons is to make their enlargements as nearly white as possible.

In one corner, on a home-made book-rack, stood Peter’s library,—­a Greek book or two, an old calculus, a sociology, a psychology, a philosophy, and a score of other volumes he had accumulated in his four college years.  As Peter, his head aching, looked at these, he realized how immeasurably removed he was from the cool abstraction of the study.

The brown man sat down in an ancient rocking-chair by the window, leaned back, and closed his eyes.  His blood still whispered in his ears from his fight.  Notwithstanding his justification, he gradually became filled with self-loathing.  To fight—­to hammer and kick in Niggertown’s dust—­ over a girl!  It was an indignity.

Peter shifted his position in his chair, and his thoughts took another trail.  Tump’s attack had been sudden and silent, much like a bulldog’s.  The possibility of a simple friendship between a woman and a man never entered Tump’s head; it never entered any Niggertown head.  Here all attraction was reduced to the simplest terms of sex.  Niggertown held no delicate intimacies or reserves.  Two youths could not go with the same girl.  Black women had no very great powers of choice over their suitors.  The strength of a man’s arm isolated his sweetheart.  That did not seem right, resting the power of successful mating entirely upon brawn.