Peter tried to explain that he was there to do a little writing for the Captain.

“Well, ‘fo’ Gawd, when niggers gits to writin’ fuh white folks, ants’ll be jumpin’ fuh bullfrogs—­an havin’ other niggers bring dey breakfusses.  You jes as much a nigger as I is, Peter Siner, de brightes’ day you ever seen!”

Peter began a conciliatory phrase.

Old Rose banged the platter on the table and then threatened: 

“Dis is de las’ time I fetches a moufful to you, Peter Siner, or any other nigger.  You ain’t no black Jesus, even ef you is a woods calf.”

Peter paused in drawing a chair to the table.

“What did you say, Rose?” he asked sharply.

“You heared whut I say.”

A wave of anger went over Peter.

“Yes, I did.  You ought to be ashamed to speak ill of the dead.”

The crone tossed her malicious head, a little abashed, perhaps, yet very glad she had succeeded in hurting Peter.  She turned and went out the door, mumbling something which might have been apology or renewed invectives.

Peter watched the old virago close the door and then sat down to his breakfast.  His anger presently died away, and he sat wondering what could have happened to Rose Hobbett that had corroded her whole existence.  Did she enjoy her vituperation, her continual malice?  He tried to imagine how she felt.

The breakfast Rose had brought him was delicious:  hot biscuits of feathery lightness, three wide slices of ham, a bowl of scrambled eggs, a pot of coffee, some preserved raspberries, and a tiny glass of whisky.

The plate which Captain Renfrew had set before his guest was a delicate dawn pink ringed with a wreath of holly.  It was old Worcester porcelain of about the decade of 1760.  The coffee-pot was really an old Whieldon teapot in broad cauliflower design.  Age and careless heating had given the surface a fine reticulation.  His cup and saucer, on the contrary, were thick pieces of ware such as the cabin-boys toss about on steamboats.  The whole ceramic melange told of the fortuities of English colonial and early American life, of the migration of families westward.  No doubt, once upon a time, that dawn-pink Worcester had married into a Whieldon cauliflower family.  A queer sort of genealogy might be traced among Southern families through their mixtures of tableware.

As Peter mused over these implications of long ancestral lines, it reminded him that he had none.  Over his own past, over the lineage of nearly every negro in the South, hung a curtain.  Even the names of the colored folk meant nothing, and gave no hint of their kin and clan.  At the end of the war between the States, Peter’s people had selected names for themselves, casually, as children pick up a pretty stone.  They meant nothing.  It occurred to Peter for the first time, as he sat looking at the chinaware, that he knew nothing about himself; whether his kinsmen were valiant or recreant he did not know.  Even his own father he knew little about except that his mother had said his name was Peter, like his own, and that he had gone down the river on a tie boat and was drowned.