Twice, as I went, I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop, which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating.  To enter a door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have a few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his fixed idea, and myself quite furious—­I laughed more than twice; but, by the time I had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter’s shop, another side of it had brought reflection to my mind.  Here was a foreigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole association with the South had begun but five years ago; and the race question had brought his feelings to this pitch!  He had seen the Kings Port negro with the eyes of the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory, and as a result the reddest rag for him was pale beside a Boston philanthropist!

Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives, and in doctrine especially is this true.  We need not expect a Confucius from the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that blind and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the de-civilizing of white and black alike.  Who brought him here?  Did he invite himself?  Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead him, compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, or financier, but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow.  Because “the door of hope” was once opened too suddenly for him is no reason for slamming it now forever in his face.

Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through the streets of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took me abruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man’s world into the blackest Congo.  Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and I had now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesses which teem and swarm with negroes.  As cracks will run through fine porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible among the gardens and the houses.  The picture that these places offered, tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries, the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings, bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an overripe melon bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in the court, the parents playing cards in the room, the grandparents smoking pipes on the porch, and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at you like creatures from the Old Testament or the jungle.  From the jungle we had stolen them, North and South had stolen them together, long ago, to be slaves, not to be citizens, and now here they were, the fruits of our theft; and for some reason (possibly the Teuton was the reason) that passage from the Book of Exodus came into my head:  “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children.”