CHAPTER VIII

What were my thoughts after all?  Was I ashamed of my kinship with Zoe?  With this human being who had nursed me so tenderly through my illness?  Did I begrudge her the interest which she had, of right, with me in our father’s estate?  She was as closely connected to him by ties of blood as I was.  These things I reflected upon as I felt course through me a deep undercurrent of regret.

Was it my mother?  Her face came before me as I had learned to know it from her picture.  Yes, that seemed to be it.  My mother had not been honored.  How could my father for any ambition, for any exigency of circumstance stoop to a marriage of this sort, with the memory of my mother still fresh in mind, if not in heart?  Ah! that was it!  Did he keep her in his heart?  My grandmother’s reticence about my father began to fill in with significance of this sort.  She knew that he had married the octoroon not many years after my mother’s death.  She resented it and she preserved silence about him, while keeping me ignorant.  Thus without any preparation for the disclosure, I had encountered it at full speed in my career.  Reverdy had, no doubt, alluded to this matter when he spoke with such feeling of my father in Chicago.  “Poor fellow,” he had said.  Did my father suffer for this marriage?  What was his secret?  Why “poor fellow?”

With these thoughts I entered the house.  I could sense that they knew that I should return with the secret which they had kept from me.  Zoe was not in sight.  Sarah’s grandmother sat in her chair by the window and called me to her.  “Come here, Jimmy,” she said.  “You’re a nice English boy.  You know we are all English.  My father and mother were English ... well, to be truthful, my father was half Irish.  His mother was Irish.  And that makes us all friends, no matter how much we fight.  We fight and get over it.  My husband was in the Revolutionary War; and he’s dead and gone long ago; and here I am in this new country of Illinois with Sarah and a son-in-law soon to be ... and maybe as lonely sometimes as you are.  Sarah’s mother was my pride and she’s dead a long time too, but I don’t get over that....  What’s the matter, Jimmy?  You’ve had bad news.  O, yes, it had to come.  You know now about Zoe.  Well, remember that pretty is as pretty does.  For that matter, she is pretty enough, and good enough too.  Change her skin and any boy would be proud to be her brother.  That’s what a little color does.  And yet the good Lord made us all, white as well as black.  I have always liked the colored people.  I liked them in Tennessee, and I hated to see them mistreated whenever they were.  But I’m like a lot of others, I don’t know what we are going to do with so many of them; and I say let the southern people run their own business and not try to intermeddle in the business of the Almighty.  If He hadn’t wanted slavery He could have prevented it.  As