did. It was not strange, therefore, that he should have come home

believing implicitly that his father was right when he had said Kenneth could get along without trouble in Central City as long as he attended to his own business.

Kenneth talked on and on, unfolding the plans he had made for the extending of the influence of his hospital throughout the South. Bob, occupied with his own thoughts, heard but little of it. Suddenly he interrupted Kenneth with a sharply put question.

"Ken, why did you come back to Central City?" he asked. He went on without waiting for a reply. "If I had had your chances of studying up North and in France, and living where you don't have to be A afraid of getting into trouble with Crackers all the time, I'd rather've done anything else than to come back to this rotten place to live the rest of my life."

Kenneth laughed easily, almost as though a five-year-old had asked some exceedingly foolish question.

"Why did I come back?" he repeated. "That's easy. I came back because I can make more money here than anywhere else."

"But that isn't the most important thing in life!" Bob exclaimed.

"Maybe not the most important," Kenneth laughed, "but a mighty convenient article to have lying around. I came back here where the bulk of coloured people live and where they make money off their crops and where there won't be much trouble for me to build up a big practice."

"That's an old argument," retorted Bob. "Nearly a million coloured people went North during the war and they're making money there hand over fist. You could make just as much money, if not more, in a city like Detroit or Cleveland or New York, and you wouldn't have to be always afraid you've given offence to some of these damned ignorant Crackers down here."

"Oh, I suppose I could've made money there. Dr. Cox at Bellevue told me I ought to stay there in New York and practise in Harlem, but I wanted to come back home. I can do more good here, both for myself and for the coloured people, than I could up there." He paused and then asserted confidently: "And I don't think I'll have any trouble down here. Papa got along all right here in this town for more than fifty years, and I reckon I can do it too."

"But, Ken," Bob protested, "the way things were when he came along are a lot different from the way they are now. Just yesterday Old Man Mygatt down to the bank got mad and told me I was an ‘impudent young nigger that needed to be taught my place' because I called his hand on a note he claimed papa owed the bank. He knew I knew he was lying, and that's what made him so mad. They're already saying I'm not a ‘good nigger' like papa was and that education has spoiled me into thinking I'm as good as they are. Good Lord, if I wasn't any better than these ignorant Crackers in this town, I'd go out and jump in the river."

Bob was working himself into a temper. Kenneth interrupted him with a good-natured smile as he said:

"Bob, you're getting too pessimistic. You've been reading too many of these coloured newspapers published in New York and Chicago and these societies that're always playing up some lynching or other trouble down here—"

"What if I have? I don't need to read them to know that things are much worse to-day than they were a few years back. You haven't lived down here for nearly nine years and you don't know how things are changed."

"It's you who have changed—not conditions so much!" Kenneth answered. "What if there are mean white folks? There are lots of other white people who want to see the Negro succeed. Only this morning Dr. Bennett told mamma he was glad I came back and he'd do what he could to help me. And there're lots more like"

"That's nice of Dr. Bennett," interjected Bob. "He can afford to talk big—he's got the practice of this town sewed up. And, most of all, he's a white man. Suppose some of these poor whites get it into their heads to make trouble because you're getting too prosperous—what then? Dr. Bennett and all the rest of the good white folks around here can't help you!"

"Oh, yes, they can," Kenneth observed with the same confident smile. "Judge Stevenson and Roy Ewing and Mr. Baird at the Bank of Central City and a lot others run this town and they aren't going to let any decent coloured man be bothered. Why, I'll have a cinch around this part of Georgia! There aren't more than half a dozen coloured doctors in all this part of the country who've had a decent medical education and training. All they know is ladling out pills and fake panaceas. In a few years I'll be able to give up general practising and give all my time to major surgery. I'll handle pretty nearly everything in this part of the State. And then you'll see I'm right!"

"Have it your own way," retorted Bob. "But I'm telling you again, you haven't been living down here for eight or nine years and you don't know. When all these Negroes were going North, some of these same ‘good white folks' you're depending on started talking about ‘putting niggers in their place' when they couldn't get servants and field hands. You'll find things a lot different from the way they were when you went up North to school."

"What're you boys fussing about? What's the trouble?"

Bob and Kenneth turned at the voice from the doorway behind them. It was their mother. "Nothing, mamma, only Bob's got a fit of the blues to-day."

Mrs. Harper came in and looked from one to the other of her sons. She was a buxom, pleasant-faced woman of fifty-odd years, her hair once brown now flecked with grey. She wiped the perspiration from her forehead with the corner of her apron, announcing meanwhile that supper was ready. As he rose, Kenneth continued his explanation of their conversation.

"Bob's seeing things like a kid in the dark. He thinks I'll not be able to do the things I came back here to accomplish. Thinks the Crackers won't let me! I'm going to solve my own problem, do as much good as I can, make as much money as I can! If every Negro in America did the same thing, there wouldn't be any race problem."

Mrs. Harper took an arm of each of her sons and led them into the dining-room where their sister Mamie was putting supper on the table.

"You're right, Kenneth," Mrs. Harper remarked as she sat down at the table. "Your father and I got along here together in Central City without a bit of trouble for thirty-five years, and I reckon you can do it too."

"But, mamma," Bob protested, "I've been telling Ken things are not what they were when you and papa came along. Why—"

"Let's forget the race problem for a while," Kenneth interrupted. "I'm too hungry and tired to talk about it now."

"That's right," was Mrs. Harper's comment. "Draw your chairs up to the table. You're not goin' to have any trouble here in town, Ken, and we're mighty glad you came back. Mrs. Amos was in this afternoon and she tells me they're having some trouble out near Ashland between the coloured sharecroppers and their landlords, but that'll blow overjust as it's always done."

"What's the trouble out there?" asked Kenneth. He wasn't much interested, for he could hear Mamie, in the kitchen beyond, singing some popular air to the accompaniment of chicken-frying.

"It's a case where coloured farmers claim they can't get fair settlements from their landlords for their crops at the end of the year," explained his mother.

"Why don't they hire a lawyer?" Kenneth asked, with little interest.

"That shows you've forgotten all about things in the South," said Bob with mingled triumph and despair at his brother's ignorance. "There isn't a white lawyer in Georgia who'd take a case like this. In the first place, the courts would be against him because his client's a Negro, and in the second place, he'd have to buck this combination of landlords, storekeepers, and bankers who are getting rich robbing Negroes. If a white lawyer took a case of a Negro share-cropper, he'd either sell out to the landlord or be scared to death before he ever got to court. And as for a Negro lawyer," here Bob laughed sardonically, "he'd be run out of town by the Ku Klux Klan or lynched almost before he took the case!"

"Oh, I don't know so much about that!" Kenneth replied. "There are landlords, without doubt, who rob their tenants, but after all there are only a few of them. And furthermore," he declared as Mamie entered the room with a platter of fried chicken in one hand and a plate of hot biscuits in the other, "supper looks just a little bit more interesting to me right now than landlords, tenants, or problems of any kind."

Mamie divested herself of her apron and sat down to the table. She was an attractive girl of twenty-two or twenty-three, more slender than Bob, and about Kenneth's height. Her hair was darker than that of either of her brothers, was parted in the middle and brushed down hard on either side. Though not a pretty girl, she had an air about her as though she was happy because of the sheer joy of living. She had graduated from Atlanta University two years before, and with two other girls had been teaching the seven grades in the little ramshackle building that served as a coloured school in the town. That hard work had not as yet begun to tell on her. She seemed filled with buoyant good health and blessed with a lively good nature. Yet she too was inclined to spells of depression like Bob's. She resembled him more nearly than Kenneth. As has every comely coloured girl in towns of the South like Central City, she had had many repulsive experiences when she had to fight with might and main to ward off unwelcome attentions—both of the men of her own race and of white men. Especially had this been true since the death of her father. Often her face overclouded as she thought of them. She, like Bob, felt always as though they were living on top of a volcano—and never knew when it might erupt. …

The four sat at supper. Forgotten were problems other than the immediate one of Kenneth's in getting his practice under way. Eagerly they talked of his plans, his prospects, his ambitions. Bob said nothing until they began to discuss him and his plans for returning to school the following fall, now that Kenneth was back to complete the settling of the small details that remained in connection with Joe Harper's estate. …

It was a happy and reasonably prosperous, intelligent family group—one that can be duplicated many, many times in the South.