“He is called one of the makers of modern France,” added Dixon. “Did you know that despite his French name, he is a Pole?”
Then, espying the twinkling lights of the town, he exclaimed. “Ah, here we are coming into Boone now.”
“Good-by,” said the passenger, with genuine regret in his voice, “I’m sorry that our acquaintance is so short. I’m stopping here only for the night and I will go on to Los Angeles tomorrow. I’d like to have had you all the way.”
“I’m sure you’ll have a pleasant porter tomorrow,” said Dixon cheerily, as he grasped the proffered hand. They bade each other good-by, and Dixon turned hastily to assist the new-coming passengers. After Dixon had assisted the new arrivals to bed he returned to the smoker and resumed his reading, but too tired to concentrate his thoughts on the scientific matter, he closed the volume, placed it behind him in the hollow formed by his back and the angle of the seat and began to reflect on the last passage he had read:—
“The doctrine of inequality is emphatically a science of white peoples. It is they who have invented it.”
The Germans of 1854, he reflected, built up a theory of the inferiority of the other peoples of the white race. Some of these so-called inferior whites have, in turn, built up a similar theory about the darker peoples. This recalled to him some of the many falsities current about his own people. He thought of how in nearly all the large libraries of the United States, which he had been permitted to enter, he had found books advancing all sorts of theories to prove that they were inferior. Some of these theories even denied them human origin. He went on to reflect on the discussions he had heard on the cars and other places from time to time, and of what he called “the heirloom ideas” that many persons had concerning the different varieties of the human race. These discussions, he went on to reflect, had done him good. They had been the means of his acquiring a fund of knowledge on the subject of race, as they had caused him to look up those opinions he had thought incorrect in the works of the standard scientists. Moved by these thoughts he took a morocco-bound notebook from his vest pocket and wrote:—“This doctrine of racial superiority apparently incited the other white peoples, most of whom were enemies to one another, to unite against the Germans, and destroy their empire. Will the doctrine of white superiority over the darker races produce a similar result to white empire?”
But at this juncture his thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of someone. Looking up he saw a man clad in pajamas and overcoat, and with slippered feet, enter the room.
Now Dixon had taken special notice of this man for, during the afternoon, he had been discussing the color question with another passenger in the smoker. From what Dixon had overheard, the man just entering was a Southern senator on his way to California on business.
Dixon had had occasion to go into the room several times. On one occasion he had heard this man say vehemently “The ‘nigger’ is a menace to our civilization and should be kept down. I am opposed to educating him, for the educated ‘nigger’ is a misfit in the white man’s civilization. He is a caricature and no good can result from his ‘butting in’ on our affairs. Would to God that none of the breed had ever set foot on the shores of our country. That’s the proper place for a ‘nigger’,” he had said quite aloud, on seeing Dixon engaged in wiping out the wash bowls.
At another time he had heard the same speaker deliver himself of this opinion:—“You may say what you please, but I would never eat with a ‘nigger.’ I couldn’t stomach it. God has placed an insuperable barrier between black and white that will ever prevent them from living on the same social plane, at least so far as the Anglo-Saxon is concerned. I have no hatred for the black man—in fact, I could have none, but he must stay in his place.”
“That’s nothing else but racial antipathy,” his opponent had objected.
“You don’t have to take my word for it,” said the other, snappily. “Didn’t Abraham Lincoln say: ‘there is a physical difference between the white and black races which, I believe, will forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality?’ Call it what you will, but there is an indefinable something within me that tells me that I am infinitely better than the best ‘nigger’ that ever lived. The feeling is instinctive and I am not going to violate nature.”
Upon hearing this remark, Dixon had thought as follows: “My good man, how easily I could define that ‘indefinable feeling’ of which you speak. I notice from your positive manner, and impatience of contradiction that you experience that indefinable feeling of superiority not only towards Negroes, but toward your white associates as well and that feeling you, yourself, would call in any one else ‘conceit.’ ”
Dixon had happened to be present at the close of the discussion, which had been brought to an end by the announcement of dinner. The conversation had been a rather heated one and had closed with this retort by the anti-Negro passenger.
“You, too, had slavery in the North, but it didn’t pay and you gave it up. Wasn’t your pedantic and self-righteous Massachusetts the first to legalize slavery? You, Northerners, forced slavery on us, and when you couldn’t make any more money on it, because England had stopped the slave trade, you made war on us to make us give it up. A matter of climate, that’s all. Climes reversed, it would have been the South that wanted abolition. It was a matter of business with you, not sentiment. You Northerners, who had an interest in slavery, were bitterly opposed to abolition. It is all very well for you to talk, but if you Yankees had the same percentage of ‘niggers’ that we have, you would sing a different tune. The bitterest people against the ‘nigger’ are you Northerners who have come South. You, too, have race riots, lynching and segregation. The only difference between South and North is, that one is frank and the other hypocritical,” and he added with vehement sincerity, “I hate hypocrisy.”
In spite of this avowed enmity toward his people, Dixon had felt no animosity toward the man. Here, he had thought, was a conscience, honest but uneducated.
Shortly afterward an occupant of the smoker who had been puffing a huge calabash with Indian stolidity met Dixon in the passage way. Prefacing his remarks with a few terrible, but good-natured oaths, he said, “That fellow is obsessed by the race problem. I met him yesterday at the hotel, and he has talked of hardly anything else since. This morning we were in the elevator, when a well-dressed Negro, who looked like a professional man, came in, and at once he began to tell me so that all could hear him something about ‘nigger’ doctors in Oklahoma. If he could only see how ridiculous he is making himself he’d shut up.”
“I feel myself as good as he,” he went on to say, “and I have associated with colored people. We have a colored porter in our office—Joe—and we think the world of him. He doesn’t like ‘niggers,’ eh?” Then with a knowing wink, nudging Dixon in the ribs at the same time, he added with another oath, “I wager his instinctive dislike, as he calls it, doesn’t include both sexes of your race. I know his kind well.”
Dixon had felt like saying, “We must be patient with the self-deluded,” but he did not. He had simply thanked the speaker for his kind sentiments, then turned and walked away.
All of this ran through the porter’s mind when he saw the pajama-clad passenger appear in the doorway. The newcomer, on entering, walked up to the mirror, where he looked at himself quizzically for a moment, then selected a chair and adjusting it to suit his fancy made himself comfortable in it; next, he took a plain and well-worn gold cigarette case from his pocket, selected a cigarette, and, after tapping it on the chair, began rummaging his pockets for a match, all in apparent oblivion to the presence of Dixon at the near end of the long cushioned seat. But Dixon had been quietly observing him and deftly presented a lighted match, at the same time venturing to inquire in a respectful and rather solicitous tone, “Can’t sleep, sir?”
“No, George,” came the reply in an amiable, but condescending tone, “I was awakened at the last stop and can’t go back to sleep. I never do very well the first night, anyway.”
With this the senator began to talk to Dixon quite freely, telling him of his trip from Oklahoma.