Half an hour later the blue-grass fields of Kentucky were spinning
outside of the window in a vast green whirlpool. The distant trees and
houses moved forward with the train, while the foreground, with its
telegraph poles, its culverts, section-houses, and shrubbery, rushed
backward in a blur. Now and then into the Jim Crow window whipped a
blast of coal smoke and hot cinders, for the engine was only two cars
ahead.
Peter Siner looked out at the interminable spin of the landscape with a
certain wistfulness. He was coming back into the South, into his own
country. Here for generations his forebears had toiled endlessly and
fruitlessly, yet the fat green fields hurtling past him told with what
skill and patience their black hands had labored.
The negro shrugged away such thoughts, and with a certain effort
replaced them with the constructive idea that was bringing him South
once more. It was a very simple idea. Siner was returning to his native
village in Tennessee to teach school. He planned to begin his work with
the ordinary public school at Hooker's Bend, but, in the back of his
head, he hoped eventually to develop an institution after the plan of
Tuskeegee or the Hampton Institute in Virginia.
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