Village books

It was
Miss Brownell's thin-lipped boast that she understood negroes. She had
told Peter so several times when, as a lad, he went up to the big house
on errands. Peter Siner considered this remembrance without the faintest
feeling of humor, and mentally removed Miss Molly Brownell from his list
of possible subscribers. Yet, he recalled, the whole Brownell estate had
been reared on negro labor.
Then there was Henry Hooker, cashier of the village bank. Peter knew
that the banker subscribed liberally to foreign missions; indeed, at the
cashier's behest, the white church of Hooker's Bend kept a paid
missionary on the upper Congo. But the banker had sold some village lots
to the negroes, and in two instances, where a streak of commercial
phosphate had been discovered on the properties, the lots had reverted
to the Hooker estate. There had been in the deed something concerning a
mineral reservation that the negro purchasers knew nothing about until
the phosphate was discovered. The whole matter had been perfectly legal.
A hand shook Siner's shoulder and interrupted his review.


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