Hooker to see what action he meant to take on
the notes that paid for his spurious deed. This brought another harvest
of rumors. Street gossip reported that Henry had compromised for this,
that, and the other amount, that he would not compromise, that he had
persuaded the fool niggers into signing still other instruments. Peter
never knew the truth. He was not on the committee.
But high above the legal phase of interest lay the warming fact that
Peter Siner, a negro graduate of Harvard, on his first tilt in Hooker's
Bend affairs had ridden to a fall. This pleased even the village women,
whose minds could not follow the subtle trickeries of legal disputation.
The whole affair simply proved what the white village had known all
along: you can't educate a nigger. Hooker's Bend warmed with pleasure
that half of its population was ineducable.
White sentiment in Hooker's Bend reacted strongly on Niggertown. Peter
Siner's prestige was no more. The cause of higher education for negroes
took a mighty slump. Junius Gholston, a negro boy who had intended to go
to Nashville to attend Fisk University, reconsidered the matter, packed
away his good clothes, put on overalls, and shipped down the river as a
roustabout instead.
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