And behind it
all shone the background of racial promiscuity out of which it sprang.
It was like looking at an open sore that touched all of Niggertown, men
and boys, young girls and women. It caused tragedies, murders, fights,
and desertions in the black village as regularly as the rotation of the
calendar; yet there was no public sentiment against it. Peter wondered
how this attitude of his whole people could possibly be.
With the query the memory of Ida May came back to him, with its sense of
dim pathos. It seemed to Peter now as if their young and uninstructed
hands had destroyed a safety-vault to filch a penny.
The reflex of a thought of Ida May always brought Peter to Cissie; it
always stirred up in him a desire to make this young girl's path gentle
and smooth. There was a fineness, a delicacy about Cissie, that, it
seemed to Peter, Ida May had never possessed. Then, too, Cissie was
moved by a passion for self-betterment. She deserved a cleaner field
than the Niggertown of Hooker's Bend.
Peter took Parson Ranson's arm, and the two moved to the gate by common
consent.
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