At Cairo, Illinois, the Pullman-car conductor asked Peter Siner to take
his suitcase and traveling-bag and pass forward into the Jim Crow car.
The request came as a sort of surprise to the negro. During Peter
Siner's four years in Harvard the segregation of black folk on Southern
railroads had become blurred and reminiscent in his mind; now it was
fetched back into the sharp distinction of the present instant. With a
certain sense of strangeness, Siner picked up his bags, and saw his own
form, in the car mirrors, walking down the length of the sleeper. He
moved on through the dining-car, where a few hours before he had had
dinner and talked with two white men, one an Oregon apple-grower, the
other a Wisconsin paper-manufacturer. The Wisconsin man had furnished
cigars, and the three had sat and smoked in the drawing-room, indeed,
had discussed this very point; and now it was upon him.

At the door of the dining-car stood the porter of his Pullman, a negro
like himself, and Peter mechanically gave him fifty cents. The porter
accepted it silently, without offering the amenities of his whisk-broom
and shoe-brush, and Peter passed on forward.

Beyond the dining-car and Pullmans stretched twelve day-coaches filled
with less-opulent white travelers in all degrees of sleepiness and
dishabille from having sat up all night. The thirteenth coach was the
Jim Crow car. Framed in a conspicuous place beside the entrance of the
car was a copy of the Kentucky state ordinance setting this coach apart
from the remainder of the train for the purposes therein provided.

The Jim Crow car was not exactly shabby, but it was unkept. It was half
filled with travelers of Peter's own color, and these passengers were
rather more noisy than those in the white coaches. Conversation was not
restrained to the undertones one heard in the other day-coaches or the