Pullmans. Near the entrance of the car two negroes in soldiers' uniforms
had turned a seat over to face the door, and now they sat talking loudly
and laughing the loose laugh of the half intoxicated as they watched the
inflow of negro passengers coming out of the white cars.

The windows of the Jim Crow car were shut, and already it had become
noisome. The close air was faintly barbed with the peculiar, penetrating
odor of dark, sweating skins. For four years Peter Siner had not known
that odor. Now it came to him not so much offensively as with a queer
quality of intimacy and reminiscence. The tall, carefully tailored negro
spread his wide nostrils, vacillating whether to sniff it out with
disfavor or to admit it for the sudden mental associations it evoked.

It was a faint, pungent smell that played in the back of his nose and
somehow reminded him of his mother, Caroline Siner, a thick-bodied black
woman whom he remembered as always bending over a wash-tub. This was
only one unit of a complex. The odor was also connected with negro
protracted meetings in Hooker's Bend, and the Harvard man remembered a
lanky black preacher waving long arms and wailing of hell-fire, to the
chanted groans of his dark congregation; and he, Peter Siner, had
groaned with the others. Peter had known this odor in the press-room of
Tennessee cotton-gins, over a river packet's boilers, where he and other
roustabouts were bedded, in bunk-houses in the woods. It also recalled a
certain octoroon girl named Ida May, and an intimacy with her which it
still moved and saddened Peter to think of. Indeed, it resurrected
innumerable vignettes of his life in the negro village in Hooker's Bend;
it was linked with innumerable emotions, this pungent, unforgetable odor
that filled the Jim Crow car.

Somehow the odor had a queer effect of appearing to push his