country. Here for generations his forebears had toiled endlessly and
fruitlessly, yet the fat green fields hurtling past him told with what
skill and patience their black hands had labored.

The negro shrugged away such thoughts, and with a certain effort
replaced them with the constructive idea that was bringing him South
once more. It was a very simple idea. Siner was returning to his native
village in Tennessee to teach school. He planned to begin his work with
the ordinary public school at Hooker's Bend, but, in the back of his
head, he hoped eventually to develop an institution after the plan of
Tuskeegee or the Hampton Institute in Virginia.

To do what he had in mind, he must obtain aid from white sources, and
now, as he traveled southward, he began conning in his mind the white
men and white women he knew in Hooker's Bend. He wanted first of all to
secure possession of a small tract of land which he knew adjoined the
negro school-house over on the east side of the village.

Before the negro's mind the different villagers passed in review with
that peculiar intimacy of vision that servants always have of their
masters. Indeed, no white Southerner knows his own village so minutely
as does any member of its colored population. The colored villagers see
the whites off their guard and just as they are, and that is an attitude
in which no one looks his best. The negroes might be called the black
recording angels of the South. If what they know should be shouted aloud
in any Southern town, its social life would disintegrate. Yet it is a
strange fact that gossip seldom penetrates from the one race to the
other.

So Peter Siner sat in the Jim Crow car musing over half a dozen