When George was a child, there was a story that was current over all the South. Some local hero—some village champion of the rights of white men and the maintenance of white supremacy—told the gory adventure of his one and only, his first and last, his final, all-sufficient journey into the benighted and corrupted domains of the North. Sometimes the adventure had occurred in Washington, sometimes in Philadelphia or New York, sometimes in Boston or in Baltimore, but the essential setting was always the same. The scene for this heroic drama was always laid in a restaurant of a Northern city. The plumed knight from below the Mason-Dixon line had gone in to get something to eat and had taken his seat at a table. He had progressed no further than his soup, when, looking up, he found to his horror and indignation that a “big buck nigger” had come in and taken a seat opposite him, and at his own table. Whereupon—but let the more skillful small-town raconteurs of twenty years ago complete the tale:
“Well, ole Jim says he took one look at him and says, ‘You black son-of-a-bitch, what do you mean by sitting at my table?’ Well, the nigger begins to talk back to him, telling him he was in the North now, where a nigger was just as good as anyone. And ole Jim says, ‘You black bastard you, you may be as good as a Yankee, but you’re talking to a white man now!’—and with that, he says, he ups with a ketchup bottle and he just busts it wide open over that nigger’s head. Jim says he reckoned he killed him, says he didn’t wait to see, he just left him laying there and grabbed his hat and walked out. He says he caught the first train going South and he’s never been North since, and that he don’t care if he never sees the God-damn place again.”
This story was usually greeted with roars of appreciative and admiring laughter, the sound of thighs smitten with enthusiastic palms, gleeful exclamations of “’Oddam! I’d ’a’ given anything to’ve seen it! Whew-w! I can just see ole Jim now as he let him have it! I’ll betcha anything you like he killed that black bastard deader’n a doornail! Yes sir! Damned if I blame him either! I’d ’a’ done the same thing!”
George must have heard this gory adventure gleefully related at least a hundred times during his childhood and the adolescent period of his youth. The names of the characters were sometimes different—sometimes it was “ole Jim” or “ole Bob” or “ole Dick”—but the essential circumstance was always the same; an impudent black limb of Satan entered, took the forbidden seat, and was promptly, ruthlessly, and gorily annihilated with a ketchup bottle. This story, in its various forms and with many modern innovations, was still current among returned wanderers from the Southland at the time when George first came to the great city to live. In more modern versions the insolent black had been annihilated on busses and in subway trains, in railway coaches or in moving picture theatres, in crowded elevators or upon the street—wherever, in fact, he had dared impudently to intrude too closely upon the proud and cherished dignity of a Southern white. And the existence of this ebony malefactor was, one gathered, one of the large contributing reasons for the return of the native to his own more noble heath.
Another, and probably more intelligent, portion of this defeated—and retreated—group had other explanations for their retreat, which were, however, derived from the same basic sources of rationalized self-defense. These were the members of the more intellectual groups—the writers, painters, actors—who had tried the ardors of the city’s life and who had fled from it. Their arguments and reasons were subtler, more refined. The actor or the playwright asserted that he found the integrity of his art, the authentic drama of the folk, blighted and corrupted by the baleful and unnatural influence of the Broadway drama, by artificiality, trickery, and cheap sensation, by that which struck death to native roots and gave only a waxen counterfeit of the native flower. The painter or the musician found the artist and his art delivered to the mercy of fashionable cliques, constricted with the lifeless narrowness of ?sthetic schools. The writer had a similar complaint. The creator’s life was menaced in the city with the sterile counterfeits of art—the poisonous ethers of “the literary life,” the poisonous intrigues of the literary cliques, the poisonous politics of log-rolling and back-scratching, critic-mongering and critic-pandering, the whole nasty, crawling, parasitical world of Scribbleonia.