His story was ordinary. His father was a farmer. The old man's affairs were not so good. The boy graduated from a high school. He didn't have enough money to go to college. He set out to look for a job. He did not find it. He had to enroll in the CCC. There, together with other boys, he clears forests and digs fire-prevention ditches. They feed him not badly, clothe him, and give him thirty dollars a month (five in hand and twenty-five to his parents). Of course, this is a help. What will happen further is unknown. He knows only one thing: he is young, healthy, he has a white skin, he plays baseball. That means that everything will be well—" all right"—and will work out well. There is no fog in his consciousness. On the contrary, utter explicitness. He could give no answers to most of the questions we asked him. Then, with charming frankness, he would say: "I don't know about that." But then when he understood the question, he would reply at once, without thinking, with a ready-made formula, which was evidently firmly embedded in the family of his father, the farmer, and in the city of Elizabethtown.

"But, after all, don't you want to go to college?"

"Of course, although I do know lots of fellows with diplomas in their pockets who tramp through the country in search of work. But still, it is easier to make your way after going through college."

"Well, what studies interest you in college?"

"Well, what do you mean—what studies? Why, of course, those that they study there."

We were passing through a Negro village. It was the same standardized Negro poverty. It would have been just as unusual to find here a good Negro house as to find a bad road.

"You can tell a Negro house right away from a white man's house," our fellow traveller said with a smile.

"Is it possible that all Negroes live so poorly?"

"Of course, all of them."

"Well, now, you have grown up in the South. Tell us, do you know at least one wealthy Negro?"

The youth thought for some time.

No, I don't know a single one," he finally answered.

"Why is it so? Are Negroes bad workers?"

"No, they know how to work."

"Maybe it's because they're dishonest people?"

"Why dishonest? I know Negroes well. Negroes are good people. There are some good football players among them."

"How does it happen then that all Negroes are poor?"

"I don't know about that."

"Is your father acquainted with any Negroes?"

"We know many Negroes."

"And you treat them well?"

"Of course!"

"Would you ask such a Negro to sit down at the table with your family?"

The youth laughed.

"No, that's impossible!"

"Why?"

"Because! Negroes and white folks cannot sit together at the same table."

"But why not?"

"You must be from New York," said the young man.

To the Southern mind, New York is the limit of freethinking and radicalism.

"Now tell us this. We have passed through several Negro states and occasionally we saw quite good-looking Negresses. Could you be fond of a Negress?"

"Why, yes, that can happen," said the young man after some cogitation. "Yes, that might happen. It's true that among the coloured there are some good-looking ones, especially mulattoes."

"But if you were fond of her, would you marry her?"

"Go on! That's out of the question!"

"Why?"

"That's impossible!"

"Well, but suppose you loved her very much? Or suppose a white girl fell in love with a Negro and married him?"

The youth waved his arms.

"No, I can see right away that you're from New York."

"I dare say such a Negro would be hanged. Right?"

"I think something of the kind might happen to him."

The young man laughed gaily for a long time.

This conversation is reproduced here with complete accuracy.

Not only here, but even in New York itself, about which the young boy from the South talked with horror, it is almost impossible to see a Negro in a restaurant, a motion-picture theatre, or a church, unless, of course, he is there as a servant or a porter. In a large New York hall —Carnegie Hall—at the concert of the Negro singer, Marian Anderson, we saw hundreds of intelligent Negroes who sat in the gallery in a quite separate group.

Of course, in accordance with American laws, and especially in New York, Negroes have the right to take any place among the white, to go into a white motion-picture theatre or into a white restaurant. But the Negro himself will never do it. He knows only too well how such experiments might end. He will not be beaten up, of course, as in the South, but his closest neighbours in most cases will at once demonstratively depart—that is indubitable.

By law, Negroes are free citizens of the United States, yet in the South under various pretexts they are deprived of the right to vote, and in Washington itself, and not alone Washington, but in the very building where the laws were written, the following occurred: a Negro by the name of DePriest was elected to Congress from the city of Chicago. To the disaffection of the white Congressmen, he sat beside them at the sessions of the House of Representatives. But that wasn't all. This black man with his black secretary went to eat in the Congressional dining-room. He could not be turned out, and he paid no attention whatever to the quiet demonstrations against him. Finally, they thought up an excellent way out of the situation. They closed the dining-room. They closed down entirely the Congressional dining-room, just so that the Negro would not be able to eat with white people.

"Yes, yes, gentlemen," said Mr. Adams, when, after letting off our young man from the CCC, we drove on, "I'll tell you a remarkable story about my friend from the Island of Trinidad. I knew an American family that lived there. They decided to come to New York. It so happened that I was obliged to leave New York for a year and decided to sublet my apartment to them. I recommended them to my landlord and went away. When I returned a year later the landlord flung himself at me almost with clenched fists. `It's an outrage,` he cried. `I never thought that you would play such a dirty trick on me!' I became frightened and began to wonder what I could have done to him that was so bad. ' I don't know what I did to hurt you,' I told the landlord. 'You settled Negroes in my house,' the landlord groaned. 'I beg your pardon,' I said, 'I settled in your house my friends from the Island of Trinidad. They are white people, just like you and me. They lived in the Islands for thirty years, and now return to America.' 'But why didn't you tell me at once that your friends lived in the Island of Trinidad? I wouldn't have let them in for anything in the world.' ' What happened?'I asked. 'This is what happened. All my tenants in one voice insist that your friends have a touch of Negro blood. They have a grandmother whose hair is too curly. That's definitely established. One of my tenants moved out. The others said that if I didn't get rid of these Negroes, they would break their leases and move out.' Seriously, gentlemen, it would be foolish to think that Negroes are well off in New York. Now, in our house there is a Negro elevator man. But, of course, that's a different matter."

It became cold in Northern Carolina and still colder in Virginia. The thin rain poured on the roof of our car all through the last day of our journey. It was only a few miles to Washington, but Mr. Adams feared that the water might begin to freeze. Bill-boards appeared advertising Washington hotels.