“Miss Jinny, ma’am,” he had said, “Ah don’t want mah li’l’ boy ter grow up ter be lak’ Ah is! Miss Jinny--look at me!” He had spread out his work-twisted hands in the mellow sunshine of late afternoon and looked at her earnestly, and Miss Jinny (and Woodie) had looked at him. “Ah don’t know nothin’; Ah can’t read an’ Ah can’t write; Ah ain’t got nothin’ an’ Ah ain’t never goin’ ter have. Ah’m jest er cawnfiel’ nigger--er li’l’ better’n er mule. Don’t yer expec’ that mebbe somehow it might be fixed so’s mah li’l’ boy might be--diff’rent?” Woodie heard again the grave, self-respecting bass and saw the deeply furrowed, kindly face looking out at him with what had come to be to the boy the wistfulness of their race. Miss Jinny, too, had seen and heard, and felt, and in the end had found a man in Boston--and Jerusalem seemed no farther from the Piney Woods--to send Woodie away to school and give him such an opportunity as had fallen to the lot of no other coloured child he had ever known. Even his vacations were provided for: that the experiment might have a thorough chance, he had spent them, until this year, with a prosperous Negro family who had a summer place in Maine. Behind the humble Simmons family always, as protection, somehow, from any hardship too great to be borne, had stood the great rock of Miss Jinny Pickens: impoverished, elderly, and alone, but a Pickens; knit into the fibres of the state; indomitable by nature and affiliations. Woodie felt her there. He stepped up and knocked at her door with confidence. The door was opened by a woman of his own race whom he did not know. “_She_ ain’t hyeh!” she said, with inflections that suggested that only the undesirable wouldn’t have known it. “She done gone ter Leestown, ter see Miss Sadie Lee.” The Lees were cousins of the Pickenses. He hadn’t thought of any of the old names for a long time. He asked when Miss Jinny would return. “Mebbe ter-morrer an’ mebbe not. Is you Tampa Simmons’ boy?” When he said he was she told him what Draper meant to do at the funeral. She told him with sympathy, but with a strange gusto. There had been a trace of it even in the kindly Charity. He had come through the woods. As he went back by the road and one Negro after another stopped him to tell him the same thing in the same way, the sick consciousness dawned within him of something which he could not have expressed. The sympathy of these people was real enough, but there was in it an excitation of horror that they craved; a brushing near of occult and of awful things. They awaited his father’s funeral in a state of delicious, morbid expectancy. If Miss Jinny failed him!... He got out the old white mule and started for Leestown. When he returned the mule to the stable a round white moon was pouring light steadily into the velvet darkness. Sore and stiff, he stumbled into the kitchen, where a pallet had been fixed for him on the floor.