On one occasion some five hundred sailors set out to “clean up colored town,” but they were met by an adequate force of armed police and marines and changed their minds. On the other hand, a mob of colored crews and troops started an attack on the town jail, but a few armed men quickly dispersed them. I noticed at once that the Blacks of Norfolk were very much more black than those of Washington or New York. Their hair was more matted. Their eyes were more goggly. They were more odorous. When the black chambermaid had been in my room for two minutes it was filled with a pungent and sickening odor. The elevator reeked with this odor. It was the characteristic smell of my first Southern hotel. I noticed it on the trolley cars. It was wafted among the vegetables and fruit of the city market. Indeed, the whole town had it. I grew used to it after a while and was told by those who were liberal of mind that every race had its smell. For instance, to certain tribes of Indians there was said to be nothing so disgusting as the smell of a perfectly clean white man. Even when a man who has a bath every day and a change into perfectly fresh linen came into his presence, the Indian felt sick. Negroes were supposed to notice the smell of white men, but were too subservient or polite to remark upon it. There is, however, a good deal of doubt about this point in human natural history. The smell that we have is the smell of the animal in us, and not of the more human or spiritual part of us. One knows the smell of the bear and the fox, and that the wolf has a stronger smell than the dog, and the wild cat than the domestic cat. Bloodhounds are said to follow the trail of the Negro more readily than that of the white man, and it might reasonably be argued that the terrible odor of the Blacks is due to their greater proximity to an animal stage in development. Be that as it may, I quite see that this odor is something which the Negro will have difficulty in living down. I learned that he was very sensitive about it, as about his kinky hair, and that the more educated and refined he became the more he strove to get rid of these marks. That explained to me why in all those happy streets of prosperous Baltimore at every corner there was a “Beauty Parlor,” where specialists plied Mme. Walker’s “Anti-Kink,” and why the prosperous Negro workingman demanded a bathroom and hot water in his home. The reason why the Blacks seem blacker in the South seems to be because they are segregated in “Jim Crow” sections of the cars, and none of the black comes off on white people, but is on the contrary intensified by the shadow of black looks.