In slavery it had kept them from being crushed and exterminated as oppression had done to the Indian. In freedom it had kept them from becoming mere cogs in an elaborately organized machine. Some people called it shiftlessness, laziness, inherent racial inferiority. Mimi herself at times had heard these charges made and frequently she had believed them and had been ashamed of them, especially during the years she had lived in Atlanta and particularly since that terrible night during the riot. The forced growth of her race-conscious attitude had accelerated this shamedness of her people’s apparent lack of assimilation by industrialism—now she began to feel glad that this was so.
She wished she could make up her mind just what she would have them be. When she listened to Mr. Hunter and the type of hustling, progressive, acquisitive men which he represented, she doubted seriously the wisdom of the Negro’s doing anything other than acquire wealth, forge ahead in business and commerce and manufacture as many of them were doing. But when she talked with Carl or, more strongly, when she heard Negroes sing or laugh, she wondered which road would lead to greater happiness.
On Communion Sundays she went through the same process of ratiocination. The passing of the bread and wine after the sermon, the bread hard and tasteless, the wine in a huge silver cup passed from hand to hand, was followed always by a silent prayer ending with the singing of a Spiritual, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” She never forgot the emotions which the song created within her as plaintive, eerily sweet, stirring verse after verse winged its way through the small church and lost itself among the age-stained rafters. For years afterward the song made her imagine she had pains in her neck and back, for the song was always sung bent forward in prayer. It was with this weariness that she associated the terrifyingly real agony of Jesus which the words evoked. “Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?” “When they pierced Him in the side?” “When He bowed His head and died?” “When they laid Him in the tomb?”