weakening, had almost thought seriously of trying to stick it out. Each time that she had almost convinced herself that this was the wisest and only course, some new evidence of the ordeal would come to her and make her vow anew that she would not attempt to live it down. Years before she had heard a story which Booker Washington had told in which he likened Negroes to a basket of crabs when one of them had with great energy climbed almost to the top of the basket and freedom, the others less progressive than he would reach up with their claws and pull him back to their own level. This had seemed to her then merely an effective story coined for oratorical purposes, but now its applicability was forced upon her with painful truth.
Though she had to a considerable degree recovered from the intense consciousness of race which her experiences in the riot at Atlanta had engendered in her, yet Mimi, despite the shortcomings which she saw in her own people, had a loyalty to and an affection for them that was almost an obsession. She never spoke of this feeling, for she felt that to those who understood, explanations were unnecessary, while to those who needed an explanation, whatever she might say would have been obscure and difficult of understanding. In other words, to her it was as useless for her to attempt the depiction of her loyalty as it would be for a man to maintain loudly and persistently the faithfulness of his wife. She had always felt an instinctive distrust of those Negroes who boasted of their loyalty and devotion to their race. It had seemed to her that if such faithfulness were genuine and unselfish it needed restatement no more than did the affirmation by a woman that she was respectable.
Thus her passing from the race seemed to Mimi persecution greater than any white people had ever visited upon coloured people—the very intolerance of her own people had driven her from them. And in the deception she would have to practise as one ostensibly white, she felt she was doing a mean and dishonourable thing. She would do so, she determined, for there was no other course open to her. But in her new