diagram to assist my understanding—“a nigger can’t come here to the front-door of my house and ring the bell; but he can go round to the back door”—a line represented his tortuous course—“and I tell you he does. Every household supports at least four or five niggers. Now the vagrancy laws are going to drive that class of niggers to the North, and the Yankee ain’t goin’ to stand his ways. We’re a long-sufferin’ people here in the South.” 62 As for Mr. Du Bois’s book, it was evident that, even if he had it, he was not going to sell it to me. I left the shop with two books: one was “The Clansman,” by Thomas Dixon, jun., a melodramatic romance of the Ku-Klux-Klan; the other a pseudo-scientific onslaught on the negro race—a brutal and disgusting volume. An hour or two later I was sitting in the consulting-room or “office” of a coloured physician—Dr. Oberman, let me call him. |A Doctor’s Story.|His real name was that of a we ll-known Southern family, and I remarked upon the fact, expecting to hear that he had been born a slave in that family. In a sense this was the case; but his story was a strange one, and he told it with frank simplicity. |A Doctor’s Story.| | | “My father,” he said, “was in fact a member of that family”—and he told of sundry political offices which his white kindred had filled. 63“But my father attached himself openly and honourably to my mother, who was a slave in the family, and for that reason had to leave his home in North Carolina. For some reason or other they chose to go to the State of Mississippi. In 1850 that was a long and toilsome journey; and I was born on the way, not far from this place. For some years they lived in Mississippi, but they were again driven from there and passed into Ohio. My father was one of the noblest of men, and as soon as he was in a State where he could legally do so, he married my mother. I was present at the wedding.” 63 “Your mother, Dr. Oberman,” I said, “must surely have been a quadroon, or even an octoroon?” “My dear mother,” he said, “was very nearly of the same colour as myself. You see, sir, we don’t breed straight,”—and he proceeded to give several instances in which the children either of two people of mixed blood, or of a white father and a mother of mixed blood, had varied very widely in complexion and facial type, some
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