e plenty
of them in the immediate neighborhood, swarming around the collection
of huts and shanties near the railroad tracks given over to negroes,
and known as Flytown. But they had their own school, which looked
externally quite like all the others in town, and their playground,
beaten bare like that of the Washington Street School, was filled
with laughing, shouting children, ranging from shoe-black through
coffee-color to those occasional tragic ones with white skin and blue
eyes, but with the telltale kink in the fair hair and the bluish
half-moon at the base of the finger-nails.

The four hundred children in the Washington Street School were,
therefore, a mass more homogeneous than alarmists would have us
believe it possible to find in this country. They were, for all
practical purposes, all American, and they were all roughly of one
class. Their families were neither rich nor poor (at least so far as
the children's standards went). Their fathers were grocers, small
clerks, merchants, two or three were truck-farmers, plumbers,
carpenters, accountants, employees of various big businesses in town.

It was into this undistinguished and plebeian mediocrity that the
Marshall children were introduced when they began going to school.

The interior of the school-building resembled the outside in being
precisely like that of ten thousand other graded schools in this
country. The halls were long and dark and dusty, and because the
building had been put up under contract at a period when public
contract-work was not so scrupulously honest as it notably is in our
present cleanly muck-raked era, the steps of the badly built staircase
creaked and groaned and sagged and gave forth clouds of dust under the
weight of the myriads of little feet which climbed up and clown those
steep ascents every day. Everything was of wood. The interior looked
like the realized dream of a professional incendiary.

The classrooms were high and well-lighted, with many large windows,
never either very clean or very dirty, which let in a flood of our
uncompromisingly brilliant American daylight upon the rows of little
seats and desks screwed, like those of an ocean liner, immovably to
the floor, as though at any moment the building was likely to embark
upon a cruise in stormy waters.

Outwardly the rows of clean-faced, comfortably dressed, well-shod
American children, sitting in chairs, bore no resemblance to
shaven-headed, barefooted little Ara