ife dan when I got dis medal fuh stobbin'
fo' white men."

Peter Siner looked through the Jim Crow window at the vast rotation of
the Kentucky landscape on which his forebears had toiled; presently he
added soberly:

"You were fighting for your country, Tump. It was war then; you were
fighting for your country."

* * * * *

At Jackson, Tennessee, the two negroes were forced to spend the night
between trains. Tump Pack piloted Peter Siner to a negro cafe where they
could eat, and later they searched out a negro lodging-house on Gate
Street where they could sleep. It was a grimy, smelly place, with its
own odor spiked by a phosphate-reducing plant two blocks distant. The
paper on the wall of the room Peter slept in looked scrofulous. There
was no window, and Peter's four-years regime of open windows and fresh-
air sleep was broken. He arranged his clothing for the night so it would
come in contact with nothing in the room but a chair back. He felt dull
next morning, and could not bring himself either to shave or bathe in
the place, but got out and hunted up a negro barber-shop furnished with
one greasy red-plush barber-chair.

A few hours later the two negroes journeyed on down to Perryville,
Tennessee, a village on the Tennessee River where they took a gasolene
launch up to Hooker's Bend. The launch was about fifty feet long and had
two cabins, a colored cabin in front of, and a white cabin behind, the
engine-room.

This unremitting insistence on his color, this continual shunting him
into obscure and filthy ways, gradually gave Peter a loathly sensation.
It increased the unwashed feeling that followed his lack of a morning
bath. The impression grew upon him that he was being handled with tongs,
along back-alley routes; that he and his race were something to be kept
out of sight as much as possible, as careful housekeepers manoeuver
their slops.

At Perryville a number of passengers boarded the up-river boat; two or
three drummers; a yellowed old hill woman returning to her Wayne County
home; a red-headed peanut-buyer; a well-groomed white girl in a tailor
suit; a youngish man barely on the right side of middle age who seemed
to be attending her; and some negro girls with lunches. The passengers
trailed from the railroad station down the river bank through a slush of
mud, for the river had just fallen and had left a layer of liquid mud to
a height of about twenty feet