her picture. Yes, that seemed to be it. My mother had not been
honored. How could my father for any ambition, for any exigency of
circumstance stoop to a marriage of this sort, with the memory of my
mother still fresh in mind, if not in heart? Ah! that was it! Did he
keep her in his heart? My grandmother's reticence about my father began
to fill in with significance of this sort. She knew that he had married
the octoroon not many years after my mother's death. She resented it and
she preserved silence about him, while keeping me ignorant. Thus without
any preparation for the disclosure, I had encountered it at full speed
in my career. Reverdy had, no doubt, alluded to this matter when he
spoke with such feeling of my father in Chicago. "Poor fellow," he had
said. Did my father suffer for this marriage? What was his secret? Why
"poor fellow?"

With these thoughts I entered the house. I could sense that they knew
that I should return with the secret which they had kept from me. Zoe
was not in sight. Sarah's grandmother sat in her chair by the window
and called me to her. "Come here, Jimmy," she said. "You're a nice
English boy. You know we are all English. My father and mother were
English ... well, to be truthful, my father was half Irish. His mother
was Irish. And that makes us all friends, no matter how much we fight. We
fight and get over it. My husband was in the Revolutionary War; and he's
dead and gone long ago; and here I am in this new country of Illinois
with Sarah and a son-in-law soon to be ... and maybe as lonely sometimes
as you are. Sarah's mother was my pride and she's dead a long time too,
but I don't get over that.... What's the matter, Jimmy? You've had bad
news. O, yes, it had to come. You know now about Zoe. Well, remember that
pretty is as pretty does. For that matter, she is pretty enough, and
good enough too. Change her skin and any boy would be proud to be her
brother. That's what a little color does. And yet the good Lord made us
all, white as well as black. I have always liked the colored people. I
liked them in Tennessee, and I hated to see them mistreated whenever
they were. But I'm like a lot of others, I don't know what we are going
to do with so many of them; and I say let the southern people run their
own business and not try to intermeddle in the business of the Almighty.
If He hadn't wanted slavery He could have prevented it. As for me, I
don't want no slaves. Every one to his own way. Re