Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/32

 blood in his veins and so bitter because of it, that he used up whatever talents he had groaning inwardly at capricious fate, and planning revenge upon the world at large, especially the black world. For it was Negroes and not whites whom he blamed for his own, to him, life’s tragedy. He was not fair enough of skin, despite his mother’s and his own hopes, to pass for white. There was a brownness in his skin, inherited from his mother, which immediately marked him out for what he was, despite the red hair and the Irish blue eyes. And his facial features had been modeled too generously. He was not thin lipped, nor were his nostrils as delicately chiseled as they might have been. He was a Negro. There was no getting around it, although he tried in every possible way to do so.

Finishing school, he had returned West for the express purpose of making his father accept him publicly and personally advance his career. He had wanted to be a lawyer and figured that his father’s political pull was sufficiently strong to draw him beyond race barriers and set him as one apart. His father had not been entirely cold to these plans and proposals, but his father’s wife had been. She didn’t mind her husband giving this nigger bastard of his money, and receiving him in his home on rare and private occasions. She was trying to be liberal, but