Poorhouse Fair by John Updike

declare himself; tightened the screw on his silence.
    Hook was saying in a speechifying manner, ". . . received money from the hands of the northern manufactur-ers. Now that was what was said in my father's day."
    "Look at an old penny, John," Amy Mortis said, "the next time you have one. That's the face of no grafter,"
    "Hav-ing your face on coinage," was the considered reply, "doesn't make an honest man. Else why would we hold the opinion we do of the Emperor Nero?"
    Hook tilted his cigar with satisfaction at himself. His antagonist's goiter shook as she made a crude counter-thrust. "You don't think then he should have freed the slaves? You think the slaves should still be that way?"
    "Ah, they still were. Had the northern manufactur-ers been half so concerned with the slaves in their own mills as they were with those in the fields of the South, they would have had no need to make the war for the sake of munitions profits. But they were jealous. Their hearts were consumed by envy. They had taken a beating in the Panic of '57. The civili-zation of the south menaced their pocket-books. So as is the way with the mon-ied minority they hired a lawyer to do their dirty work, Lincoln."
    "They should have kept the niggers down then?" Amy said, restating her charge, with the implication that it had been evaded by the old debater.
    Conner conceived of a way to postpone inserting himself into their circle. The room was damp and chilled by the change of weather. None of the inmates had thought to light a fire, though dry wood was stacked pyramidally by the great fireplace, a black carven thing shipped from Bavaria by Mrs. Andrews, as fruit of a flighty excursion. All he needed to light a fire was paper. He moved about, with only Mary Jamiesson studying him, searching; accustomed to his office, he was bewildered that a room could contain so little paper. In a dark corner he did find, meticulously stacked on a table, some copies of a monthly publication of the Lutheran diocese titled Sweet Charity, forwarded to a male pensioner who had died the previous year in the west wing and to whom this musty stack appeared to form a monument. Conner took several of these white magazines and crumpled them.
    "Not down," Hook said, "but not everywhichway either. Where do you think the freed Negro was to find work, if not on the home plantation? Now did the manufac-turers want him in the northern cities? Now if I may have a minute of your time, good lady, endure this old fella for the length of one anecdote. Rafe Beam, my father's hired man when I was a boy on my father's farm ten miles this side of the Delaware, came from Pennsylvan-i-a, and had been raised near a settlement of the Quakers. The Quakers among the city dwellers had a great repu-tation for good works, and in Buchanan's day were much lauded for passing the runaway slaves on up to Canada. Ah. But the truth of it was, this old fella who was the patriarch of the sect would harbor the Negroes in the summer, when they would work his fields for nothing, and then when the cold weather came, and the crops were in, he would turn them out, when they had never known a winter before. One black man balked, you know, and the old fella standing on the doorstep said so sharp: 'Dost thou not hear thy Master calleth thee?' "
    Everyone laughed; Hook was an expert mimic. The hiss of avarice and the high-pitched musical fluting of the hypocrite had been rebuilt in their midst, and Hook's face had submitted to a marvelous transformation, the upper lip curling back in fury, then stiffening to go with the sanctimony of the arched eyebrows. Smiling a bit himself, he pulled on his cigar and concluded, "And no doubt he was a fair specimen of those so desirous to aid the Negro."
    It puzzled Conner to overhear such lively discussions of dead issues. The opposition of Republican and Democrat had been unreal since the Republican administrations of a generation ago. The word "Negro" itself was quaint.
    Dark-skinned