a wall in the exciting glare of the corner lamp, which flared gaseously, winking noisily from time to time.
Or, crouched in the concealing shrubbery of Gant’s yard, they waited for romantic negro couples climbing homewards, jerking by a cord, as their victims came upon the spot, a stuffed black snake— appearing stocking. And the dark was shrill with laughter as the loud rich comic voices stammered, stopped, and screamed.
Or they stoned the cycling black boy of the markets, as he swerved down gracefully into an alley. Nor did they hate them: clowns are black. They had learned, as well, that it was proper to cuff these people kindly, curse them cheerfully, feed them magnanimously. Men are kind to a faithful wagging dog, but he must not walk habitually upon two legs. They knew that they must “take nothin’off a nigger,” and that the beginnings of argument could best be scotched with a club and a broken head. Only, you couldn’t break a nigger’s head.
They spat joyously upon the Jews. Drown a Jew and hit a nigger.
The boys would wait on the Jews, follow them home shouting “Goose Grease! Goose Grease!” which, they were convinced, was the chief staple of Semitic diet; or with the blind acceptance of little boys of some traditional, or mangled, or imaginary catchword of abuse, they would yell after their muttering and tormented victim: “Veeshamadye Veeshamadye!” confident that they had pronounced the most unspeakable, to Jewish ears, of affronts.
Eugene had no interest in pogroms, but it was a fetich with Max. The chief object of their torture was a little furtive-faced boy, whose name was Isaac Lipinski. They pounced cattishly at him when he appeared, harried him down alleys, over fences, across yards, into barns, stables, and his own house; he moved with amazing speed and stealth, escaping fantastically, teasing them to the pursuit, thumbing his fingers at them, and grinning with wide Kike constant derision.
Or, steeped catlike in the wickedness of darkness, adrift in the brooding promise of the neighborhood, they would cluster silently under a Jew’s home, grouped in a sniggering huddle as they
