Quicksand
blunted the perceptions. Robbed life of its crudest truths. Especially it had its uses for the poor—and the blacks.
For the blacks. The Negroes.
And this, Helga decided, was what ailed the whole Negro race in America, this fatuous belief in the white man‘s God, this childlike trust in full compensation for all woes and privations in “kingdom come.” Sary: Jones‘s absolute conviction, “In de nex‘ worl‘ we‘s all recompense‘,” came back to her. And ten million souls were as sure of it as was Sary. How the white man‘s God must laugh at the great joke he had played on them! Bound them to slavery, then to poverty and insult, and made them bear it unresistingly, uncomplainingly almost, by sweet promises of mansions in the sky by and by.
“Pie in the sky,” Helga said aloud derisively, forgetting for the moment Miss Hartley‘s brisk presence, and so was a little startled at hearing her voice from the adjoining room
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