he felt that the next person who asked him if he were bee immune might safely be given an affirmative answer. He believed that the next time a bee alighted on a flower before him he would at least be able to say whether it was an Italian or a Black German.
He so disliked the name that he told himself as he climbed the back walk that if those bees belonged to him, he truly would pick up the hives of the Black Germans and carry them down and pitch them into the Pacific Ocean. He would not have anything called a Black German, not even a bee, where it was a daily reminder of what true Black Germans had done to men of his father’s race and country, to men who carried his same blood in their veins. Of course, it was silly to carry the loathing contempt he felt for a race of men into his feeling for a hive of bees. It was not very sensible, but Jamie reflected as he slowly climbed the walk, eating a big red tomato that he had picked from a vine he passed, that there was not much reason to most of our likes and dislikes in this world. What we liked was so a matter of individual preference, and preference was so controlled by the manner in which one had been reared, by environment, by individual taste, that necessarily there had to be a wide range given to personal preference.
Jamie wiped his fingers and threw the core of the tomato as far as he could fling it down the mountain-side and went into the house. On the back porch he changed his own coat, and entered the living room to select the particular book he intended to read, with two thoughts foremost in
