Cold Shoulder

Without dating, the American University would be as popular as a start prison. Negro men at Oregon date little this year, seldom at any time openly, because of the absence of negro women and the special circumstances that made dating with several white women easily possible the preceding few years.

What I now relate may seem tc contradict my account of friendships with whites, and unwillingness to go more than half-way. Yet so strong is the desire for the company of women that contradictions in behaviour inevitably arise.

My first year at Oregon was the final one for a negro family, a student and his wife and child, who occupied a small tan house adjacent to the campus.

Half-a-dozen men and an equal number of white girls congregated at this home at least several times a week, sometimes part of them every day. Occasionally a white married couple and one or two white men students would drop in to add to the company.

Here we celebrated birthdays, the finish of exams., danced, had a drink or two at times, joked and laughed. When the weather was fine, we often travelled into the country on picnics.

Inside the house, or alone by ourselves in the country, all of us were outwardly gay and relaxed, and on extremely friendly, if not intimate, terms. Yet just under the surface, tension stretched the relationships taut.

Once I tried to arrange a meeting in the city with one of the girls of whom I was rather fond.

"No." she said, "we've got to play the game carefully. I don't like the rules of society, but I've more to lose than you if were caught breaking them."

We never accompanied the girls on rampus. If you met one of them alone, she would greet you. If she walked with others, she would give a weak hello, or avoid speaking altogether.

In other, words, we were strangers until we entered that small tan house. Then all barriers broke.

When the school year ended, and the negro who rented the house graduated and left Eugene, our circle, not having a place to meet, scattered. 1 was not very sorry in most ways.

The whole relationship constantly reminded me of the one between Bilbo, late red-haired, red-nosed, ranting US senator, and his Mississippi negro constituents—the few who ever got near a political meeting or a polling booth.

"I've no grudge against you folks." he would tell a small roomful of negroes. "I don't appear to be a friend to you in public because the prejudices of the white people round here won't let me. But I want you to know that I'm really your friend no matter what I say to them."

The general attitude of white girls towards us is summed up in a little incident that happened in January.

Snow fluttered through the air as I crossed the campus between the education building and the library. Three girls plodded just ahead of me.

"A coon," one said after a backward glance.

"Uh, uh," the other two nodded in agreement.

The attitude of white men towards negro men mixing with white women reveals itself in an account passed on to me by a white acquaintance.

A friend of mine and his fiancee, who was on friendly terms with several negro families In Portland, attended a party at a negro home. The fiancee had always denied racial bias, in any form, and was devoted to a religious sect which boasted strict adherence to the ways of Christ. His bride-to-be danced with one the negro men.

"I could have killed them both," he admitted.