In those days right after the war, things were a mite different than they became later. But in another way of looking at it, I don’t reckon things really are ever all that different. People are still people and they still have to live together and get along. People of different skin still have trouble sharing this old world together. Kinda funny, it’s always seemed to me. You’d figure folks would enjoy their differences and wouldn’t all want to be the same. But strange to say, that’s not how it is. All through history, I suppose, people haven’t liked those who were different from them. You might say that’s just about been at the root of all the world’s problems. I don’t understand it myself, but then that’s the way it seems to be. When it comes to the differences between people of white skin and people of what you’d call colored skin, that’s where the differences and disputes and conflicts seem to be worst of all. After the war, slaves like Jake and me had been freed from slavery, but we hadn’t been freed from the white man’s feelings against black people.
