It took a moment for him to realize that the feeling came from being the only white man in a speakeasy full of colored folk.It wasn't that he was the object of stares; rather the opposite, since everyone was taking care not to meet his eyes. He could feel their fear, though, because he was white and a cop, and with white cops the Negro was always only a word or a look or a bad moon rising away from jail or the lynching tree.And he could feel their hate, which came from having the white man's boot on their necks for all their lives and their daddies' lives and their daddies' lives and so on back, so that the hate got bred into the blood. At least that, thought Fio, was how his partner had put it to him once, but then Day Rourke had this thing about the Negro race that Fio didn't understand. Although he had, after a fashion, learned to live with it.The speak was just one big old room with a bandstand at one end. The air was thick with the smell of muscatel, cheap perfume, hot grease, reefer, and years worth of God-knew-what-all that had been soaked and ground into the rubber tile floor.
