Into his room, through the thin wall, came the catch of numberless sobs, the long-drawn open wails, and the spasms of sobbing.  Blurred voices called, “O Gawd!  Gawd hab mercy!  Hab mercy!” Now words were lost in the midst of confusion.  The clamor boomed through the thin partition as if it would shake down his newspapered walls.  With wet cheeks and an aching throat, Peter sat by his table, staring at his book-case in silence, like a white man.

The dim light of his lamp fell over his psychologies and philosophies.  These were the books that had given him precedence over the old washwoman who kept him in college.  It was reading these books that had made him so wise that the old negress could not even follow his thoughts.  Now in the hour of his mother’s death the backs of his metaphysics blinked at him emptily.  What signified their endless pages about dualism and monism, about phenomenon and noumenon?  His mother was dead.  And she had died embittered against him because he had read and had been bewildered by these empty, wordy volumes.

A sense of profound defeat, of being ultimately fooled and cozened by the subtleties of white men, filled Peter Siner.  He had eaten at their table, but their meat was not his meat.  The uproar continued.  Standing out of the din arose the burden of negro voices “Hab mercy!  Gawd hab mercy!”

In the morning the Ladies of Tabor came and washed and dressed Caroline Siner’s body and made it ready for burial.  For twenty years the old negress had paid ten cents a month to her society to insure her burial, and now the lodge made ready to fulfil its pledge.  After many comings and goings, the black women called Peter to see their work, as if for his approval.

The huge dead woman lay on the four-poster with a sheet spread over the lower part of her body.  The ministrants had clothed it in the old black-silk dress, with its spreading seams and panels of different materials.  It reminded Peter of the new dress he had meant to get his mother, and of the modish suit which at that moment molded his own shoulders and waist.  The pitifulness of her sacrifices trembled in Peter’s throat.  He pressed his lips together, and nodded silently to the black Ladies of Tabor.

Presently the white undertaker, a silent little man with a brisk yet sympathetic air, came and made some measurements.  He talked to Peter in undertones about the finishing of the casket, how much the Knights of Tabor would pay, what Peter wanted.  Then he spoke of the hour of burial, and mentioned a somewhat early hour because some of the negroes wanted to ship as roustabouts on the up-river packet, which was due at any moment.

These decisions, asked of Peter, kept pricking him and breaking through the stupefaction of this sudden tragedy.  He kept nodding a mechanical agreement until the undertaker had arranged all the details.  Then the little man moved softly out of the cabin and went stepping away through the dust of Niggertown with professional briskness.  A little later two black grave-diggers set out with picks and shovels for the negro graveyard.