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A few hours later the two negroes journeyed on down to Perryville, Tennessee, a village on the Tennessee River where they took a gasolene launch up to Hooker's Bend. The launch was about fifty feet long and had two cabins, a colored cabin in front of, and a white cabin behind, the engine-room.

This unremitting insistence on his color, this continual shunting him into obscure and filthy ways, gradually gave Peter a loathly sensation. It increased the unwashed feeling that followed his lack of a morning bath. The impression grew upon him that he was being handled with tongs, along back-alley routes; that he and his race were something to be kept out of sight as much as possible, as careful housekeepers manœuver their slops.

At Perryville a number of passengers boarded the up-river boat; two or three drummers; a yellowed old hill woman returning to her Wayne County home; a red-headed peanut-buyer; a well-groomed white girl in a tailor suit; a youngish man barely on the right side of middle age who seemed to be attending her; and some negro girls with lunches. The passengers trailed ​from the railroad station down the river bank through a slush of mud, for the river had just fallen and had left a layer of liquid mud to a height of about twenty feet all along the littoral. The passengers picked their way down carefully, stepping into one another's tracks in the effort not to ruin their shoes. The drummers grumbled. The youngish man piloted the girl down, holding her hand, although both could have managed better by themselves.