In defending the racial status quo, Dixon had actually elevated himself to the role of defender of the white South itself and—in the minds of virtually all white southerners of the time—the Southland. For African Americans were in no way considered of the South in the same way white southerners understood the proposition of their own nativity. Blacks were part of the South, to be sure, but one with alien roots, and only a legitimate part of the Southland when kept firmly in their place of subservience, quietude, and dutiful physical labor.

A few more improvements are very essential, such as a new flooring for the Male Wards and Dispensary; another ambulance in place of the sick wagon, as a call for ambulance is often received while it is responding to a previous one, the only resort then being to forward the sick wagon, a vehicle not as suitable as an ambulance, two ambulances thus being more preferable ; also, the repairing of the one on hand, it being in a very poor condition.

After that I was regarded as comic. I became a ‘coconut’—someone brown on the outside, white on the inside. I was the bleached academic—more white than the anglo professors. In my classes several students glared at me, clearly seeing in me the person they feared ever becoming. Who was I, after all, but some comic Queequeg, holding close to my breast a reliquary containing the white powder of a dead European civilization?

You can either have a wild, exciting life stiff-arming God or a dull, boring one doing the go-to-church-God-thing.