Paid Servant by E. R. Braithwaite Read Free Book Online

little devil, very sturdy and sound.”
    â€œHe’s coloured, isn’t he?” from Audrey.
    â€œOh, yes!”
    â€œWhat happened to his parents?”
    â€œNobody seems to know anything about the father, and the mother abandoned him in hospital soon after birth.”
    â€œFrom which part of the West Indies is she?” Don asked.
    â€œShe’s not West Indian. She’s English.”
    They exchanged glances, and immediately I could feel the change in their attitude.
    â€œOh,” exclaimed Audrey, “I thought when you said that he was coloured you meant he was one of us.”
    â€œWell, he’s not white,” I replied lamely.
    â€œThat makes it a bit difficult, Rick,” Don said. “After all, if we’re going to adopt a child we would like to have one which at least looked like us. We don’t want to have to explain to people about it. Apart from that, I don’t mind putting myself out for one of our own people, but I’m not getting involved with any of the others.”
    There it was again. ‘My people’; ‘those people’; ‘other people’. They’d not seen the boy and were casually prepared to exclude him from their consideration purely because he was not black enough; the mere mention of the English mother had settled the matter. They were not even interested in the father’s origin.
    â€œPoor little bugger,” I said. “That leaves him high and dry in no-man’s-land.”
    â€œSorry, Rick,” Don said, “but it would cause too many complications. If it was a Negro child we might consider it, but as it is ….”
    Very reasonable and fair, and probably right. But, listening to him, I remembered that this was the same Don with whom I had had so many heated arguments years before when I was passing through a very rough time right here in Britain. In those distant times, he was always holding forth on the illogic of prejudice and the importance of individual responsibility. Whenever I started on my anti-white hate quest, he was the person who often talked about the futility of hate, and the need for positive endeavour to live above it. Especially that time after the Old Bailey thing; he was the one who …
    I had been quite unprepared for it. The envelope seemed so ordinary except for the blue colour and the official O.H.M.S. stamp on it, that I was flabbergasted to discover that it was a summons to appear for jury service at the Old Bailey within ten days. Me. And after all the difficulty and heartache I had experienced in trying to earn a living. Me—on a jury. It seemed too fantastic for words.
    I knew how people were selected for jury service, and the qualifications necessary to selection. I was a householder (quite a highbrow name to describe my ownership of the tiny two-up and one-down house which I had bought as an alternative to paying excessive room rent near where I worked), and that alone was enough to qualify me; the powers which summoned one neither knew nor cared about my state of mind.
    I had spoken with Don about the summons and my feelings of resentment. He had patiently talked about the origins of the jury system, and the bloody price which Englishmen had paid centuries ago in order to safeguard this cornerstone of freedom; he reminded me that I had not been summoned to jury service because I was black, but because I was a man, a citizen, and I should be proud to shoulder a citizen’s responsibility. He further advised me to live like a man, with dignity and not let the colour of my skin cripple my spiritual growth or social consciousness. And he told me then that our shoutings against prejudice and discrimination would be empty and meaningless until, inside ourselves, we admitted no difference between men, any men, based on the colour of their skins.
    I believed him. I believed all he said because we had shared many similar experiences and had so much in common, and I