so john freemantle accepted the invitation , and the vote went his way ( by quite a comfortable margin , too ) , and there were nasty cracks , and jokes about how a coon had got caught in the grange hall loft , and about how when a nigger-baby went to heaven and got its little black wings you called it a bat instead of an angel , and ben conveigh went around for a while telling people that the only reason the mystic tie grange had voted john freemantle in was because the children 's fair was coming up pretty soon and they needed a nigger to play the african orangutan .