The Blacker the Berry (17 page)

“And you don’t see me starving, either,” would be the comeback.

“Oh, jost ’cause you got that little black wench …”

“That’s all right about the little black wench. She’s forty with me, and I know how to treat her. I bet you couldn’t get five cents out of her.”

“I wouldn’t try.”

“Hell, if you tried it wouldn’t make no difference. There’s a gal ready to pay to have a man, and there are lots more like her. You couldn’t even keep a good-looking gold mine like Anise. Wish I could find her.”

Braxton would sulk a while, thinking that his silence would discourage Alva, but Alva was not to be shut up. He was truly outraged. He felt that he was being imposed upon, being used by some one who thought himself superior to him. He would admit that he wasn’t as handsome as Braxton, but he certainly had more common sense. The next Monday Braxton moved.

Alva was to take Emma Lou to the midnight show at the Lafayette Theater. He met her as she left work and they had taken the subway uptown. On the train they began to talk, shouting into one another’s ears, trying to make their voices heard above the roar of the underground tube.

“Do you like your new home?” Alva shouted. He hadn’t seen her since she had moved two days before.

“It’s nice,” she admitted loudly, “but it would be nicer if I had you there with me.”

He patted her hand and held it regardless of the onlooking crowd.

“Maybe so, Sugar, but you wouldn’t like me if you had to live with me all the time.”

Emma Lou was aggrieved: “I don’t see how you can say that. How do you know? That’s what made me mad last Sunday.”

Alva saw that Emma Lou was ready for an argument and he had no intention of favoring her, or of discomfiting himself. He was even sorry that he said as much as he had when she had first broached the “living together” matter over the telephone on Sunday, calling him out of bed before noon while Geraldine was there, too, looking, but not asking, for information. He smiled at her indulgently:

“If you say another word about it, I’ll kiss you right here in the subway.”

Emma Lou didn’t put it beyond him so she could do nothing but smile and shut up. She rather liked him to talk to her that way. Alva was shouting into her ear again, telling her a scandalous tale he claimed to have heard while playing poker with some of the boys. He thus contrived to keep her entertained until they reached the 135th Street station where they finally emerged from beneath the pavement to mingle with the frowsy crowds of Harlem’s Bowery, Lenox Avenue.

They made their way to the Lafayette, the Jew’s gift of entertainment to Harlem colored folk. Each week the management of this theater presents a new musical revue of the three-a-day variety with motion pictures—all guaranteed to be from three to ten years old—sandwiched in between. On Friday nights there is a special midnight performance lasting from twelve o’clock until four or four-thirty the next morning, according to the stamina of the actors. The audience does not matter. It would as soon sit until noon the next day if the “high yaller” chorus girls would continue to tell stale jokes, just so long as there was a raucous blues singer thrown in every once in a while for vulgar variety.

Before Emma Lou and Alva could reach the entrance door, they had to struggle through a crowd of well-dressed young men and boys, congregated on the sidewalk in front of the theater. The midnight show at the Lafayette on Friday is quite a social event among certain classes of Harlem folk, and, if one is a sweet back or a man about town, one must be seen standing in front of the theater, if not inside. It costs nothing to obstruct the entrance way, and it adds much to one’s prestige. Why, no one knows.

Without untoward incident Emma Lou and Alva found the seats he had reserved. There was much noise in the theater, much passing to and fro, much stumbling down dark aisles. People were always leaving their seats, admonishing their companions to hold them, and some one was always taking them despite the curt and sometimes belligerent, “This seat is taken.” Then, when the original occupant would return, there would be still another argument. This happened so frequently that there seemed to be a continual wrangling automatically staged in different parts of the auditorium. Then people were always looking for some one or for something, always peering into the darkness, emitting code whistles, and calling to Jane or Jim or Pete or Bill. At the head of each aisle, both upstairs and down, people were packed in a solid mass, a grumbling, garrulous mass, elbowing their neighbors, cursing the management, and standing on tiptoe trying to find an empty, intact seat—intact because every other seat in the theater seemed to be broken. Hawkers went up and down the aisle shouting, “Ice cream, peanuts, chewing gum, or candy.” People hissed at them and ordered what they wanted. A sadly inadequate crew of ushers inefficiently led people up one aisle and down another trying to find their supposedly reserved seats; a lone fireman strove valiantly to keep the aisles clear as the fire laws stipulated. It was a most chaotic and confusing scene.

First, a movie was shown while the organ played mournful jazz. About one o’clock the midnight revue went on. The curtain went up on the customary chorus ensemble singing the customary, “Hello, we’re glad to be here, we’re glad to please you” opening song. This was followed by the usual song-and-dance team, a blues singer, a lady Charleston dancer, and two black-faced comedians. Each would have his turn, then begin all over again, aided frequently by the energetic and noisy chorus, which somehow managed to appear upon the stage almost naked in the first scene, and keep getting more and more naked as the evening progressed.

Emma Lou had been to the Lafayette before with John and had been shocked by the scantily clad women and obscene skits. The only difference that she could see in this particular revue was that the performers were more bawdy and more boisterous. And she had never been in or seen such an audience. There was as much, if not more, activity in the orchestra and box seats than there was on the stage. It was hard to tell whether the cast was before or behind the proscenium arch. There seemed to be a veritable contest going on between the paid performers and their paying audience, and Emma Lou found the spontaneous monkey shines and utterances of those around her much more amusing than the stereotyped antic of the hired performers on stage.

She was surprised to find that she was actually enjoying herself, yet she supposed that after the house-rent party she could stand anything. Imagine people opening their flats to the public and charging any one who had the price to pay twenty-five cents to enter? Imagine people going to such bedlam Bacchanals?

A new scene on the stage attracted her attention. A very colorfully dressed group of people had gathered for a party. Emma Lou immediately noticed that all the men were dark, and that all the women were either a very light brown or “high yaller.” She turned to Alva:

“Don’t they ever have anything else but fair chorus girls?”

Alva made a pretense of being very occupied with the business on the stage. Happily, at that moment, one of a pair of black-faced comedians had set the audience in an uproar with a suggestive joke. After a moment Emma Lou found herself laughing, too. The two comedians were funny, no matter how prejudiced one might be against unoriginality. There must be other potent elements to humor besides surprise. Then a very Topsy-like girl skated onto the stage to the tune of “Ireland must be heaven because my mother came from there.” Besides being corked until her skin was jet black, the girl had on a wig of kinky hair. Her lips were painted red—their thickness exaggerated by the paint. Her coming created a stir. Every one concerned was indignant that something like her should crash their party. She attempted to attach herself to certain men in the crowd. The straight men spurned her merely by turning away. The comedians made a great fuss about it, pushing her from one to the other, and finally getting into a riotous argument because each accused the other of having invited her. It ended by them agreeing to toss her bodily off the stage to the orchestral accompaniment of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” while the entire party loudly proclaimed that “Black cats must go.”

Then followed the usual rigamarole carried on weekly at the Lafayette concerning the undesirability of black girls. Every one, that is, all the males, let it be known that high browns and “high yallers” were “forty” with them, but that…. They were interrupted by the re-entry of the little black girl riding a mule and singing mournfully as she was being thus transported across the stage:

A yellow gal rides in a limousine,
A brown-skin rides a Ford,
A black gal rides an old jackass
But she gets there, yes, my Lord.

Emma Lou was burning up with indignation. So color-conscious had she become that any time some one mentioned or joked about skin color, she immediately imagined that they were referring to her. Now she even felt that all the people near by were looking at her and that their laughs were at her expense. She remained silent throughout the rest of the performance, averting her eyes from the stage and trying hard not to say anything to Alva before they left the theater. After what seemed an eternity, the finale screamed its good-bye at the audience, and Alva escorted her out into Seventh Avenue.

Alva was tired and thirsty. He had been up all night the night before at a party to which he had taken Geraldine, and he had had to get up unusually early on Friday morning in order to go after his laundry. Of course, when he arrived at Bobby’s apartment where his laundry was being done, he found that his shirts were not yet ironed, so he had gone to bed there, with the result that he hadn’t been able to go to sleep, nor had the shirts been ironed, but that was another matter.

“First time I ever went to a midnight show without some thing on my hip,” he complained to Emma Lou as they crossed the taxi-infested street in order to escape the crowds leaving the theater and idling in front of it, even at four A.M. in the morning.

“Well,” Emma Lou returned vehemently, “it’s the last time I’ll ever go to that place any kind of way.”

Alva hadn’t expected this. “What’s the matter with you?”

“You’re always taking me some place, or placing me in some position where I’ll be insulted.”

“Insulted?” This was far beyond Alva. Who on earth had insulted her and when. “But,” he paused, then advanced cautiously, “Sugar, I don’t know what you mean.”

Emma Lou was ready for a quarrel. In fact, she had been trying to pick one with him ever since the night she had gone to that house-rent party, and the landlady had asked her to move on the following day. Alva’s curt refusal of her proposal that they live together had hurt her far more than he had imagined. Somehow or other he didn’t think she could be so serious about the matter, especially upon such short notice. But Emma Lou had been so certain that he would be as excited over the suggestion as she had been that she hadn’t considered meeting a definite refusal. Then the finding of a room had been irritating to contemplate. She couldn’t have called it irritating of accomplishment because Alva had done that for her. She had told him on Sunday morning that she had to move and by Sunday night he had found a place for her. She had to admit that he had found an exceptionally nice place, too. It was just two blocks from him, on 138th Street between Eighth Avenue and Edgecombe. It was near the elevated station, near the park, and cost only ten dollars and fifty cents per week for the room, kitchenette, and private bath.

On top of his refusing to live with her, Alva had broken two dates with Emma Lou, claiming that he was playing poker. On one of these nights, after leaving work, Emma Lou had decided to walk past his house. Even at a distance she could see that there was a light in his room, and when she finally passed the house, she recognized Geraldine, the girl with whom she had seen Alva dancing at the Renaissance Casino, seated in the window. Angrily, she had gone home, determined to break with Alva on the morrow, and on reaching home had found a letter from her mother which had disturbed her even more. For a long time now her mother had been urging her to come home, and her Uncle Joe had even sent her word that he meant to forward a ticket at an early date. But Emma Lou had no intentions of going home. She was so obsessed with the idea that her mother didn’t want her, and she was so incensed at the people with whom she knew she would be forced to associate, that she could consider her mother’s hysterically put request only as an insult. Thus, presuming, she had answered in kind, giving vent to her feelings about the matter. This disturbing letter was in answer to her own spleenic epistle, and what hurt her most was, not the sharp counselings and verbose lamentations therein, but the concluding phrase, which read, “I don’t see how the Lord could have given me such an evil, black hussy for a daughter.”

The following morning she had telephoned Alva, determined to break with him, or at least make him believe she was about to break with him, but Alva had merely yawned and asked her not to be a goose. Could he help it if Braxton’s girl chose to sit in his window? It was as much Braxton’s room as it was his. True, Braxton wouldn’t be there long, but while he was, he certainly should have full privileges. That had quieted Emma Lou then, but there was nothing that could quiet her now. She continued arguing as they walked toward 135th Street.

“You don’t want to know what I mean.”

“No, I guess not,” Alva assented wearily, then quickened his pace. He didn’t want to have a public scene with this black wench. But Emma Lou was not to be appeased.

“Well, you will know what I mean. First you take me out with a bunch of your supposedly high-toned friends, and sit silently by while they poke fun at me. Then you take me to a theater, where you know I’ll have my feelings hurt.” She stopped for breath. Alva filled in the gap.

“If you ask me,” he said wearily, “I think you’re full of stuff. Let’s take a taxi. I’m too tired to walk.” He hailed a taxi, pushed her into it, and gave the driver the address. Then he turned to Emma Lou, saying something which he regretted having said a moment later.