The Blacker the Berry (18 page)

“How did my friends insult you?”

“You know how they insulted me, sitting up there making fun of me ’cause I’m black.”

Alva laughed, something he also regretted later.

“That’s right, laugh, and I suppose you laughed with them then, behind my back, and planned all that talk before I arrived.”

Alva didn’t answer and Emma Lou cried all the rest of the way home. Once there he tried to soothe her.

“Come on Sugar, let Alva put you to bed.”

But Emma Lou was not to be sugared so easily. She continued to cry. Alva sat down on the bed beside her.

“Snap out of it, won’t you, Honey? You’re just tired. Go to bed and get some sleep. You’ll be all right tomorrow.”

Emma Lou stopped her crying.

“I may be all right, but I’ll never forget the way you’ve allowed me to be insulted in your presence.”

This was beginning to get on Alva’s nerves but he smiled at her indulgently:

“I suppose I should have gone down on the stage and biffed one of the comedians in the jaw?”

“No,” snapped Emma Lou, realizing she was being ridiculous, “but you could have stopped your friends from poking fun at Me.”

“But, Sugar,” this was growing tiresome. “How can you say they were making fun of you. It’s beyond me.”

“It wasn’t beyond you when it started. I bet you told them about me before I came in, told them I was black….”

“Nonsense, weren’t some of them dark? I’m afraid,” he advanced slowly, “that you are a trifle too color-conscious,” he was glad he remembered that phrase.

Emma Lou flared up: “Color-conscious … who wouldn’t be color conscious when everywhere you go people are always talking about color. If it didn’t make any difference they wouldn’t talk about it, they wouldn’t always be poking fun, and laughing and making jokes….”

Alva interrupted her tirade. “You’re being silly, Emma Lou. About three-quarters of the people at the Lafayette tonight were either dark brown or black, and here you are crying and fuming like a ninny over some reference made on the stage to a black person.” He was disgusted now. He got up from the bed. Emma Lou looked up.

“But, Alva, you don’t know.”

“I do know,” he spoke sharply for the first time, “that you’re a damn fool. It’s always color, color, color. If I speak to any of my friends on the street you always make some reference to their color and keep plaguing me with—’Don’t you know nothing else but light-skinned people?’ And you’re always beefing about being black. Seems like to me you’d be proud of it. You’re not the only black person in this world. There are gangs of them right here in Harlem, and I don’t see them going around a-moanin’ ’cause they ain’t half white.”

“I’m not moaning.”

“Oh, yes you are. And a person like you is far worse than a hinkty yellow nigger. It’s your kind helps make other people color-prejudiced.”

“That’s just what I’m saying; it’s because of my color….”

“Oh, go to hell!” And Alva rushed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Braxton had been gone a week. Alva, who had been out with Marie, the creole Lesbian, came home late, and, turning on the light, found Geraldine asleep in his bed. He was so surprised that he could do nothing for a moment but stand in the center of the room and look-first at Geraldine and then at her toilet articles spread over his dresser. He twisted his lips in a wry smile, muttered something to himself, then walked over to the bed and shook her.

“Geraldine, Geraldine,” he called. She awoke quickly and smiled at him.

“Hello. What time is it?”

“Oh,” he returned guardedly, “somewhere after three.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Playing poker.”

“With whom?”

“Oh, the same gang. But what’s the idea?”

Geraldine wrinkled her brow.

“The idea of what?”

“Of sorta taking possession?”

“Oh,” she seemed enlightened, “I’ve moved to New York.”

It was Alva’s cue to register surprise.

“What’s the matter? You and your old lady fall out?”

“Not at all.”

“Does she know where you are?”

“She knows I’m in New York.”

“You know what I mean. Does she know you’re going to stay?”

“Certainly.”

“But where are you going to live?”

“Here.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“But … but … well, what is this all about, anyhow?”

She sat up in the bed and regarded him for a moment, a light smile playing around her lips. Before she spoke she yawned; then in a cool, even tone of voice, announced, “I’m going to have a baby.”

“But,” he began after a moment, “can’t you—can’t you…?”

“I’ve tried everything and now it’s too late. There’s nothing to do but have it.”

It was two years later. “Cabaret Gal,” which had been on the road for one year, had returned to New York and the company had been disbanded. Arline was preparing to go to Europe and had decided not to take a maid with her. However, she determined to get Emma Lou another job before she left. She inquired among friends, but none of the active performers she knew seemed to be in the market for help, and it was only on the eve of sailing that she was able to place Emma Lou with Clere Sloane, a former stage beauty who had married a famous American writer and retired from public life.

Emma Lou soon learned to like her new place. She was Clere’s personal maid, and found it much less tiresome than being in the theater with Arline. Clere was less temperamental and less hurried. She led a rather leisurely life, and treated Emma Lou more as a companion than a servant. Clere’s husband, Campbell Kitchen, was very congenial and kind, too, although Emma Lou, at first, seldom came into contact with him, for he and his wife practically led separate existences, meeting only at meals, or when they had guests, or when they both happened to arise at the same hour for breakfast. Occasionally, they attended the theater or a party together, and sometimes entertained, but usually they followed their own individual paths.

Campbell Kitchen, like many other white artists and intellectuals, had become interested in Harlem. The Negro and all things negroid had become a fad, and Harlem had become a shrine to which feverish pilgrimages were in order. Campbell Kitchen, along with Carl Van Vechten, was one of the leading spirits in this “Explore Harlem; Know the Negro” crusade. He, unlike many others, was quite sincere in his desire to exploit those things in Negro life which he presumed would eventually win for the Negro a more comfortable position in American life. It was he who first began the agitation in the higher places of journalism which gave impetus to the spiritual craze. It was he who ferreted out and gave publicity to many unknown blues singers. It was he who sponsored most of the younger Negro writers, personally carrying their work to publishers and editors. It wasn’t his fault entirely that most of them were published before they had anything to say or before they knew how to say it. Rather it was the fault of the faddistic American public which followed the band wagon and kept clamoring for additional performances, not because of manifested excellence, but rather because of their sensationalism and pseudo-barbaric
decor
.

Emma Lou had heard much of his activity, and had been surprised to find herself in his household. Recently he had written a book concerning Negro life in Harlem, a book calculated by its author to be a sincere presentation of those aspects of life in Harlem which had interested him. Campbell Kitchen belonged to the sophisticated school of modern American writers. His novels were more or less fantastic bits of realism, skipping lightly over the surfaces of life, and managing somehow to mirror depths through superficialities. His novel on Harlem had been a literary failure because the author presumed that its subject matter demanded serious treatment. Hence, he disregarded the traditions he had set up for himself in his other works, and produced an energetic and entertaining hodgepodge, where the bizarre was strangled by the sentimental, and the erotic clashed with the commonplace.

Negroes had not liked Campbell Kitchen’s delineation of their life in the world’s greatest colored city. They contended that, like “Nigger Heaven” by Carl Van Vechten, the book gave white people a wrong impression of Negroes, thus lessening their prospects of doing away with prejudice and race discrimination. From what she had heard, Emma Lou had expected to meet a sneering, obscene cynic, intent upon ravaging every Negro woman and insulting every Negro man, but he proved to be such an ordinary, harmless individual that she was won over to his side almost immediately.

Whenever they happened to meet, he would talk to her about her life in particular and Negro life in general. She had to admit that he knew much more about such matters than she or any other Negro she had ever met. And it was because of one of these chance talks that she finally decided to follow Mrs. Blake’s advice and take the public school teachers’ examination.

Two years had wrought little change in Emma Lou, although much had happened to her. After that tearful night, when Alva had sworn at her and stalked out of her room, she had somewhat taken stock of herself. She wondered if Alva had been right in his allegations. Was she supersensitive about her color? Did she encourage color prejudice among her own people, simply by being so expectant of it? She tried hard to place the blame on herself, but she couldn’t seem to do it. She knew she hadn’t been color-conscious during her early childhood days; that is, until she had had it called to her attention by her mother or some of her mother’s friends, who had all seemed to take delight in marveling, “What an extraordinarily black child!” or “Such beautiful hair on such a black baby!”

Her mother had even hidden her away on occasions when she was to have company, and her grandmother had been cruel in always assailing Emma Lou’s father, whose only crime seemed to be that he had had a blue black skin. Then there had been her childhood days when she had ventured forth into the streets to play. All of her colored playmates had been mulattoes, and her white playmates had never ceased calling public attention to her crow-like complexion. Consequently, she had grown sensitive and had soon been driven to play by herself, avoiding contact with other children as much as possible. Her mother encouraged her in this, had even suggested that she not attend certain parties because she might not have a good time.

Then there had been the searing psychological effect of that dreadful graduation night, and the lonely and embittering three years at college, all of which had tended to make her color more and more a paramount issue and ill. It was neither fashionable nor good for a girl to be as dark as she, and to be, at the same time, as untalented and undistinguished. Dark girls could get along if they were exceptionally talented or handsome or wealthy, but she had nothing to recommend her, save a beautiful head of hair. Despite the fact that she had managed to lead her classes in school, she had to admit that mentally she was merely mediocre and average. Now, had she been as intelligent as Mamie Olds Bates, head of a Negro school in Florida, and president of a huge national association of colored women’s clubs, her darkness would not have mattered. Or had she been as wealthy as Lillian Saunders, who had inherited the millions her mother had made producing hair straightening commodities, things might have been different; but here she was, commonplace and poor, ugly and undistinguished.

Emma Lou recalled all these things, while trying to fasten the blame for her extreme color-consciousness on herself as Alva had done, but she was unable to make a good case of it. Surely, it had not been her color-consciousness which had excluded her from the only Negro sorority in her college, nor had it been her color-consciousness that had caused her to spend such an isolated three years in Southern California. The people she naturally felt at home with had, somehow or other, managed to keep her at a distance. It was no fun going to social affairs and being neglected throughout the entire evening. There was no need in forcing one’s self into a certain milieu only to be frozen out. Hence, she had stayed to herself, had had very few friends, and had become more and more resentful of her blackness of skin.