The Blacker the Berry (20 page)

But Gwendolyn was a poor psychologist. She didn’t realize that Emma Lou was possessed of a perverse bitterness and that she idolized the one thing one would naturally expect her to hate. Gwendolyn was certain that Emma Lou hated “yaller” niggers as she called them. She didn’t appreciate the fact that Emma Lou hated her own color and envied the more mellow complexions. Gwendolyn’s continual damnation of “pinks” only irritated Emma Lou and made her more impatient with her own blackness, for, in damning them, Gwendolyn also enshrined them for Emma Lou, who wasn’t the least bit anxious to be classified with persons who needed a champion.

However, for the time being, Emma Lou was more free than ever from tortuous periods of self-pity and hatred. In her present field of activity, the question of color seldom introduced itself except as Gwendolyn introduced it, which she did continually, even to the extent of giving lectures on race purity and the superiority of unmixed racial types. Emma Lou would listen attentively, but all the while she was observing Gwendolyn’s light-brown skin, and wishing to herself that it were possible for her and Gwendolyn to effect a change in complexions, since Gwendolyn considered a black skin so desirable.

They both had beaux, young men whom they had met at the various church meetings and socials. Gwendolyn insisted that they snub the “high yallers” and continually was going into ecstasies over the browns and blacks they conquested. Emma Lou couldn’t get excited over any of them. They all seemed so young and pallid. Their air of being all-wise amused her, their affected church purity and wholesomeness, largely a verbal matter, tired her. Their world was so small—church, school, home, mother, father, parties, future. She invariably compared them to Alva and made herself laugh by classifying them as a litter of sick puppies. Alva was a bulldog and a healthy one at that. Yet these sick puppies, as she called them, were the next generation of Negro leaders, the next generation of respectable society folk. They had a future; Alva merely lived for no purpose whatsoever except for the pleasure he could squeeze out of each living moment. He didn’t construct anything; the litter of pups would, or at least they would be credited with constructing something whether they did or not. She found herself strangely uninterested in anything they might construct. She didn’t see that it would make much difference in the world whether they did or did not. Months of sophisticated reading under Campbell Kitchen’s tutelage had cultivated the seeds of pessimism experience had sown. Life was all a bad dream recurrent in essentials. Every dog had his day and every dog died. These priggish little respectable persons she now knew and associated with seemed infinitely inferior to her. They were all hypocritical and colorless. The committed what they called sin in the same colorless way they served God, family, and race. None of them had the fire or gusto of Alva, nor his light-heartedness. At last she had met the “right sort of people” and found them to be quite wrong.

However, she quelled her growing dissatisfaction and immersed herself in her work. Campbell Kitchen had told her again and again that economic independence was the solution to almost any problem. When she found herself a well-paying position she need not worry more. Everything else would follow and she would find herself among the pursued instead of among the pursuers. This was the gospel she now adhered to and placed faith in. She studied hard, finished her courses at Teachers College, took and passed the school board examination, and mechanically followed Gwendolyn about, pretending to share her enthusiasms and hatreds. All would soon come to the desired end. Her doctrine of pessimism was weakened by the optimism the future seemed to promise. She had even become somewhat interested in one of the young men she had met at St. Mark’s. Gwendolyn discouraged this interest. “Why, Emma Lou, he’s one of them yaller niggers; you don’t want to get mixed up with him.”

Though meaning well, she did not know that it was precisely because he was one of those “yaller niggers” that Emma Lou liked him.

Emma Lou and her new “yaller nigger,” Benson Brown, were returning from church on a Tuesday evening where they had attended a young people’s bible class. It was a beautiful early fall night, warm and moonlit, and they had left the church early, intent upon slipping away from Gwendolyn, and taking a walk before they parted for the night. Emma Lou had no reason for liking Benson save that she was flattered that a man as light as he should find himself attracted to her. It always gave her a thrill to stroll into church or down Seventh Avenue with him. And she loved to show him off in the reception room of the Y.W.C.A. True, he was almost as colorless and uninteresting to her as the rest of the crowd with whom she now associated, but he had a fair skin and he didn’t seem to mind her darkness. Then, it did her good to show Gwendolyn that she, Emma Lou, could get a yellow-skinned man. She always felt that the reason Gwendolyn insisted upon her going with a dark-skinned man was because she secretly considered it unlikely for her to get a light one.

Benson was a negative personality. His father was an ex-preacher turned Pullman porter because, since prohibition times, he could make more money on the Pullman cars than he could in the pulpit. His mother was an active church worker and club woman, “one of the pillars of the community,” the current pastor at their church had called her. Benson himself was in college, studying business methods and administration. It had taken him six years to finish high school, and it promised to take him much longer to finish college. He had a placid, ineffectual dirty yellow face, topped by red mariney hair, and studded with gray eyes. He was as ugly as he was stupid, and he had been as glad to have Emma Lou interested in him as she had been glad to attract him. She actually seemed to take him seriously, while every one else more or less laughed at him. Already he was planning to quit school, go to work, and many her; and Emma Lou, while not anticipating any such sudden consummation, remained blind to everything save his color and the attention he paid to her.

Benson had suggested their walk and Emma Lou had chosen Seventh Avenue in preference to some of the more quiet side streets. She still loved to promenade up and down Harlem’s main thoroughfare. As usual on a warm night, it was crowded. Street speakers and their audiences monopolized the corners. Pedestrians and loiterers monopolized all of the remaining sidewalk space. The street was jammed with traffic. Emma Lou was more convinced than ever that there was nothing like it anywhere. She tried to formulate some of her impressions and attempted to convey them to Benson, but he couldn’t see anything unusual or novel or interesting in a “lot of niggers hanging out here to be seen.” Then, Seventh Avenue wasn’t so much. What about Broadway or Fifth Avenue downtown where the white folks gathered and strolled. Now those were the streets, Seventh Avenue, Harlem’s Seventh Avenue, didn’t enter into it.

Emma Lou didn’t feel like arguing. She walked along in silence, holding tightly to Benson’s arm and wondering whether or not Alva was somewhere on Seventh Avenue. Strange she had never seen him. Perhaps he had gone away. Benson wished to stop in order to listen to one of the street speakers who, he informed Emma Lou, was mighty smart. It seemed that he was the self-styled mayor of Harlem, and his spiel nightly was concerning the fact that Harlem Negroes depended upon white people for most of their commodities instead of opening food and dress commissaries of their own. He lamented the fact that there were no Negro store owners, and regretted wealthy Negroes did not invest their money in first-class butcher shops, grocery stores, et cetera. Then, he perorated, the Jews, who now grew rich off their Negro trade, would be forced out, and the money Negroes spent would benefit Negroes alone.

Emma Lou knew that this was just the sort of thing that Benson liked to hear. She had to tug hard on his arm to make him remain on the edge of the crowd, so that she could see the passing crowds rather than center her attention on the speaker. In watching, Emma Lou saw a familiar figure approach, a very trim, well-garbed figure, alert and swaggering. It was Braxton. She didn’t know whether to speak to him or not. She wasn’t sure that he would acknowledge her salute should she address him, yet here was her chance to get news of Alva, and she felt that she might risk being snubbed. It would be worth it. He drew near. He was alone, and, as he passed, she reached out her arm and touched him on the sleeve. He stopped, looked down at her and frowned.

“Braxton,” she spoke quickly, “pardon me for stopping you, but I thought you might tell me where Alva is.”

“I guess he’s at the same place,” he answered curtly, then moved away. Emma Lou bowed her head shamefacedly as Benson turned toward her long enough to ask who it was she had spoken to. She mumbled something about an old friend, then suggested they go home. She was tired. Benson agreed reluctantly and they turned toward the Y.W.C.A.

A taxi driver had brought Alva home from a saloon where he had collapsed from cramps in the stomach. That had been on Monday. The doctor had come and diagnosed his case. He was in a serious condition, his stomach lining was practically eaten away and his entire body wrecked from physical excess. Unless he took a complete rest and abstained from drinking liquor and all other forms of dissipation, there could be no hope of recovery. This hadn’t worried Alva very much. He chafed at having to remain in bed, but possibility of death didn’t worry him. Life owed him very little, he told Geraldine. He was content to let the devil take his due. But Geraldine was quite worried about the whole matter. Should Alva die or even be an invalid for any lengthy period, it would mean that she alone would have the burden of their misshapen child. She didn’t want that burden. In fact, she was determined not to have it. And neither did she intend to nurse Alva.

On the Friday morning after the Monday Alva had been taken ill, Geraldine had left for work as was her custom. But she did not come back that night. Every morning during that week she had taken away a bundle of this and a bundle of that until she had managed to get away most of her clothes. She had saved enough of her earnings to pay her fare to Chicago. She had chosen Chicago because a man who was interested in her lived there. She had written to him. He had been glad to hear from her. He ran a buffet flat. He needed some one like her to act as hostess. Leaving her little bundles at a girl friend’s day after day and packing them away in a secondhand trunk, she had planned to leave the moment she received her pay on Saturday. She had intended going home on Friday night, but at the last moment she had faltered and reasoned that as long as she was away and only had twenty-four hours more in New York she might as well make her disappearance then. If she went back she might betray herself or else become soft-hearted and remain.

Alva was not very surprised when she failed to return home from work that Friday. The woman in the next room kept coming in at fifteen-minute intervals after five-thirty inquiring: “Hasn’t your wife come in yet?” She wanted to get rid of the child which was left in her care daily. She had her own work to do, her own husband and child’s dinner to prepare; and, furthermore, she wasn’t being paid to keep the child both day and night. People shouldn’t have children unless they intended taking care of them. Finally Alva told her to bring the baby back to his room … his wife would be in soon. But he knew full well that Geraldine was not coming back. Hell of a mess. He was unable to work, would probably have to remain in bed another week, perhaps two. His money was about gone, and now Geraldine was not there to pay the rent out of her earnings. Damn. What to do … what to do? He couldn’t keep the child. If he put it in a home they would expect him to contribute to its support. It was too bad that he didn’t know some one to leave this child of his with as his mother had done in his case. He began to wish for a drink.

Hours passed. Finally the lady came into the room again to see if he or the baby wanted anything. She knew Geraldine had not come in yet. The partition between the two rooms was so thin that the people in one were privy to everything the people in the other did or said. Alva told her his wife must have gone to see her sick mother in Long Island. He asked her to take care of the baby for him. He would pay her for her extra trouble. The whole situation offered her much pleasure. She went away radiant, eager to tell the other lodgers in the house her version of what had happened.

Alva got up and paced the room. He felt that he could no longer remain flat on his back. His stomach ached, but it also craved for alcoholic stimulant. So did his brain and nervous system in general. Inadvertently, in one of his trips across the room, he looked into the dresser mirror. What he saw there halted his pacing. Surely that wan, dissipated, bloated face did not belong to him. Perhaps he needed a shave. He set about ridding himself of a week’s growth of beard, but being shaved only made his face look more like the face of a corpse. It was liquor he needed. He wished to hell some one would come along and get him some. But no one came. He went back to bed, his eyes fixed on the clock, watching its hands approach midnight. Five minutes to go…. There was a knock on the door. Eagerly he sat up in the bed and shouted, “Come in.”

But he was by no means expecting or prepared to see Emma Lou.

Emma Lou’s room in the Y.W.C.A. at three o’clock that same morning. Emma Lou busy packing her clothes. Gwendolyn in negligee, hair disarrayed, eyes sleepy, yet angry:

“You mean you’re going over there to live with that man?”

“Why not? I love him.”

Gwendolyn stared hard at Emma Lou. “But don’t you understand he’s just tryin’ to find some one to take care of that brat of his? Don’t be silly, Emma Lou. He doesn’t really care for you. If he did, he never would have deserted you as you once told me he did, or have subjected you to all those insults. And … he isn’t your type of man. Why, he’s nothing but a …”

“Will you mind tending to your own business, Gwendolyn,” her purple powdered skin was streaked with tears.

“’But what about your—”