IF Peter was unconscious of the utter desirability of association with
the young Marshalls, Maggie Ellersley was not. Ever since her childhood
when she had overheard a conversation between a cousin and her mother,
she had made up her mind to attach herself to some such family and see
what came of it.
The cousin and her mother worked together for some wealthy white people.
Maggie’s mother was a laundress, a spare hard-working woman to whom life
had meant nothing but poverty and confusion. On Thursdays and Fridays of
each week she washed and ironed and gossiped with “my cousin Mis’
Sparrow” who was cook at the house on Madison Avenue. Maggie used to
come there for dinner and go home with her mother.
“Mis’ Sparrow,” small and spidery, had a perpetual complaint against the
world. In particular she experienced envy toward those who were better
off than herself. Her jaundiced disposition may be excused, however,
when one reflects that hers was a lot which had been hard ever since she
could remember. She was poor, she was weak, she was ignorant. Add to
that the fact that she was black in a country where color is a crime and
you have her “complex.” Some people would say she had really done well
in one sense with her life. She had attained by her own unaided efforts
to a comfortable, even if menial, position, where she had heat, light
and enough to eat. They would ask: Considering her beginnings what more
could she want? Alas, in that dull soul unknown aspirations stirred,
amazing questions took form. “Why, why, why?” asked Mis’ Sparrow in her
own peculiar dialect, “are all the sweetness and light of life showered
on some and utterly denied to me?”
At present Mis’ Sparrow had fastened a resentful eye on Mrs. Proctor,
the bride of the son of the “white folks” for whom she worked. Edmonia
the maid had told her about the newcomer, and over the supper table she
retailed it to Mrs. Ellersley.
“She wan’t nobuddy. Jes’ a little teeny slip of ole white gal. No money,
no fambly, no nuthin’.”
“Where’d he meet her then?” asked Mrs. Ellersley, uninterested but
polite.
“Young Mr. Proctor’s sister met her in boardin’-school, poorest thing
there,” replied Mis’ Sparrow, wiping a puckered mouth with her apron.
“’Monia says Miss Dorothy sorry for her and got her a job in her
father’s office. Mr. Harry was jes’ home f’um college; he saw her, took
a fancy to her and jes’ married her. Jes’ wouldn’t listen to nobuddy
a-tall.”
“Don’t it beat all,” pondered Mrs. Ellersley, “how some people have all
the luck? Now if that kind of thing could just happen to my Maggie.”
Mis’ Sparrow was unmoved by the irrelevant allusion to Maggie. Where
would she get such a chance?
“’Monia says she don’t even love him. Liked some young travelin’
salesman she’d known all her life. ’Monia declares she cries about him
when she’s by herself.”
“What she marry him for then?” asked Maggie Ellersley, aged twelve, and
an interested listener.
“H’m child, wouldn’t you do anything to get away f’um hard work, an’
ugly cloes an’ bills? Some w’ite folks has it most as bad as us poor
colored people. On’y thing is they has more opporchunities.”
Maggie, visualizing the life which she and her mother endured, thought
she probably would. She thought it again after they had reached the
tenement in Thirty-fifth Street where the two of them lived. It was the
famous “Tenderloin” of those days and Maggie’s spirit revolted with a
revulsion of feeling which never ceased to amaze her mother against the
sordidness of that place. There were three rooms. The front one looked
on the street and so was well lighted, but the other two got light only
from the air-shaft. Mrs. Ellersley, a widow who considered herself
fortunate to be one, rented the front room out, usually to train-men
(perhaps some of Meriwether’s acquaintances were among them),
occasionally to a married couple.
She and Maggie slept and lived in the two wretchedly ventilated rooms,
in a perpetual gloom penetrated ever so slightly by a flickering blue
flame. A confusion of clothes, obscene old furniture, boxes, stale
newspapers was littered about them. For some reason the rooms were
everlastingly damp, perhaps because, although rain could get down the
air-shaft, the sunlight never could. The rooms gave Maggie a constantly
eerie feeling, which in later more fortunate years she was always able
to recall by the sight of a gas-flame burning low and blue.
They never, in those days, enjoyed a really bright flame. Saving was
Mrs. Ellersley’s insistent because necessary fetish. Maggie’s tea was
always weak, and never sweet enough. The bread—baker’s with holes in it,
yesterday’s, two loaves for five cents—was always stale; the meat
usually salt and sometimes tainted.
Out of it all Maggie bloomed—a strange word but somehow true. She was
like a yellow calla lily in the deep cream of her skin, the slim
straightness of her body. She had a mass of fine, wiry hair which hung
like a cloud, a mist over two gray eyes. Her lips, in spite of her
constant malnutrition, persisted unbelievably red. When she met
excitement those gray eyes darkened and shone, her cheeks flushed a
little, her small hands fluttered. And she was nearly always excited.
Something within her frail bosom pulsed in a constant revolt against the
spirit of things that kept her in these conditions.
“I will not always live like this, Ma—I’ll get out of it some way.”
And her mother, though always scoffing, believed her with a dreary
hopefulness. “If there’s a way to be found out, Maggie’ll find it.”
Maggie found early that one avenue of escape lay through men. They were
stronger than women, they made money. They did not give the impression
of shrinking from spending the last penny lest when that cent was gone
there should be no more. All the train-men liked her. She could not get
much order in that abominable home, but she could and did keep herself
clean and neat. She washed her few garments over night; she wound a
stray ribbon, from a box of cigars or a box of candy, through her hair.
Some of the men, young students, “on the road” during their summer
vacations, used to flirt with her.
“Hurry and grow up, Mag. When I get through school I’ll come back and
marry you. How’d you like to live in a little house—not like this!—in
Washington?” Or Wilmington or Savannah as the case might be. “I’d give
you pretty dresses.”
Poor Maggie. Her calla-lily charm visibly lessened in those days when
she opened her pretty mouth. She disclosed herself then for what she
was, a true daughter of the Tenderloin.
“Aw quit your kiddin!”
But she came slowly to realize that here was a way out. If she could
only grow up—if she were—say—seventeen.
She was persistently frail, else her mother might have put her to work.
As it was she was sent to school very regularly—to save fuel and gas.
Evenings she went to the houses where her mother worked and got her
dinner.
On the night after she had listened to Mis’ Sparrow’s comments about
young Mrs. Proctor, she sat thoughtful a long time. She had sense enough
to know that very often these train-men stayed poor. They made pretty
good money—they did, too, in those days—but not enough to save their
wives from labor. Maggie did not want to wash and iron, to go through
the dreary existence which had been her mother’s when her father was
living; he had run on the road.
Suppose, just suppose, there were some colored men who were fortunate,
successful, who had enough to eat, who could give their wives help. Her
mother knew of ministers like that. There were colored doctors and
lawyers somewhere. Their very titles connoted prosperity.
“Ma,” she spoke out of her brown study, “are there any very rich colored
men?”
“Not any very rich ones, I don’t think,” Mrs. Ellersley replied
thoughtfully, “but lots very well off, comfortable, with servants to
wait on ’em.” She sighed.
“I’m going to meet one,” said Maggie solemnly, and henceforth she
thought, she dreamed of nothing else.
When she was fourteen young John Howe, who was occupying the front room,
came down with a spell of typhoid fever. He begged Mrs. Ellersley not to
send him to the hospital, and it was impossible to get him to his home
in Oklahoma. He had enough money to see him through, and he put his
fortunes and his case into her withered hands. All the train-men knew of
Mrs. Ellersley’s absolute honesty. She did what she could for him, sat
up long nights, gave him his medicine faithfully, “counted out his
money.”
But it was Maggie who gave real service. She stayed out of school to
attend him. The doctor gave her a list of directions which she followed
with meticulous care. In that shabby house down in that terrible
district John Howe met with an attention, a devotion from the humble
woman and her delicate daughter, such as no money could have bought him
in the seats of the mighty.
John Howe was a Lincoln divinity student, intermittently working his way
through college. He sat up gaunt and weak in the scratched bed of cheap
cherry wood and picked with long skeleton fingers at the thin blue and
white checked coverlet.
“Maggie, you and your mother’ve been mighty good to me. Look here, I’ve
got to pay you back somehow. After this illness I’ll have to stay out of
school a year. What do you want?”
Maggie stared at him, her gray eyes going black in the yellow oval of
her face.
“There’s only one thing I want, Mr. Howe, and you couldn’t give me
that.”
“I could try. What is it?”
“Oh Mr. Howe, if you could just get us out of this awful place, this
house, this street! If I could just get to know some decent folks——”
“Well, I don’t see how I could arrange about the folks. Where do you
want to live, if you go from here? There’re not many places for colored
folks in New York.”
“There are houses for colored people up in Fifty-third Street, and
decent folks living in them.”
“But my goodness, Maggie, it costs a fortune to rent one of those
houses.”
“I know, oh, I know. But if we could just get started. Mother could fill
the house with roomers. Why there’ve been twelve men here for this room
since you’ve been sick. The rest of the rooms aren’t much, but mother
always keeps this room tidy, and we’re honest. They all know that. Never
missed a penny here, any of them. And they tell their friends about us.
Lots of times they tell Ma if she only had more room she’d have all the
roomers she wanted.”
“But you’ve no furniture.”
“We could buy on the instalment plan.” She had her scheme all worked
out. Clearly she had nursed her project. “Mr. Howe, if you could just
help us to begin.”
He would, he told her, convinced by her earnestness. “What exactly do
you want me to do, Maggie?”
She wanted him to make his headquarters with them for the year, and to
pay as much as he could in advance. It was still early summer. He must
write and tell other men, who would want rooms, and get a few of them to
pay in advance, too. “Train-men won’t mind that,” she told him shrewdly,
“they’ll like to know they have some place to go to when they’ve cleaned
themselves out at cards, or whatever it is they do. That will pay a
month’s rent, and leave something, and with what we pay on this—this
_hole_, we’ll have something to put on the furniture.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Howe, “I’ll speak to your mother about it.”
But that was useless. Mrs. Ellersley was sure of her livelihood, her
mere existence here, but she was doubtful about a great venture. “Of
course, for Maggie’s sake I’d like to get away.”
“Oh, Ma, do—do, Ma,” Maggie had pleaded in an ecstasy of longing. “This
is our one chance. You see if we don’t take this we’ll never get away.”
Fortunately she had Howe to back her. “She’s right, Mrs. Ellersley, and
this is no place for a young girl to grow up. You can count on me. I’ll
go look for a house, and see about some furniture. I know plenty of
fellows would be glad to come.”
Miraculously the scheme worked. It gave Maggie her first insight into
the workings of life. If you wanted things, you thought and thought
about them, and when an opportunity offered, there you were with your
mind made up to jump at it.
Of course they were poor, but at least they were decent. John Howe,
staying for that year in New York, realizing more and more how truly he
was indebted to Maggie and her mother, took a proprietary interest. He
laid the cheap rugs, he set up the cots, three in a room, he did
mysterious jobs in the bath-room which to Maggie was always so
marvelous. He bought tools and fixed window-cords which the landlord
neglected. Maggie darned his socks for him, and he bought some
wall-paper, cheap but clean and virginal, a soft yellow, and papered her
square box of a room. A good job he made of it, too. Another roomer at
his instigation made a dressing table out of a packing box which Mrs.
Ellersley, re-invigorated, covered with scrim.
Gradually, word of her rooming-house spread among the better class of
transients. All her lodgers gave her their mending to do, she washed for
some of them, gave breakfast to a few chosen spirits, and they paid
willingly and well.
Maggie was in transports. This was something like a home. Of course, she
had to attend school in the district. Her mother took her as soon as
matters were settled. She looked fresh and neat in a dark blue serge
dress trimmed with black braid, the gift of melancholy Mis’ Sparrow who
in turn had had it from young Mrs. Proctor. The dress was worn, but it
was whole, and Maggie had tacked a tiny turnover of white lace in the
high collar.
She was assigned to the eighth grade. There were two of them in the
school. Her star was in the ascendant, for she was assigned to the one
of which Sylvia Marshall was a member. She would have fared differently
if it had been Joanna, for unless she were markedly clever, Joanna, who
was intellectually a snob, would probably never have seen her. But
Sylvia spied her at once. She came over to Maggie at recess.
“You’re a new girl, aren’t you? Want me to show you your way around?”
Maggie looked at the pretty girl, charming in a soft dark red cashmere
dress made with a wide pleated skirt. She had on little patent leather,
buttoned shoes with cloth tops, and a big red bow perched butterfly
fashion on her dark head. Joanna wore her hair rather primly back from
her face, but Sylvia’s was parted and rolled in waves over her ears,
then it was caught up and confined by the bow. She had a thin gold
bracelet on one arm. And about her hung the aura of well-being and easy
self-assurance which marked all the Marshall children.
“I wish you would,” said Maggie.
Sylvia in those days was an ardent worker in Old Zion Sunday School and
had promised to help in a campaign for more students. She told Maggie
about it within the next two or three days.
“My mother is going to entertain the new folks whom I get to join. Will
you join?”
Maggie would and so went to Sylvia’s home as her mother’s guest.
She never forgot that home with its quiet dignity and atmosphere of
prosperity. The Marshall children were a revelation to her. She had not
known of colored people like these.
“At last I’m getting to know decent people,” she told her mother.
She had a passion for respectability and decency quite apart from what
they connoted of comparative ease and comfort, though she coveted these
latter, too, and meant some day to have them.
“Two months ago,” she thought, “I was still in that horrible house on
Thirty-fifth Street, and I got away. If that could happen, anything
could happen.” She lay in her bed at nights in the little yellow room
and saw visions.
------------------------------------------------------------------------