JOANNA stood on the steps of the New York Public Library, gazing at the
paralysis of traffic which at the bidding of an autocratic policeman had
fallen on the massed ranks of vehicles. Subconsciously she thought of a
German story, “Germelshausen,” in which all the life of the village
suddenly ceased, leaving the people statues of flesh and blood. Fifth
Avenue coming to life again, she fell quite consciously to wondering
where she could get a good dinner. All about her flashed the lights of
restaurants, but she was not sure of their reception of colored patrons
and being in a slightly irritable mood, she wanted consciously to spare
herself any contact which would be more annoying. She needed more than
the cup of chocolate and sandwich which she might easily have had at one
of the two drug stores near by. And of course she could get something
expensive, but satisfying, in the station which towered not far away.
But of late the restaurant management in that particular station had
shown a tendency to place its colored patrons in remote and isolated
corners.
Joanna had spent the morning shopping. In one of the more exclusive
stores on Forty-fourth Street she had asked to look at coats. The
saleswoman had been very pleasant, but she had seated Joanna well in the
rear of the store quite away from the lighted front windows and the
mirrors which were so adjusted as to give all possible views of the
figure.
Joanna had not noticed this at first but when she did she proposed going
toward the front of the store “where there was more light.”
“Why not come this way?” proposed the still affable saleswoman, pointing
to the windows in the rear wall which also let in daylight. Yet when
Joanna without answering had walked on to the front, she offered no
further comment.
The incident was a slight one, possessing possibly no significance, but
Joanna had walked out of the store hot and raging, the more so because
she was not completely sure whether the slight was intentional or not.
It had not helped her frame of mind to purchase a less becoming coat in
a department store where she was known and liked by one of the
salesgirls. Gradually she worked herself into a state of contemptuous
indifference, but she meant to be careful in selecting a place in which
to get her dinner. She had to work too hard these days to bring on her
good spirits, she was not going to have them dissipated by galling if
petty discriminations.
Well, there was no help for it, she would have to go over to the
Pennsylvania station at Thirty-third Street. She was sure of pleasant
treatment there. After this solid afternoon of work in the gloomy
library, the walk would do her good.
A hand fell on her shoulder, and she turned to find beside her Vera
Manning, one of the members of her old dancing-class. This surprised
her, for of late hardly any one of Joanna’s group had seen Vera. The
report in Harlem was that she was passing for white and had no desire to
be recognized by her colored acquaintances.
“It’s been ages since I’ve seen you, Joanna,” Vera began confidently. “I
was sitting in the library waiting for a ‘date’—doesn’t that sound
awful?—and then all of a sudden I thought, ‘pshaw, I don’t want to be
bothered!’ Just then you hove on the scene. Where you going?”
“Some place to get a good dinner,” Joanna told her, wondering why she
looked different from the Vera Manning she used to know. Her clothes
showed her usual careful, even modish taste, but her face looked
hard—“reckless”—Joanna suddenly decided; that was the word. She went on
quickly: “See here, you work somewhere down in this neighborhood, don’t
you? Where do you suppose I can get something to eat, without walking a
thousand miles for it?”
Vera frowned thoughtfully. “You see, I’m ‘passing’ just now—I know
you’ve heard of it—and so I go into any of these places around here, but
I never see any colored people. Of course you could try the Automat.”
But Joanna didn’t want that.
“Their food’s all right when you feel like eating it, but I want a
regular dinner—waiter, service, and all the rest of it. Pick out a good
place for me and I’ll take you to dinner, too. Nothing could be fairer
than that.”
Vera agreed smilingly that it couldn’t. “There’s a place over on
Forty-second Street. I remember now I have seen some colored people in
there and they get decent treatment. We could go there—” she checked
herself a moment. “Oh, no, I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“Look here, Janna, I might as well be frank, we were all of us children
together—doesn’t it seem ages ago? You know I wouldn’t ever try to fool
you. But the truth of it is I go to that particular restaurant often
with the other girls in my office and of course the restaurant people
think I’m—I’m white. See? I don’t know just what they’d think if they
saw me with you—some one who definitely showed color—or what might come
of it. You don’t think I’m a pig, Joanna?”
“I think I’d be a pig if I did think so,” Joanna told her heartily.
“Come on and take dinner with me over at the Pennsy station. It’ll be
nice to have a talk.”
The two girls moved down Fortieth Street in the direction of Seventh
Avenue.
“You’d understand it better if you worked among them—white people you
know,” Vera told her seriously. “Of course I suppose there must be some
decent ones, not the high-brow philanthropists and all that crowd, but
people who have too much breeding, too much innate—well, niceness, I
guess you’d call it, to make light of folks just because they’re
different. But that crowd in my office, they never think of being
courteous to a colored person. If they want the janitor it’s ‘Where’s
that darky?’ or ‘I saw a coon in the subway this morning wearing a red
tie, made me think of Jim here,’ always something like that. Of course
they don’t say it to the man’s face. There’d be a fight if they did.”
“I don’t see how you stand it,” Joanna puzzled. “What put it in your
head to work with white people, anyhow?”
“Oh, to get away from everybody and everything I’d ever known.” They
were at the table in the dining-room now and Vera was making criss-cross
marks with her fork on the white cloth, frowning absorbedly.
“You know, Joanna, I wasn’t like you—not one of us girls was. I was more
like Sylvia, I wanted a good time, but most of all I wanted, I expected
to marry. You remember Harley Alexander?”
Joanna did remember him, indeed, a tall personable youth about her own
color, a companion of Harry Portor, Brian Spencer, and to a less degree
of her own brother Alec. But what she especially remembered was that he
had been the constant shadow of Vera Manning.
“Of course I remember him, Vera. He’s a dentist now, isn’t he? Didn’t he
graduate the same year as Harry Portor?”
“Yes, that’s the fellow. Joanna, we really loved each other, and we
planned even before he went to college to get married as soon as he came
out. But as soon as my mother—you know how color-struck she is—realized
we were in earnest, up she went in the air. None of her children should
marry a dark man. It only meant unhappiness. If Harley and I should have
children they’d be brown and would have to be humiliated like all other
colored children.”
She fell to drawing more designs.
“We had a terrible time. I was completely alone in my fight. Father
always follows mother’s lead. Brother Tom refused to commit himself.
Alice is just like mother—she really liked, I’m sure of it, John
Hamilton, but because he was dark, she let him go for Howard Morris,
whom I can’t stand. For a long time I managed to keep it from Harley but
the Christmas of his last year in college, mother told him she didn’t
favor his attentions to me, and told him why.”
“Goodness,” Joanna breathed, “that must have been awful.”
“Awful! It was unspeakable. And nothing I could say to Harley could
destroy the effect of what she said. She must have put it up to him as
to whether he thought he could compensate a wife for the estrangement of
her family. You know how Harley was. We had always been a remarkably
united family up to that time. He said: ‘If your mother objected to my
being poor I could tell her that I could change that, but when it comes
to my color, I can’t do anything with that and, by God, I wouldn’t if I
could.’
“So that,” Vera ended wryly, “was the end of my young romance.”
Bit by bit she made Joanna see the picture of her life since her break
with her lover. Before then she had worked in her father’s office, but
now she was secretary to one of the heads of a big advertising agency.
As she was an unusually swift stenographer and had a level head, she was
getting along famously.
“Of course they think I’m white. There are a lot of young men in the
office and I flirt with them outrageously. At first I did it only to
annoy mother, she hated it so. You know, the funny thing is she doesn’t
like white people any better than I do—she just didn’t want me to marry
a dark man because, she says, in this country a white skin is such an
asset.”
“Do you enjoy yourself going about?”
“Yes and no. When I began I did immensely. You can’t imagine—I
couldn’t—the almost unlimited opportunities that those people have for
work, for pleasure, for anything. As a white girl I’ve seen sights and
places, yes, and eaten food that I never even knew about when I used to
go out with Harley. And then, too, Jan, you can’t imagine the
blessedness of no longer being uncertain whether you can enter such and
such a hotel, or of getting a decent berth if you’re going traveling or
of little things like that, the sudden removal of thousands of
pin-pricks, not only that, of inconveniences.”
“You must be very happy,” Joanna said wistfully.
“No, I’m not. They aren’t, either. That’s the funny part. Oh, of course
I suppose nobody is actually happy, but I do think that colored people,
when they’re let alone long enough to have a good time, know how to
enjoy themselves better than any other people in the world. It’s a
gift.”
“I should think you’d drop it all, Vera.”
“I would if it weren’t for the sense of freedom. It’s wonderful to be
able to do as you like. Sometimes I think I will drop it, then I think:
‘Oh, pshaw, what difference does it make?’ Without Harley I’m bound to
be unhappy, anyway, even if I do go back to my own. Since I can’t have
happiness I might just as well take up my abode where I can have the
most fun and comfort even though it’s making me—well, no saint, I can
tell you.” She laughed recklessly. “I wish I were like you, Joanna.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know—here ever since you were little you’ve had Peter Bye
right at your beck and call—you must have loved him, Jan, he was so
everlastingly good-looking, and charming, too, we all thought. I
remember he took me to a movie one Christmas. Then you fussed with him
or something—some of your high-brow stuff I suppose—and you send him off
without winking an eyelash. How do you stand it?”
Joanna was cautious. “Of course I have my work. I do miss Peter
though—sometimes.”
“Sometimes! Girl, you aren’t human. Well, being heartless isn’t bad!
What do you want to do, go to the ‘Dance of The Nations’ down at the
District Line Theater?”
But Joanna wanted a chance to think, so on the pretext of having to
return to the Library, she left Vera. She realized the tragedy of her
friend’s case, the awful emptiness that had come into her life. Hadn’t
her own life been affected in the same way?
A bus stopped before her and she mounted it, her thoughts weaving
mechanically. She did not blame Vera at all for the change in her mode
of living. In those first few months after Peter had left her she had
wondered often how she could go on with life. For a long while she had
existed simply from day to day, paying an exaggerated attention to small
happenings, making engagements with people whom she had scarcely noticed
before, doing anything to get away from the weariness of her thoughts.
Many a night she had spent meditating on some _coup_, some reckless
expenditure of energy and interest no matter how silly, how scandalous,
so long as it took her out of herself.
She had even tried flirting, a field hitherto unthought of. As it was
she had been too kind to Harry Portor; of late she had consciously
avoided him because she knew only too well what he meant to ask of her
the next time they were alone. She hated to hurt him but that seemed
inevitable, for her heart held not the slightest fraction of love for
him.
Oh, Peter! Peter!
As she rode up Fifth Avenue under the starry reaches of the sky, beneath
the tender budding of April trees, her desperate longing quickened to a
sudden resolve. She would write to Maggie—Maggie, who could not possibly
love Peter. And even if she did, she could not love him as
she—Joanna—loved him. Why, there had been Philip once, and then
Henderson Neal!—Whereas Peter had been the only love of her own life.
She would write to Maggie, very clearly, very frankly and she would beg
her to let him go. It all seemed simple enough. And then she and Peter
would be happy. She would make him love her again, worship her. And
“Peter,” she would tell him, “never another unkind word, I’ll be a new
Joanna, darling.”
Her father’s house, its windows darkened, loomed up before her. Straight
up to her own room she sped, not stopping to enter Sylvia’s apartments,
although the sound of laughing voices penetrated to her.
Alone at the little flat-topped desk, she took out pen and paper and
began the letter—“Dear Maggie”—But that was what she had done years
ago,—written to Maggie to give up Philip. That was in the unconscious
selfishness of youth. Now was she to write her again to give up Peter?
Her courage oozed away, left her helpless. She looked at the pen, put it
carefully away on the rack, slipped the sheet of paper back in the
pigeonhole. She might go down to Philadelphia to visit Alice Talbert.
Yes, she would do that very soon. And then maybe she would see Maggie
Ellersley—on the street, or even go and call on her. Undoubtedly it was
better to discuss such personal matters face to face.
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