The Living is Easy. Dorothy West

Cleo did not know the word, and would not have admitted that its meaning was applicable, her yearning for her sisters was greater than her concern for them. All of her backward looks were toward the spellbinding South. The rich remembering threw a veil of lovely illusion over her childhood. Her sisters, with their look of Mama, would help her keep that illusion alive. She could no longer live without them. They were the veins and sinews of her heart.

      “Here comes the trolley car,” said Judy, who had finished her table of twos and was patiently reviewing her table of threes because she knew Cleo’s shut-away face and the uselessness of intruding her image on the broad bright canvas that Cleo called “long before you were ever thought of.”

      The trolley halted and they boarded it. There were several vacant seats at this hour of the day. Cleo herded Judy into one that was farthest away from the other passengers, who were, as usual, mildly diverted by the pair. Judy stared slightly open-mouthed while Cleo opened her purse, extracted the rent receipt, and wondered exasperatedly why children seemed to have nothing to do but mind the business of grown-ups. She rummaged around in the bottom of her bag, finally gave up her useless search, and surreptitiously surveyed the passengers. She settled on a lone man and pointed him out to Judy.

      “You see that man? Go ask him nicely to lend your mother a pencil. Tell him I want to write an address before I forget it.”

      Judy rose eagerly, feeling important, and started down the aisle.

      “Judy!” Cleo called softly.

      She turned and gaped at her mother.

      “A pencil with an eraser.”

      Judy came back and hung over Cleo. Cleo held the pencil poised and looked at her coldly. Then her face cleared. “Now,” she said sweetly, “go ask the conductor if this trolley goes to Scollay Square. My, but you’re a big girl!”

      Judy danced away, dizzy with happiness.

      Carefully Cleo erased the figure that Mr. Van Ryper had written in and substituted forty-five. With that bit of deception she had twenty dollars in her possession that Mr. Judson didn’t know she had. If she stayed on her toes, she would have twenty dollars every month until Mr. Judson caught up with her.

      Cleo sighed. Some day she would run out of ways to skin the cat. Then her head went up and her chin looked stubborn. But she’d give Mr. Judson a run for his money until she did.

      Judy came back tripping over her tongue as she imparted her information. Looking at the eager innocent face, Cleo remembered the many times Mr. Judson had said to her, “We should pull in harness for the child’s sake, Cleo. When you work against me, you work against her.” Her sluggish conscience stirred. She said quickly, almost appealingly, “Judy, don’t you ever get lonesome all by yourself? I had three sisters to play with when I was growing up. Wouldn’t you like two little girls and a little boy to keep you company when we move into that big house?”

      “Oh, I would, I would,” said Judy ecstatically.

      “I thought so,” said Cleo contentedly, and her conscience bogged down again.

CHAPTER 6

      BART JUDSON stared over the shimmering sea, his eyes screwed up against the sun and his sixth sense straining for some inner awareness of the merchant ship Lucy Evelyn sailing up from Jamaica under the English flag. Incoming craft bent their bows toward the busy harbor, their whistles blasting holes in the morning. Sea gulls dipped and screamed and soared. In their upward flight toward the sun, their breasts had the beauty of alabaster. Sparows twittered in the eaves of the wharves, and pigeons searched the gutters. Greek stevedores, with curls and classic faces, descended like dirty gods into the holds of ships at anchor. Jobbers darted about, shouting directions to shore workers. Over all was the ceaseless rumble of wagon wheels on the cobbled streets of the Boston Market.

      Bart stood alone, responding absently to the hurried genial greetings of the market men, whose places of business, along with his, formed the sprawling city of warehouses, wholesale stores, and retail stalls that made up the old historic market, which was the terminal point for the produce that came by sea and rail to feed the city and her neighbors north to Canada.

      All of Bart’s living had led to this place, and even this hour when he watched for a sea-scarred ship from Jamaica, bringing a cargo of bananas, of which his consignment was more than a thousand bunches. The fancy gold lettering over his store read: Bartholomew Judson, Foreign and Domestic Choice Fruits and Vegetables, Bananas a Specialty. There was no other man in the market who knew better than Bart how to ripen the delicate and perishable banana. From the great hooks in his ripening rooms hung the heavy fruit winter and summer. Always there was the ripening smell. Always it hung about Bart. His weekly bath could not wash away the odor of tropic fruit.

      He had seen his first banana when he was ten, somewhere along the middle seventies, and nine years after Mary, his mother, had snatched him from his crib, and tossed him in the air, and laughed, and cried, and told him he was free.

      He took his first step out of bondage that night, and walked without faltering straight to the shining object his mother held out to him. It was a piece of silver money that she had found the year before. She closed his tiny fist over it, and counseled him to treasure it, for money was the measure of independence.

      His year-old mind had not grasped that, but his mother dinned it into him over the period of his formative years until it was part of everything he thought. Mary knew what she wanted for herself and for him. She had no recollection of her own parents, and her man had been sold away from her. She was determined that she and her son would be the forerunners of a solid family.

      She packed her few belongings in a bandana, put her heavy baby on her hip, and walked off the ruined plantation into Richmond. She knew where she wanted to go and what she wanted to do. She went to the Widow Mears, who had sometimes hired slaves from the Judson plantation and who was known to be a just mistress. Widow Mears kept a rooming house for drummers and farmers in town for a brief stay. Mary had been a field hand all her life, but she talked herself up as the finest cook on the Judson plantation, and Widow Mears was persuaded to advertise meals.

      Mary fixed up the back shed and moved into it. Then she got a cigar box and cut a slit in it. She ripped the stitches in Bart’s pinafore pocket, where she had sewed the silver piece for safety. She placed it in his hand again and urged him to drop it down the hole. He yelled and resisted. She tugged at his tightened fist and pried it open. The coin fell through with a plunking sound that caught Bart’s ear. He picked up the box, shook it carefully, heard the roll and rattle of his savings, swallowed his sobs, and grinned.

      Every penny Mary made went into that box. As soon as her son was five years old and smart and strong enough to do a few chores, Mary got Widow Mears to put him to work shining shoes, filling pitchers, emptying slops. Each morning he followed her to the open market with a basket on his arm for rush things. Watching the dealers polish and praise, and Widow Mears pick and choose and warily watch the scales, Bart learned the elementary lessons of trade.

      As he grew older, there formed in his mind his dream of buying and selling. He began to live close, denying himself the peppermint sticks and candy apples that his sweet tooth hankered for, in order to swell the cigar box. When he was grown enough, he was going into business, and he would need capital.

      When he was eight, he put himself in school, not because he had any interest in formal education, but because he wanted to learn how to figure, and to write with a flourish, so that men would see he had schooling and would know in advance that he wasn’t a poor ignorant darky who would take a dime for a dollar.

      When he was ten, he knew exactly the line his life should follow. He borrowed a word from the Bible — beget. He liked the sound of the saying, money begets money. He and Mary counted their savings and rented an eating house in the center of town. Bart did the buying, and doubled as barker, shouting the specials of the day through the business section and taking orders drawled at doorways and windows. At the noon hour he trotted up and down office stairs in a long, immaculate apron that missed