The Living is Easy. Dorothy West

jugglers all along the way.

      They kept on the lookout for Cleo because she walked proud with her eyes on a point above their bullet heads. They had sworn to a man to make her smile.

      “Look away, look away,” moaned an ogling admirer. “The yeller sun has took up walking like a natchal woman.”

      Roars of appreciative guffaws greeted this attempt at wit. As the laughter subsided, a falsetto voice implored, “Lawd, take me to heaven while I’m happy. You done open my eyes and I done see a host of angels coming at me. She look like fire, and she ack like ice. I’m hot, I’m cold. Oh, Lawd, have mercy on my soul.”

      Twin spots glowed in Cleo’s cheeks. A stream of white-hot words erupted inside her, but did not pass the thin line of her lips. She swallowed them down and felt the spleen spread to the pit of her stomach. Men were her enemies because they were male.

      The trolley wires began to hum. “Here comes the trolley,” said Cleo, with an expelled breath of profound relief. “Pick up your feet and don’t you dare fall down. If you get yourself dirty before we get to Brookline, I’ll give you to a Chinaman to eat.”

      The trolley halted, and she boosted Judy aboard. She dropped a single fare in the slot — Judy was small for going on six — asked for a transfer, guided Judy down the aisle of the swaying car, and shuttled her into a window seat. She sank down beside her and fanned herself elegantly with one gloved hand, stirring no air whatever.

      She looked herself now, gay and earth-rooted and intensely alive. Her gray eyes sparkled at Judy, at the slyly staring passengers, at the streets that grew cleaner and wider as the trolley left the Negro neighborhood, at the growing preponderance of white faces.

      Judy’s nose was pressed against the glass. Cleo nudged her and whispered, “Judy,” what do I tell you about making your nose flat?”

      Judy sighed and straightened up. The exciting street scene was a whole inch farther away. She withdrew into an injured silence and studied her reflection in the glass. It was not very clear, but she knew what she looked like. She looked like Papa.

      The people on the streetcar didn’t know that. They regarded her in a way that she was quite used to. They were wondering where Cleo got her. They carefully scrutinized Cleo, then they carefully scrutinized her, and raised their eyebrows a little.

      She was dark. She had Papa’s cocoa-brown skin, his soft dark eyes, and his generous nose in miniature. Cleo worked hard on her nose. She had tried clothespins, but Judy had not known what to do about breathing. Now Cleo was teaching her to keep the bridge pinched, but Judy pinched too hard, and the rush of dark blood made her nose look larger than ever.

      A little white dog with a lively face and a joyful tail trotted down the street. Judy grinned and screwed around to follow him with her eyes.

      Cleo hissed in her ear: “Don’t show your gums when you smile, and stop squirming. You’ve seen dogs before. Sit like a little Boston lady. Straighten your spine.”

      The trolley rattled across Huntington Avenue, past the fine granite face of Symphony Hall, and continued up Massachusetts Avenue, where a cross-street gave a fair and fleeting glimpse of the Back Bay Fens, and another cross-street showed the huge dome of the magnificent mother church of Christian Science. At the corner of Boylston Street, within sight of Harvard Bridge and the highway to Cambridge, Cleo and Judy alighted to wait for the Brookline Village trolley.

      Cleo saw with satisfaction that she was already in another world, though a scant fifteen-minute ride away from the mean streets of the Negro neighborhood. There were white people everywhere with sallow-skinned, thin, austere Yankee faces. They had the look that Cleo coveted for her dimpled daughter. She was dismayed by Judy’s tendency to be a happy-faced child, and hoped it was merely a phase of growth. A proper Bostonian never showed any emotion but hauteur. Though Cleo herself had no desire to resemble a fish, she wanted to be able to point with the pride of ownership to someone who did.

      The Village trolley came clanging up Boylston Street, and Judy clambered up the steps, pushed by her mother and pulled by the motorman. Cleo was pleased to see that there were no other colored passengers aboard. The occupants of the half-filled car were mostly matrons, whose clothes were unmodish and expensive. All of them had a look of distinction. They were neither Cabots nor Lowells, but they were old stock, and their self-assurance sat well on their angular shoulders.

      They did not stare at Cleo and Judy, but they were discreetly aware of the pair, and appreciative of their neat appearance. Boston whites of the better classes were never upset nor dismayed by the sight of one or two Negroes exercising equal rights. They cheerfully stomached three or four when they carried themselves inconspicuously. To them the minor phenomenon of a colored face was a reminder of the proud rôle their forebears had played in the freeing of the human spirit for aspirations beyond the badge of house slave.

      The motorman steered his rocking craft down a wide avenue and settled back for the first straight stretch of his roundabout run. Cleo looked at the street signs, and her heart began to pound with excitement. This was Brookline. There wasn’t another colored family she knew who had beaten her to it. She would be the first to say, “You must come to see us at our new address. We’ve taken a house in Brookline.”

      She began to peer hard at house numbers. A row of red-brick houses began, and Cleo suddenly pulled the bell cord.

      “We get off here,” she said to Judy, and shooed her down the aisle.

      Cleo walked slowly toward the number she sought, taking in her surroundings. Shade trees stood in squares of earth along the brick-paved sidewalk. Each house had a trim plot of grass enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. The half-dozen houses in this short block were the only brick houses within immediate sight except for a trio of new apartment houses across the way, looking flat-faced and ugly as they squatted in their new cement sidewalk.

      In the adjoining block was a row of four or five weathered frame houses with wide front porches, big bay windows, and great stone chimneys for the spiraling smoke of logs on blackened hearths. The area beyond was a fenced-in field, where the sleek and beautiful firehorses nibbled the purple clover and frisked among the wild flowers. Near-by was the firehouse with a few Irish heads in the open windows, and a spotted dog asleep in a splash of sun.

      Directly opposite from where Cleo walked was a great gabled mansion on a velvet rise, with a carriage house at the end of a graveled drive. The house was occupied, but there was an air of suspended life about it, as if all movement inside it was slow. Its columned porch and long French windows and lovely eminence gave the house grandeur.

      A stone’s-throw away was the winding ribbon of the Riverway Drive, over which the hooves of carriage horses clip-clopped and shiny automobiles choked and chugged. Beyond were the wooded Fens, at the outset of their wild wanderings over the city to Charlesgate.

      Cleo was completely satisfied with everything she saw. There were no stoop-sitters anywhere, nor women idling at windows, nor loose-lipped loiterers passing remarks. Her friends who lived in Dorchester, or Cambridge, or Everett had nice addresses, of course. But Brookline was a private world.

      She stopped and glanced down at her daughter to see if her ribbed white stockings were still smooth over her knees, and if the bright ribbons on the ends of her bobbing braids were as stiff and stand-out as they had been when she tied them. She scanned the small upturned face, and a rush of protective tenderness flooded her heart. For a moment she thought she had never seen anything as lovely as the deep rich color that warmed Judy’s cheeks. She herself had hated being bright-skinned when she was a child. Mama had made her wash her face all day long, and in unfriendly moments her playmates had called her yaller punkins. Now her northern friends had taught her to feel defensive because Judy was the color of her father.

      “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to,” Cleo warned Judy, and mounted the steps of the house before which they stood.

      In a moment or two a colored maid responded to her ring. She looked at Cleo with open-mouthed surprise, then her look became sly and secret. “Y’all come see about the house?” she asked in a conspiratorial whisper.