The Living is Easy. Dorothy West

stuck-up northern niggers. Thought they were better than southern niggers. Well, all of them looked alike to the white man. Let this high-yaller woman go down South and she’d find out.

      “Step inside,” she said surlily. “You’re letting in flies.”

      “I’m sorry,” Cleo said sweetly. “I see a big black fly got in already.” With a dazzling smile she entered the house, and instantly drew a little breath at sight of the spacious hall with its beautiful winding stairway.

      “What’s the name?” the maid asked briefly. If this woman wanted to be treated like white folks, at least she wasn’t going to be treated like quality white folks.

      “The name is Mrs. Judson,” Cleo said readily. She had been asked a proper question, however rudely, and she was perfectly willing to answer it. This peevish incivility was much less insulting than the earlier intimacy. If she had wanted to gossip with the servant before seeing the master, she would have used the back door.

      “Wait here,” the woman said, and began a snail-pace ascent of the stairs, with her rocking buttocks expressive of her scorn.

      “Always remember,” said Cleo loudly and sweetly to Judy, “that good manners put you in the parlor and poor manners keep you in the kitchen.” The maid’s broad back seemed to swell the seams of her uniform. “That’s what I’m paying good money to your governess for,” Cleo added impressively. “So you won’t have to wear an apron.”

      Judy stared down at her shoes, feeling very uncomfortable because Cleo’s voice was carrying to the woman on the stairs. Miss Binney always said that a lady must keep her voice low, and never boast, and never, never say anything that might hurt somebody’s feelings.

      “She heard you,” said Judy in a stricken voice.

      Cleo gave her a look of amiable impatience. “Well, I expected her to hear. Who did you think I was talking to? I certainly wasn’t talking to you.”

      Her eyes grew lively with amusement as she studied her daughter’s distress. Sometimes she wondered where she had got Judy. Judy had no funny bone. Thea was probably responsible. She had no funny bone either. Their diversions were so watery. What was the sense in Judy’s taking delight in a dog’s wagging tail if she was going to miss the greater eloquence of that woman’s wagging rear, and then look shocked when her mother talked back at it? You really had to love Bostonians to like them. And the part of Cleo that did love them was continually at war with the part of her that preferred the salt flavor of lusty laughter.

      Her eyes clouded with wistfulness. The more the years increased between the now and the long ago, the more the broad A’s hemmed her in, the more her child grew alien to all that had made her own childhood an enchanted summer, so in like degree did her secret heart yearn for her sisters. She longed for the eager audience they would have provided, the boisterous mirth she would have evoked when she flatfooted up an imaginary flight of stairs, agitating her bottom. Who did she know in the length and breadth of Boston who wouldn’t have cleared an embarrassed throat before she got going good on her imitation?

      Sometimes you felt like cutting the fool for the hell of it. Sometimes you hankered to pick a bone and talk with your mouth full. To Cleo culture was a garment that she had learned to get into quickly and out of just as fast.

      She put on her parlor airs now, for Mr. Van Ryper was descending the stairs. Her eyebrows arched delicately, her luscious mouth pursed primly, and a faint stage smile ruffled her smooth cheeks. These artifices had no effect on Mr. Van Ryper, who was elderly.

      He reached the bottom step and peered at her. “Carrie should have shown you in here,” he said fussily, piloting Cleo and Judy into the parlor.

      He waved at a chair. “Sit down, Mrs. — uh — Jenkins, and you, young lady. What’s your name, Bright Eyes or Candy Kid? Let’s see if it’s Candy Kid. Look in that box on the table, and mind you don’t stick up yourself or the furniture.”

      Judy murmured her thanks and retired. She had learned to dissolve when grown-ups were talking. They forgot you and said very interesting things.

      “Now, then, Mrs. — uh — Jordan,” said Mr. Van Ryper. “I expect you’ve come about the house.”

      Cleo looked about the gracious room. The lacquered floors were of fine hardwood, the marble above the great hearth was massive and beautiful. The magnificent sliding doors leading into the dining room were rich mahogany, the wallpaper was exquisitely patterned. From the center of the high ceiling the gas chandelier spun its crystal tears.

      “It’s a beautiful house,” said Cleo with awe.

      “Best house on the block. Sorry to leave it, but I’m too old to temper my prejudices.”

      Cleo looked startled and felt humiliated. Were there colored people next door? Was that why Mr. Van Ryper was moving away? Should her pride make her rise and exit with dignity, or should she take the insult in exchange for this lovely house? Who were the people next door? If they were anybody, Miss Binney would have known them. They must be old second-class niggers from way down South, whom she wouldn’t want to live next door to herself.

      “Do you happen to know what part of the South the family came from?” she asked delicately.

      Mr. Van Ryper looked startled now. “What family?” he asked testily, peering hard at Cleo with the intent of reading her foolish feminine mind.

      “The colored family you’re prejudiced at,” Cleo said belligerently.

      Mr. Van Ryper rose to his feet. His face purpled with anger. “Madam, my father was a leader in the Underground Movement. I was brought up in an Abolitionist household. Your accusation of color prejudice is grossly impertinent. I believe in man’s inalienable right to liberty. Let me lecture you a bit for the enlightenment of your long-eared child, who is probably being brought up in cotton batting because she’s a little colored Bostonian who must never give a backward look at her beginnings.

      “We who are white enslaved you who are — to use a broad term, madam — black. We reduced your forebears to the status of cattle. It must be our solemn task to return their descendants to man’s estate. I have been instrumental in placing a good many southern Negroes in the service of my friends. My maid Carrie is lately arrived from the South. She is saving her wages to send for her family. They will learn here. They will go to night school. Their children will go to day school. Their grandchildren will go to high school, and some of them will go to college.

      “Negroes are swarming out of the South. The wheat and the chaff are mixed. But time is a sifting agent. True, the chaff will forever be our cross to bear, but one fine day the wheat will no longer be part of the Negro problem.”

      Cleo looked unimpressed. She had lent an unwilling ear to this long speech, and had stubbornly closed her mind every time Mr. Van Ryper used the word Negro, because colored Bostonians were supposed to feel scandalized whenever they heard this indecent appellation. This fancy talk was just to cover up his saying he didn’t like niggers.

      “Well, it’s nice when people aren’t prejudiced,” Cleo said politely.

      “Madam, I am distinctly prejudiced against the Irish,” Mr. Van Ryper said wearily, thinking that colored women, for all they had to endure, were as addlepated as their fairer-skinned sisters. “The Irish present a threat to us entrenched Bostonians. They did not come here in chains or by special invitation. So I disclaim any responsibility for them, and reserve the right to reject them. I do reject them, and refuse to live in a neighborhood they are rapidly overrunning. I have decided to rent my house to colored. Do you or don’t you want it?”

      “I do,” said Cleo faintly, thinking this was the oddest white man she had ever met. It would take an educated person like Miss Binney to understand how his mind worked.

      “And is the rent within your means? Thirty-five dollars, but it struck me as a fair sum. There are ten rooms. I hope you won’t mind if I don’t show them to you now. The parish priest is waiting upstairs in the sitting room. Seems some neighbors have complained