Dorothy West, "An Unimportant Man" (1928)
An Unimportant Man
By DOROTHY WEST
HE awoke to the dig of his wife's sharp elbow in the tender flesh of his side. He blinked for a moment bewilderedly and eased away from her. He glanced at the clock. It hadn't quite struck nine. He wondered, idly, had he a clean collar to wear to church, and began to question wistfully dared he miss the church service just this once, and, the family having creakingly departed, patter about in his disreputable old bathrobe and slippers in the beautiful peace of aloneness.
He smiled. He was very hot and uncomfortable, but he was happy. He wanted, a little foolishly, to burst out laughing. He ached to express his joy. And for a moment he chortled softly with his head drawn under the sheet. But his wife stirred and groaned in her sleep, and he uncovered his head and lay quite still. He began to pray that she would not awaken to shatter the quiet with her shrill complaints. He sighed. He hated his wife. He rolled over gently and looked at her. She lay on her back with her knees drawn up and her thick braids covering her narrow breasts.
One thin arm hung over the edge of the bed, the other lay across her flat stomach. It struck him suddenly, looking down at her, that the bulge of her eyeballs seemed more prominent when her straight-lashed eyelids covered them. For the first time he noted how homely she looked asleep.
Her face was unbelievably narrow. There were heavy bags beneath her eyes. The small, straight nose that had once intrigued him seemed pinched and too transparent. And with the increasing years of incompatibility the slender, sensitive curve of her lips had blended to a straight, stern line of bitterness.
She stirred again, and the long ropes of hair fell along her side. Her narrow bosom rose almost imperceptibly. He remembered with shamed surprise how he had told her, in the first, happy week of their marriage, that he would kiss her dry, young breasts to fulness. He remembered, too, the color that had rushed to her cheeks, and the instinctive lifting of her hands as if to ward off his lips.
With his own cheeks hot at the memory of that, he rolled to the edge of the bed. And then, as he lay there, his unseeing eyes blinking at the ceiling, a great swell of passion racked him. He shut his eyes. His flesh tingled. Sweat streamed from his pores, and his body itched with urging.
Something was draining him of resistance. Almost he heard a light mocking laugh. Dark flesh sank warmly into his. Hot1 thick, sensual lip~ burned his empty mouth. The phantom woman who lay in the grip of his arms was more terribly real than the passionless woman who lay every night by his side.
But after a moment of that sharp, beautiful agony he opened his eyes. The woman drifted out of his arms, and he drew a deep breath that '¥as like a sigh. He wanted to get up and take a bath, but he hadn't the strength to rise.
He could hear his old mother coming down the narrow hall with her grandchild. They would be quarreling, of course, and the old woman would be shrill in ineffectual threatenings. He was sorry for his mother. These last years of her life were as full of toil and travail as the first. He was her only son, and it came to him, rather bitterly, that he had not been a good one. Bit by bit he had broken her valiant spirit. She who had given so much had received so pitifully little.
There was ironic sadness, after the years of her teaching of independence, in her complete and unrewarded subservience.
He heard her voice rise.
"Mind now, Essie- " And his first thought was: "I wish t' God she'd stop picking on that child." But on the instant it formed in his mind, he felt a great surge of pity for his mother. And his lips framed an unexpected prayer: "Oh, dear God, let me make it all up to her." He had a sudden vision of himself, in an oratorical pose of Darrow, eloquently pleading a black man's cause.
He was happy again. Little waves of joy rolled over him. But he had a panicky moment of doubt. After all of these years-bitter years of despairing failure-had he passed his bar exams at last? Rather sheepishly he pinched himself.
It was beautifully true.
Well, by God, he had studied-and hard. He had felt somehow, that if he failed again, it meant the end. The definite blotting out of the already flickering flame of ambition. He would never have had the courage to try once more.
He read the shingle swaying in the wind: "Zebediah Jenkins, Attorney-at-Law." His tongue rolled the morsel over his lips. Lawyer Jenkins. It stood for achievement. It meant respect. Metaphorically he steadied himself on the first rung of the ladder.
But in that instant he heard again a light, mocking laugh.
Amanda, somewhere in the hot sun, laughing . . . laughing ... laughing ... Calling him fool for his ambition when her arms were wide with love.
He hadn't, he decided, wanted to be a lawyer.
He hadn't, he found with surprise, wanted to be anything. His only childhood ambition had been eventual marriage with 1\'Ianda. He had never seen beyond a two-room cabin.
He would always remember the night he had cried out his love for Manda. His mother had been doing last minute things; and he had trailed after her, in hot protest, meanly refusing to help.
For Manda, at dusk, with the wisdom of Eve, had bound him eternally to her with her darkly beautiful body. They had not made any promises. To both of them the North had seemed so far away they knew with bitter certainty they would never meet again. For Manda it would forever suffice that she had been his first love.
In a rush of scarcely articulate words he had told it all to his mother.
For a long time she had not answered. But presently, her voice very low and gentle, she had laid bare her heart. She had shown him Manda's hot young passion as a sorry thing beside her steadfast devotion. She had not, however, told him that a man must choose his mate but not his mother.
He had not known that he was a sentimentalist.
The years of her widowhood were to him a glorious record of sacrifice. He was just beginning to realize the purity of mother love. He knew a sudden sense of shame at his lust for Manda. In a swift moment of refutation he hated her for what he could not then call her honesty. With a rather splendid gesture he offered his mother his future to mould it as she willed.
She was in the bathroom with Esther. He could hear the little girl gargling her throat, and his mother's impatient: "That's 'nough, now.
Jus' look at this floor." And then a faint scuffle, and his mother again, "You keep on, now. You jus' spoilin' for a spankin.' " And Esther's bold young voice-and he visioned her, arms akimbo-"Yah, yah, yah ! You just try it." Against his will he was envious of Esther. He couldn't imagine himself at ten talking back to his mother. "Oh, my God!" he thought, and would have laughed if tears hadn't stung his lashes. He wanted passionately, this August morning, to lazily drift down a Southern stream with Manda.
He decided-feeling, however, his betrayal of his mother-that he was proud of Esther's independence. He was glad, rather fiercely glad, that she knew enough to stand up to people. No one would ever-no one must ever-shape the course of Esther's life. He would rather starve in the streets than drag his child back from the stars with his heavy hands on her skirts.
His mother was tapping on the bathroom door that opened into his bedroom. "Min, y'all up? It's ha' past nine. I done started the coffee boilin'." Minnie blinked awake and started up on her sharp, pointed elbows. Her voice was thick.
"Who? Huh? Oh, that you, Miss Lily? Awright." She sat up then and hugged her thin knees, her mouth a wide, red cavern of interrupted sleep.
He told her pleasantly, "It's a nice morning, Min." She regarded it imperturbably. "Yeh," she said.
He flung back the sheet and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was boyishly eager.
"I could eat a house." "Seems to me," she said with conscious meanness, "you'd be sick and tiahed of the sight of food, cookin' in a white man's kitchen ev'ry day." All of the sparkle went out of his eys. "It hasn't been easy, Min." She felt a certain compunction. "Well, it shouldn't be hard no longer. Things ought to brighten up in no time now, since you passed that bar exam." He was pathetically grateful. His words poured out eagerly. His nostrils dilated. His moustache quivered a little. He sat there, on the edge of the bed, in a humorous nightshirt that showed his thin legs.
"I guess you're right about that, Min. Guess this old ship's steered clear at last. Guess we'll know a little plain sailing now. I knew my God would answer my prayers." She snorted a little. "If you'd done more on your own hook 'stead o' waitin' 'round for God to help you, you'd 'a' got on faster. That's the main trouble with all o' you niggers." He could not quite veil his annoyance, but his tone was very patient. "I don't like to hear you talk like that, Min. I don't like it. That's the main trouble with us colored people-trying to act like white folks, mocking God. Let me tell you, Min, these white folks don't know nothin' 'bout slavery, and prejudice, and causeless hate.
They've never had to go down on their knees and cry out to their God for deliverance. It's all right for them to talk like fools. But for us poor colored folks, it ain't!" She was pale with vexation, but she had no adquate words to express her grievance. She said with childish irrelevancy, "Why don't you go on an' take your bath? You ain't got your sign painted yet." He got to his fet and made an unexpected reply. "But I'll have it done pretty soon." "You better see about gettin' an office," she conceded. "I see a nice place to let down on Tremont Street and I think there's three or four good size rooms in back." .
"I'll see about it," he answered, "first thing tomorrow. But I'm not going to stay down on Tremont Street long. I've never wanted nothing but the best." He entered the bathroom then, his cheeks burning with resolute purpose. Above the runnina of the water he heard her swift retort, "Y;u'd oughta be content with anything, this late age." . He tried to smile at his suddenly stramed reflection in the glass above the bowl. "I'm barely forty," he told it defiantly. "All o' ma's people live to be ninety." But there was no lessening of the pain in those mild brown eyes. He turned away dispiritedly and slumped into the tub. And he wasn't ludicrous, somehow, screwing about in the too hot wat~r.. . He was hating Minnie and wishmg pass10nately that he had never married her. !he Ion~, dark hair of his golden bride was the silken coil that had trapped him.
"If I had to do it again," he thought with rueful humor, "I wouldn't do it."
II
All of the uneventful years prior to his marriage had been almost wholly devoted to an unhappy pursuit of what his mother sternly defined as independence. Even back in the South there had been daily lessons toward this end with the invalid Marse Jim, who was always faintly amused at the grim determination of his pupil.
He looked, as he squatted on the porch, his brown toes wriggling, as if the last thing in all the world he would have chosen for himself was a career. He should have been, thought Marse, swinging down a sunlit road, with a fishing rod over his shoulder and the image of a little black girl bright on his vacuous mind .
However with praiseworthy courage he had shut one e~r against the sensuous blandishments of spring in the South and let old Marse's droning voice pour into the other just sufficient knowledge to enter him in high school.
It was then his mother had got out the old cotton stocking that was heavy in her hand. "The No'th" she had said with something like awe, and her ' eyes had been like stars.
He was a shy, sullen boy of seventeen when he entered high school. The North had fallen so far short of his dream of it. Boston bewildered him.
It was a bustling, unfriendly place where the young Irish hurled "Nigger!" at you on every other corner. He dreaded the classroom, feeling his bigness and his blackness and vaguely resenting them. He thought, after the first few days, he would rather die than rise to his awkward feet and recite, in his hesitant, Southern drawl, in that crowded, hostile room.
Thus he learned to bar it out of his consciousness by continuous and absorbing daydreams.
He spent seven years in that high school.
Zeb helped his mother after school in the house where she worked by the day. There was scarcely a moment, after he flung down his books, when there wasn't something to do. The house thronged with children and careless older people, and Miss Lily and Zeb did the thorough work of a competent staff for the salary of an underpaid cook.
It was funny, watching them both_going about that delightful house, knowing their thoughts : "This place ain't nothing to what we'll have some day." They had, poor tragic things, to live in the future.
Zeb graduated when he was twenty-three. Miss Lily went. The building, nor the teachers, nor the parents awed her. She thrilled to everything.
She thought her heart would burst with happiness. It was the one great moment of her life.
She, too, like other negro mothers, God knows why, had lived in the hope of this exalted hour.
To her, as to so many others, that stereotyped stretch of paper was, for her son, the passport to a higher life.
She had not learned the pitiable wrongness of living for one's child.
Afterwards there was the long debated question of college. It was that shook Zeb out of his apathy. He had looked down at his little gray mother and been suddenly honest and somewhat ashamed. He had been overwhelmed with a strange sense of failure. He wasn't, he saw with brutal clarity, dependable. His future was too uncertain to risk the slim savings of his mother.
For a moment he had a horrid foreboding that he would forever disappoint her. He decided then, dejectedly, to go out and get a job.
But they had compromised. Zeb, too, oddly eager, the fervor of Miss Lily inspiring him. He would work until he had saved enough to pay his own way to college.
He got the none too strenuous job of redcap in South Station.
It was there, two years later, on a Thursday afternoon, he met Minnie Means, a slim, shy girl like a lost white bird in the vastness of the station. Impersonally he had taken her proffered bag and led her to a cab, alone deploring the smallness of the expected tip.
At the door she half-way turned, apologetically slipping a thin dime into his hand. Her face all lovely confusion, she asked in a slow, soft whine, "Look heah, Mister Redcap, could you please be so kin' as to tell me whar Ah could get a room 'round heah with a nice, quiet cullud fam'ly?" He gave the driver his own address with his heart pounding like a hammer.
In the days that swiftly followed, for the first time in his life, his mother's counsel could not guide him. Past and future were forgotten in the immediate beauty of Minnie. He would have rejected his hope of salvation for a single moment of complete possession. He was, however, honorable enough about his wooing. Two weeks later they slipped away and were quietly married.
In the blissful month that passed all too quickly, they had a perfectly riotous time on his two years' accumulated savings.
Thus it was four years later he had the smallsalaried job of second cook in a self-service lunch room, a little larger flat that his mother helped pay for, and an exemption from overseas service because of a dependent wife and child.
At first he had been glad he had escaped the draft. It was a white man's war. The President had said so. Well, let him fight it unaided by his darker brother. And why, Zeb reasoned, not without logic, should the black man avenge others' wrongs when he, himself, struggled in a maze of them? And then one day he was caught in a cheering crowd that was watching a negro regiment march by. In the first few moments he was stifled by the embarrassment he always felt at the sight of a concourse of colored people. And he felt a swift indignation that they should be grouped in a separate regiment. Even the war could not reveal them brothers under the skin. They were going, poor fools, ironically enough, to fight for justice.
But suddenly all of his bitterness was swept away in the beauty of a tall, black boy, straight and fine and gloriously eager, marching sternly on because he was free and proud, and he wanted, a little bewilderedly, to do the right thing.
And in that instant Zeb wanted frantically to break into that line. He didn't want to go home to Minnie, and a fretful baby, and a mother whose reproachful eyes spoke her unsatisfied hopes. He wanted, with all of his heart, to redeem himself on the battlefield. To return to a proudly sad family with a Croix de Guerre and a wooden leg.
There was something, he found, watching that boy's splendid back, bigger than one's prejudice, bigger than one's president, to be fought for.
And that, he saw, with his eyes squeezed hard against tears, was the country God saw fit to have one born in.
The next day he sneaked into a recruiting station on the Common and was kindly but firmly rejected because of his flat feet.
In nineteen nineteen he was thirty-two. And he didn't want to be. He was afraid of the advancing years. He had done nothing. He had got nowhere. All that remained were unfulfilled dreams.
It was then young Parker drifted into his life.
Parker, the kitchen slavey, with his youth, and his courage, and the will to do. He hadn't a tenth the advantages Zeb had had. He was the illegitimate son of an intense dark woman and a worthless black man. But he had vowed, all of his unhappy, struggling years, to outreach their littleness.
In slack hours Zeb taught him the few things he had remembered, and later lent him the few books he had kept. Young Parker's eager brain absorbed like a sponge. In a year and a half he was ready for night high school. In two years he had finished with honors.
That was only the first lap, he told Zeb. And immediately he decided to go again to night school to study law. There were no visions in his eyes. They were bright with reality. He knew, this young Parker, what he wanted. God, alone, could have stood in the way of it.
Miss Lily talked with him, eagerly. Her eyes were wet. Her voice was not quite steady. And instantly Zeb knew.
"Look here," he had said, growing frightfully warm, "say, guess I'll go along with you." Parker passed his exams at the end of the fouryear term. He had known, of course, that he would. With little surprise from either, it had been Parker, during those four years, who was teacher and adviser. However, despite his tutelage, Zeb failed to pass. For the first time in her life, Miss Lily openly cried. For the first time, too, Zeb was sorrier for himself than for his mother.
With her tremulous pleas ringing in his ears, he obediently repeated the year, and again took his bar exams, feeling only a vague curiosity concerning the outcome. He dared not doubt his passing, but he somehow could not honestly believe he would. Perhaps it was a merciful indifference steeling him. For the second time he failed.
And then there was Miss Lily, bravely undismayed. "Times was hard las' year, son. It was a struggle to make both ends meet. It would sorta have surprised me if you had gone and passed them exams, worryin' an' all like you was.
Jus' you try again, son. God will hear my prayers." Zeb was thirty-nine the third year he repeated.
He entered the class with dogged determination.
He could not fail again. He knew that he would not. It wasn't egoism. It was only that he could not see beyond his failing. The hour must strike for him now. He read his Bible daily and prayed with childlike earnestness.
He had felt only an intense relief the morning the post brought the succinct letter informing him he had passed.
III
The family was at table when he entered the dining room. Miss Lily was pouring his coffee.
"Jus' set right down, son." It was good to be alive on a morning like this.
He said expansively: "You look right bright, ma . . . . How's Essie?" She screwed up her little eager face. "Good mornin ', papa." He sat down at the head of the table and helped himself liberally to pork chops and hominy.
"You all certainly got a nice breakfast this morning, Min." But she wasn't pleased by his compliment.
"It must be cold now," she told him. "I never in my life saw a man so slow. I bin waitin' 'bout an hour to get in that bathroom. Looks like we never will be on time for church." She rose, dragging her kimona about her.
"Don't you spill nothin' on that dress now, Essie. Miss Lily, you oughtn't to of let her put it on until jus' time for church. She's a don'tcare young one like her father. And, Zeb, no need o' you eatin' slow so's you won't be ready when we start. We're all goin' out o' this house together this mornin'." She left them visibly breathing sighs of relief.
"I declare," said Miss Lily, finishing her biscuit, "Minnie don't speak one pleasant word from one week to another." "You kinda fussy, too, gramma," Essie observed.
"Your pa," said Miss Lily, hurt, "never said a think like that to me in all his life." She went on with her game of spooning the grounds in her milk-diluted coffee. "Papa was scared of you, wasn't you, papa? I ain't." He corrected her gently. Don't say ain't, dear. Papa wants you to grow up a lady. You never hear a lady using English like that." The eyes in her beautiful, little dark face glowed somberly at him. She had all of the youthful loveliness of her mother in brown. She was thin and nervous and passionately eager.
"But I don't want to be a lady, papa-that kind. I don't want to go to college and learn things. It hurts my head, papa, it does. That's why I'm glad," she said with the honesty of children, "you're going to be a lawyer, and buy a big house, and be rich an ev'rything. Then I won't have to be smart and make money for you and mama and gramma. And I can just be whatever I want. And I guess I'll be a dancer." The word was anathema to Miss Lily. "Not while they's strength in my body to keep you off the stage. You'll have your own dear mammy to bury if you keep that wil' idea in your head.
Both o' our fam'lies is church-going people.
None o' 'em's ever done nothin' bad." "Actresses ain't got the name they used to have, ma," Zeb interposed. "There's good and bad women in all walks of life. And I don't b'lieve in stifling a child's natural impulse. Sow the seed and let it sprout unaided." "Choked by rank weeds," said Miss Lily grimly. "They never was a garden yit that didn't need a gardener." "But you can't force a flower that hangs its head to stare up at the sun, or a plant that lifts its face to the rain to bend toward the earth without," he said coldly, "breaking its stem." "Then I'd far rather see this chile dead," she said quietly, "than a half-naked dancer on the stage." "I think, ma," Zeb answered seriously, "the one thing that matters is Essie's happiness." Miss Lily got to her feet. She stood above her son, this little, stooping, old lady whose hands and lips were trembling. Nervously she smoothed her neat, black gown and patted her soft, crinkly hair, while a torrent of eager words beat against her mouth.
"An' could Essie be happy livin' in sin? Could I say without shame my son's only chile is a dancer? Zeb, listen, son, I don't know how it'll be later on, but to us po' cullud people right now our chillen is all we got. They is our hope, an' our pride, an' our joy. They is our life. We live for them, and oh, son, we gladly die for them.
An' all us po', strugglin' niggers want is to send our chillen to school, so's we can tell them white folks we slave for my chile's jus' as good as yours." She wet her dry lips and blinked her eyes free of tears. Her voice was sharp.
"Essie's a chile. She don't know what she wants. She jus' heard somebody talkin' 'bout dancin'. But we know, Zeb, we older ones." Her voice dropped to soft pleading. "Don' she bring in nothin' but ones and twos on her card? She's smart, Zeb. That gal's got a head on her shoulders. She's like me. I want her to do all I might 'a' done if I'd had her eddication. And, Zeb, if you died, or somep'n went wrong, I'd work these old fingers to the bone to sen' that gal to college.
"She's got somep'n in her. I see that. This chile's got the power to be anything. She don't want to sit down and trade on her looks. They's too many good-looking girls in the gutter. Let you brain work for you, chile, not your face. You got to remember that always." Essie's eyes were on Miss Lily, wide, and serious, and intent. She was interested but Uftmoved. Grandmother was an old woman. Old people were fools.
Miss Lily went on. "Do you think I ain't a proud woman today? My son's a lawyer. Miz Bemis' son's a lawyer, too. It means you're his equal. An' I'd tell her so in a minute. But when you was only a cook, you wasn't. You was a white man's servant. And young Fred Bemis was his own boss. Oh, son, nobody knows the anguish I bin through. Nobody knows how I've prayed to my Maker. If it'd taken a thousand years. I would 'a' waited and hoped. They ain't nothin' I've done for for you I regret. They ain't a grey hair in my old head, they ain't a line on my old face, they ain't a misery in my old bones that I ain't glad it's there, if it's meant the independence of my chile ! " She fled the room then, with her hand pressed hard against her lips, but both of them heard her sob.
It was Essie who broke the silence. "I hate women, papa," she said dispassionately. "They're sissies." And before he could frame a shocked reply, she had asked him, off on another tangent, "What is a sin, papa? Isn't it lying and stealing and not helping blind people? Then how is dancing a sin?" She was bewildering him, but he was suddenly very proud to be a parent. He saw himself at the outset of a "talk" with his daughter, and he was immensely flattered. There had never before been this intimacy between them.
He had meant to answer, "Because good women never go on the stage. And good women never sin." But on the verge of it, he looked at her, and her eyes were too clear and honest and eager for him to put her off with a platitude. He must grope, rather blunderingly, toward her honesty.
"Dancing isn't a sin," he told her, "unless you make it one. There is no good, there is no evil in the world really. The good and the evil lie within you." He didn't quite believe that, and he half thought he had read it somewhere, but Essie seemed to understand.
She said quickly, "Like Reverend Dill, huh, papa, winning all that money on the numbers?" He was just a little annoyed. "You mustn't repeat things, Essie." But she ignored that. Her voice was confidential. "Gramma doesn't know, does she, papa?
Dancin' can be beautiful. Maybe she thinks I mean just jazz, but dancin' can be other things, beautiful things, papa. Like on your toes, and like birds and things. You-you know, papa." He was beginning to. And he saw, suddenly, that his little daughter was growing up and learning to express the thoughts that had heretofore found chaotic release through symbols on scrap paper.
"When I was younger," he said, "I used to go a lot to theayters, and I've seen some real pretty dancing." "Like fairies in a wood, huh, papa? Likelike thistle-blowing." He tasted his coffee and found it cold and set it down. He pushed back his plate and folded his napkin.
"ls your heart really set on dancing, dear? Tell you the truth, papa sorta wishes there was something else you wanted more to do. But if there isn't, nothing could induce me to stand in your way." She smiled at him and stretched her slim fingers across the table to pat his hand.
"You're orful nice, papa, this morning. Honest you are." He beamed his gratitude. He wanted to kiss that lovely hand, but he hadn't the courage. To him had now come the inevitable realization that his daughter was better than he was. He felt a certain awe of this exquisite child.
"She said, "You know why I really want to be a dancer, papa?" "It's the one thing you can do best," he concluded, trying to help her reason.
"No," -her eyes were soft- "Nonnie can beat me dancin'. It isn't that, papa. It's-something else." She was silent for a moment, and he sensed her struggle for expression. Her face was sharp with the pain of it. Her nails were dug in her palms.
"I don't know how to say it, papa. I know it inside of me, but it won't come out. I told gramma dancin' 'cause I didn't know how else to put it. I'd just as lief sing. I'd just as lief do anything-beautiful." She caught her breath on that. "That's what I mean, papa. I-I just want to be something that's beautiful, I don't care what it is." With a sharp sigh he averted his eyes from the innocent glory of her face. "It's hard," he said gently, "for colored girls to do things that are beautiful, like acting in plays, or singing in op'ra, or dancing in ballets." She got up then and came around to him, putting one foot on the rung of his chair. She rubbed her chin over his closely cropped head, and her long, dark curls fell over his face.
"Nothin's ever going to be hard for me, papa," she said with conviction. "God didn't make me that way." They were late for church again. Old Mr.
Myrick frowned at them as they entered. But Zeb didn't mind. Miss Lily hurried down the aisle to her accustomed seat in a front pew.
Minnie rustled toward the beckoning Lize Jones, with the whispered admonition: "Now don't you let me hear your voice, Essie." Zeb and his daughter sank down gratefully in the back row.
He bent to her ear. "If it makes you nervous, you just tell papa, and we'll sneak out." She snuggled her hand through his arm. "Nobody's screaming yet." He leaned back complacently, balancing his straw hat carefully on his knee. He would have liked to come early enough to join in the singing.
However, he was glad he had missed the announcements. There might have been some stupid social to which Minnie would have dragged him. And, too, he had forgotten to stop at the corner store for peppermints to change a bill for collection.
Reverend Dill was exhorting. Zeb remembered what Essie had told him, and he was puzzled by the obvious sincerity of the man. His deep, rich voice was clear and strong. He chanted his words, striding the length of the platform, pounding the little table until the single rose trembled in the vase, one fist stuck in his pocket.
"You that are sinners had better repent. For no man knows the hour when the Son of Man cometh. And there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. O brothers, O sisters, get on board. Drop your burdens at the foot of Jesus. Drink at the fountain of His love." A woman's shrill wail shattered the echo of his thundering. "Oh, praise God, my Redeemer I I bin washed in the blood of the Lamb!" There was an answering rumble from Brother Wheelwright. "Glory be to ma God!" Zeb felt Essie's hot grip on his arm. He looked down at her and smiled reassuringly. "It's all right, dear." Her sensitive little face was anxious. She snuggled closer to him and furtively peered up into the face of the old lady sitting next her. She hoped she wasn't the sort that carried on. But the old lady's head was nodding vigorously, and her lips were moving. Essie's little heart began to beat rapidly. She wished they could have sat beside an indifferent young man.
Zeb was sorry for Essie. He knew that now she had forgotten the minister and his sermon, and that her whole being was trained toward the slightest sound. She was almost impatiently waiting for some one to sob or scream. He couldn't understand her terror. He had been brought up in the Baptist church, and he honestly thought there was no other faith that could take one to heaven as quickly. Neither his mother nor himself had ever felt the urge to give public vent to their feelings. But he didn't see any wrong in it. He was often deeply moved. There were moments, too, when he wished the Spirit might descend upon him that he might shout his praise for God in this sympathetic congregation.
Reverend Dill's voice was a wail now.
"Listen! Do you hear Jesus knocking at your heart? Open to Him, sinner. Don't let Him stand out there in the dark, fumbling for the latch. Lay your burdens on His breast. Come to Jesus l Oh, great Lord ! See Him standing in the seat of Pilate. Come to Jesus l The King of Kings being stripped and scourged. Come to Jesus! The Lord of Heaven with a crown of thorns. Come to Jesus. See Him dragging up a weary road, bearing that heavy cross. Sinner, sinner, He died for you! Come to Jesus! "They drove a nail in my Lord's hand. Come to Jesus! They drove a nail in my Lord's foot. Come to Jesus! Oh, see my Lord with blood streaming down His side, and His head bowed down with the sins of the world. Oh, hear His lonely cry, 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' Brothers, sisters, He gave up the ghost and died. Come, come-get ye behind them, Satan! -come to Jesus!" They were in a religious frenzy, this shouting, stamping congregation. There was a rush of weeping converts. Brother Wheelwright paced the aisle, clapping his hands, crying his praise, the tears streaming down his cheeks. The older women had risen to their feet, and they bent and swayed to a fervent chant. The universal gesture was a flinging up of arms, and then a sudden slump down in the pew, spent. The youngsters nudged each other, pointing out the noisier Christians, giggled. For a long five minutes there was noise and dreadful disorder in this house of God.
The old lady beside Essie had got to her feet, and her continuously outflung arms were perilously near the tip of Essie's nose. She twisted and turned, a little mad with her love for God in this moment. Her words were wild. "Oh, my Redeemer, I bin saved! Shout for joy I Praised be his name ... " The odor of sweat was sharp.
And suddenly Zeb, in a quiet exaltation, was swept from the heights by Essie's voice, shrill and choked in his ear. Only then was he conscious of her vise-like hold on his arm and the nearness of her shaking little body.
"Papa, papa, I wanna go home. I'm gonna be sick," she sobbed.
He gathered her up in his arms and flung out of the nave and raced with her down the stairs.
IV
Later, weak and ill and tearful, she told him, her dark eyes black with bitterness, "I hate good people, papa. I hate ev'rybody who goes to church. I hate ev'rybody who makes me nervous." He somehow could not find the words to rebuke her.
Young Parker dropped in after dinner. He was on his way to pay a social call in the neighborhood. And since it was the incorrect hour of seven, he had decided to look in on Zeb and congratulate him. Heretofore he had been so busy ... and that sort of thing ...
He looked very expensive and prosperous, and he prattled a good deal about a new Marmon he was thinking of buying, and he held the reluctant Essie on his knee and gave her a silver dollar.
They sat in the overcrowded parlor, that was cluttered with Sunday disorder. And Miss Lily and Minnie beamed at young Parker, and smoothed their stiff frocks, and murmured apologies. And Zeb kotowed no less.
It was only Essie, slipping from his knee and going to stand sullenly by the window, who felt no pride in him. She was thinking that there were little beads of grease on his forehead, and his nostrils distended too much when he talked.
"I knew," he was saying, "you'd make it, old timer. "The sun do move, you know. And heaven knows, if there's one man who deserves success, that man is you. You've been the most faithful kind of a son and husband all your life." Miss Lily' s eyes filled with grateful tears.
"There is a God, and He answered my prayers.
"I guess," she went on with quaint pride, "these old hands will have done their las' lick o' work after Zeb gets really settled." "I sorta think," said Zeb, "I'll take tomorrow mornin' off and go see 'bout that office you spoke of, Min. I'll be getting my certificate any day now. And I've already talked with two or three men who got cases they want me to handle." "Fine!" Parker was honestly glad. "I say, that's good! And I got quite a few minor cases I'll be glad to switch to you. Anything for old times sake." He patted Zeb's knee.
Minnie smiled. "You're a good man, Mr. Parker. You're goin' to make a nice girl happy some day." "I got her picked out," said Parker, expanding.
"A real Sheba." "A Boston young lady?" Miss Lily asked.
Parker made a disparaging gesture. "Go out of the North when you want to get married.
She's a little Washington school ma'am." "I've heard," said Miss Lily, her lips very tight, "'bout them Washington school teachers." "Good Lord!" said Parker, "she's a society girl. Five years ago she wouldn't have looked at me. Why, I'm getting into the cream of Washington society." "I wouldn't marry an old teacher," cried Essie hotly. "I wouldn't care who she was." "All nice colored girls are teachers," Parker said coldly. "They either do that or sit down on their parents. There's nothing else for a real nice girl to do." "Then I won't be a nice girl," Essie screamed, "and I won't be a crazy old teacher. I'm gonna be naughty all the rest of my life, so I can be a dancer." Minnie rose excitedly. "I'll break ev'ry bone in your body. Idea you talkin' back to folks. An' talkin' like a fool 'bout dancin'. March right on out o' here an' don't come back. An' I'll take the switch to you later." Essie crossed to the door and opened it. She stood quite still for a moment, savagely surveying them.
"I wish," she said slowly, "children needn't be born. I wish a mother hen could hatch them.
And then they wouldn't have parents and other people to boss them. And they wouldn't be scolded, and spanked, and put to be~ without even any supper. When I have my httle baby, I'm gonna give her to the cat." She slammed the door then, and they heard her run swiftly down the hall.
"Jus' give me time," Minnie called angrily, "to come after you." Miss Lily rose, too. "Seems a shame that chile's got to break up the Sabbath. Ain't a day goes by she don' need a spankin'. But Minnie's got the right idea. She's breakin' that gal's spirit young. And she'll only grow up to thank her." "It's too hot," said Parker suddenly, "to spank a child." "I only hope," answered Miss Lily, going, "Minnie don' have one o' her spells." "I hope to God," Zeb flung at the closed door, "she does." There was a long pause. Parker was horribly embarrassed, and Zeb terribly ashamed. He had never wished ill to anyone before. Suddenly he decided, staring hard at a spot on the rug, that he loved his little daughter above everything in the world. He rather wished he had been a better parent.
"It's quarter to," said Parker, rising and pulling out a heavy watch. "I got to be going, Zeb." "Sorry," said Zeb, and got rather heavily to his feet. "Have a nice time." "Oh, I guess I will." Parker's tone was easy.
"The Blakes are dicties, you know. Real quiet and refined. All of 'em have been to college, even that old grandmother." "You're pretty swell," Zeb told him, his mind still on Essie.
"No." He was striving for honesty. Zeb was the only middle-class intimate he had. In this moment he wanted definitely to express his thoughts aloud to some one who didn't really matter. And he was fond of Zeb.
"I'm not a swell, really. I'm not sure I want to be. But I do mean to make a good marriage -for my children's sake. There are too few colored people who realize the importance of good blood. And it tells, Zeb. You can pick out a dicty anywhere, no matter if he's black with woolly hair." "I know," said Zeb, but he wasn't interested.
He had a vision of Essie, dry-eyed and unbending.
"And I'll make a big name for myself some day " Parker went on. "I mean to. I sorta feel that I've got to. Race pride, I guess. I wouldn't change my color to be President. And I want to go up and up and up. I want to go just as high as a white man-and then just a little higher.
"Look here," he said, and shook Zeb by the shoulders, "that's your chief trouble. You dream too much. Man alive! Wake up and get going, old timer. Way down deep in me I sorta like music, but nobody' ever going to know it."
But Zeb didn't answer. He had heard a faint thump as of some one heavily falling, and had suddenly aged ten years.
"Oh my God," he whispered, "that's Min again. 'Nother spell, I guess. See you later, Parker."
He opened the door and quietly waited until his guest had passed.
V
Minnie lay white and rigid under the sheet, with that weight on her heart, and her eyes that were wide with terror and pain on Zeb. They clung to him because she knew so long as they held to him, they looked on life. And l\Iinnie was afraid to die. She was afraid of God. All of her life she had visioned Him as an immense Person who could rattle your sins off like a flash. And although she knew herself to be a really good woman, she was also well aware that a white sin counted just as much as a black one. She tried to recall an encouragina sermon Reverend Dill had preached a few undays past. But all she could hear was her 0"-71 voice whisperin dire threats to Essie for bein,,. so ~dge y.
·dde y she fe t tha she must talk. If death ,e:e · · e . there were so many things that _, oe ~d. For Zeb as a fool about every- -ne a·:e a ·harp i0 h and felt her body relax. he - irred and carefully shifted her position until she lay on her right side, staring up at her husband.
"Zeb." He sat very stiffly on an old dining room chair at the head of the bed. He looked down at her without emotion. For the last fifteen minutes, with utter calmness, he had been carefully trying to decide whether or not he wished his wife had died during her spell.
"How are you feeling now, Min?" "A little better," she said, brushing a tangle of hair from her eyes." "You got to be more careful, Min. You oughtn't to let things make you mad. Essie's a big girl now. She's too old to keep getting spankings." "That's why I'm afraid to die," she fretted.
"God knows how you'd raise my chile. Essie's a headstrong young one what needs guidance." He made a helpless gesture. "Wouldn't love do as well? You two'd get on better if you were more gentle with Essie. It's only natural that she should have her own opinion' bout things. I've talked a long time with that child." She flung him a vicious taunt.
"I ain't like you. I don't think people's perfect because they's pretty. Upholding that chile in her dancin'. Miss Lily told me. I'll beat it out of her if it kills me."
His eyes were gleaming. "It very nearly did."
"An' I guess," she said, "you would 'a' bin glad. You and Essie. You're 'like as two peas, you two. Don' care nothin' 'bout eddication. Seems like ev'ry mornin' I jus' has to drive that young one to school.
"You're doin' the wrong thing, Zeb Jenkins, when you encourage that chile. Neither you all's got common sense 'nough to fill a keyhole. What could she ever make out o' her dancin'? Some rotten man would ruin her before she got out of the chorus.
"Zeb," her voice was sharp with pain, "you think I don' love my baby? Why, she's mine t How can you judge a mother's heart? I'd cut off my hand in a moment if I thought it would do her any good." She was sobbing weakly. Tears welled out of her eyes and ran obliquely into the damp tendrils of her hair. She seemed pitifully helpless. "You bin to high school, Zeb. You got a lot of book-learnin'. I went as far as the third grade and then had to stop to take care of my mother's baby. Nobody but them what knows can realize what it means to be so ignorant. You bring them books and magazines here, and all I can understand is the pictures. When we go to plays, I don't know nothin' people is sayin'. I jus' like to sit and sleep in the movies. And when I hear those big bands playin' real high-tone music, it don' sound like nothin' to me but a whole lot of noise."
She was whiter than the sheet in this moment of terrible honesty. Zeb was more moved than he had ever been before. For the second time that day he felt absolutely unworthy before these two who were so utterly unlike--his wife and his child. Her voice was thin and high.
"I'd rather my chile died right now than grow up an ignorant woman like me. Listen, Zeb, dancin' ain't bad. Nothin' is bad. Sin is what you make it. If you was makin' a big lot o' money, I wouldn't min' Essie takin' up dancin'. I'd know no matter what came of it, her future would be secure. "But, Zeb, we got to be honest. You ain't a young man. And, Zeb, you ain't a smart man. The only thing really 'bout your bein' a lawyer is it takes you out o' a white man's kitchen. I don't expect you to mak' hardly more than it takes to eddicate Essie.
"Zeb," she raised herself on her elbow, her eyes burned into his, "you got to promise that whether I live or die, you'll sen' my chile to college." But in that instant, very clearly, he heard Essie's voice, shrill and sharp in his ear: "I don't want to go to college and learn thing~. It hurts my head, papa. It does." "Min," he said miserably, "I can't. Honest to God, I can't." She fell back on the bed, and her hand fluttered to her heart. "You might as well kill me, Zeb, as tell me that."
He got to his feet and crossed to the window. He stared up at a cheerfully winking star. He wanted to cry.
"Zeb," Minnie's weak voice beat upon him, "you didn't mean that, Zeb. Oh! no, Zeb."
"Essie's got a right to decide her own future," he cried jealously. "I'd bin a better man today if my mother had let me live my own life."
"You might 'a' bin slavin' in a cotton field. You might 'a' bin swingin' from a tree. And then, God knows, you would 'a' blamed your mother." He did not answer. He had no words to combat her truth. He stood quite still in this silent room, torn between his evident duty to his wife and his given promise to his child. And standing there, sick in spirit, he remembered the years of his childhood, and his boyish, unshakable faith in God. So it was then, haltingly, he repeated an almost forgotten prayer.
"Oh, dear God, if it's right for Essie to go to college, by tomorrow please give me a sign. I humbly ask it in Jesus' name. Amen." He turned and cam·e back to Minnie, and knelt by the bed.
"I sorta want to think it over, Min. I trust God to help me decide what's right. Sometime tomorrow I'll tell you sure. You go on to sleep now. You already sorta brought me 'round to your way o' thinking." She smiled, a tired, valiant smile that, oddly, lit her whole face, that transfigured her, for a glowing moment, with the hope of unselfish triumph.
"I trust God, too. I can rest easy, Zeb. I ain't worryin'." For the first time in a great many years he kissed her on her mouth. A few minutes later he fell asleep with a halfsmile on his lips. He started awake at the postman's familiar ring. He had slept a good deal longer than he had meant to. But it was nice of Minnie not to have waked him. He guessed that she had long been up, pressing his one good business suit, baking hot biscuits for his breakfast. He stretched luxuriously. He had slept soundly throughout the night, waking only once to listen contentedly to Minnie's regular breathing. But his dream had been a queer jumble. And on recalling it, he felt a vague alarm, a confused dread of the inexplicable. He had fallen asleep presently to dream that Minnie had died, and his mother had laid her out, in her old kitchen dress, on the new plush soft in the parlor. And he had taken Essie by the hand, and they had run out and away ; but always, no matter how far they ran, they had found themselves back in that dreadful room. And then there was Essie, with her head neatly bandaged, sitting on old Marse's wide verandah, recklessly turning the leaves of a ponderous volume.
While it seemed to him, helplessly watching her, the incessant rustle of the pages would drive him mad. And last, he had stood in a courtroom, with a sheaf of paper in his hand, trying to prove to Parker, stern and unbelieving in the judge's seat, that he was a dicty. And in a swift moment it wasn't Parker sitting there but Manda, with the little yellow dog they had buried long ago. And Manda was crying because it was dead, though it lay on her lap joyously licking her hand. And suddenly it seemed to him that there were a million steps between them. And no matter how many he mounted, she forever remained inaccessible.
VI
He heard Essie's sharp rap on the door. "Papa, you wake? Can I come in? You got a letter this mornin'."
"Stick it under the door," he commanded. "I ain't dressed." He got out of bed and shambled across the floor, a bit grotesquely comic in his shuffle toward fate. As he bent to pick up the letter, he had the thought: "This may be a kinda sign like I wanted." He opened it with fingers that trembled.
The words leaped out at him and burned upon his brain. "Bar Committee ... Dear Sir .. . regret to inform you ... fraud discovered ... all of the innocent with the guilty one ... examinations must be retaken ... unfortunate ('Oh, my God I ') ... "
He was never to remember how long he stood there, staring down at the open letter. He suffered every torture of the damned. Later he would have sworn he did not even breathe. He thought that he had died and gone to hell. And it might have been a minute later, or an hour, that he found himself by the window, and presently heard his own horrified whisper, "No, no, I can't. Oh, my God, I can't. Colored people don't do such things." He went and sat down on the edge of the bed and buried his stricken face in his hands. He thought calmly,
"I better look like getting to work. You can't fool with these white folks." But rage swept down upon him. His throat was choked with hatred of himself.
"You fool!" he cried. "You G-d-cook ! You failure!" He shook with the terrible fury of self-revilement. Slowly, then, his eyes filled with tears. He was horribly racked by violent sobs, that presently left him washed clean of despair, knowing a certain, sad peace. Thus he thought, absolutely without reproach, "That was the sign I wanted."
He understood now. He had been shocked to self-revealment. He must save Essie from the terrible fate that had all but crushed his spirit. And if she fought bitterly for release, God give him strength to hold her. She was too much like him, too much the idle dreamer. And he had wrongly encouraged her. It had taken this brutal awakening to show him. Well, he would spare Essie this moment.
Suppose-oh, dear God! - suppose that Essie had flung herself out of that window. All of the loveliness of Esther in a crumpled, blood-soaked heap. Essie was fond of him. Essie trusted him. He would straightly guide her toward the goal of independence his mother had vainly desired for him. After all, she had really no definite ambition. Except being something beautiful. Well, there was beauty in everything, and in nothing unless you found it. He was proud of his child. She was so brilliant. Why, she was already a grade beyond her age, and leading her class. It would be, of course, an unpardonable sin to indulge her childish whim and neglect that glorious brain of hers that could sweep her to the stars. Essie owed it to herself. Essie owed it to her mother.
Above all, Essie owed it to her race. That was it. He saw it now: the inevitable truth that Essie must face and brand upon her heart. The race was too young, its achievements too few, for whimsical indulgence. It must not matter whom you loved; it must not matter what you desired; it must not matter that it broke your heart, if sacrifice meant a forward step toward the freedom of our people. He went down on his knees by the side of the bed. "Oh, dear God," he prayed, "keep me well and strong, to work for my child and send her to college. Guide Essie's footsteps. Show her the truth. Help me teach her to love her race above ev'rything. Let me live to see her shine like a star. I humbly ask it in Jesus' name. Amen." The room was filled with the echo of sadly mocking laughter.
Published in Saturday Evening Quill, June 1928