Comedy_American Style

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  How she pored over this new and fascinating interest! How wonderful to be able to understand the workings of another’s mind, to anticipate another’s reactions. It gave one a god-like quality, she thought; and she wondered why not everybody profited by it. Of course later she was to discover that all that had happened was that by great good luck she had stumbled on the type of interest that just suited her style of mind. Also she came to realize that it was neither easy nor natural to keep constantly about one in ordinary encounters one’s academic attitude. Furthermore there were frequently cases which her meager knowledge was unable to gauge. There was always Olivia. . . .

  The town library was pitifully equipped, but a sympathetic librarian was able to tell this eager neophyte of extension courses at Harvard; courses not only in psychology but on other subjects sure to appeal to the inquiring mind of this caliber. The trip to Cambridge by the interurban trolley though long was not tedious and the new life after the worry of enrollment had passed was rich and revealing.

  Twice a week for two years, she went, receiving a rather mediocre but, to her, definitely stimulating pabulum of popular psychology, Greek art, and the current events of a day long before the radio. She loved and enjoyed every bit of it. And behind and through all that enjoyment was the constant realization that she was not standing still; that certainly she was not the same woman in whose arms poor Lee had died and that somehow, somewhere, something was bound to happen.

  Naturally all this activity cured her physical loneliness. Yet never had she felt so completely, so spiritually apart as on the day, five years from the date of Lee’s death, when she and her sullen daughter set out for Cambridge to embark on her grand adventure. . . . She had had a frightful scene with Olivia, who, with that strange undemanding complacency which so distinguished her from both her parents, had been spending five happy years in the company of shop-girls, soda-water jerkers, small seamstresses . . . who were white.

  Janet had met them from time to time, treating them with courtesy and gentleness not only for her daughter’s sake and safety but also for the maintenance of her own economic position. She knew—as what colored person thirty years ago did not?—the rancor of the poor small-town white who saw in his Negro working competitor only the menace of the wanton interloper.

  The thought of going again to a colored church, of playing a quiet game of whist in a decent colored parlor with its family album and what-not; of gradually working one’s way into membership of small committees, of receiving the polished, if not always grammatical, gallantries of colored men—all these things bore for Janet’s imagination the same charm that the sight of fresh water might bear to a shipwrecked sailor.

  To Olivia, however, all this meant nothing. “But,” said Janet, “do you really like these people, Olivia? Or is it just because they are white? And if that is why you’re so anxious to remain with them do you mean to tell me you’re willing all your life to sail under false pretenses? Good heavens, Olivia, you wouldn’t want to marry one of these rats, would you? Why, Olivia, think of the decent, kindly cultivated fellows you’ll be meeting in Boston! The worst of them would be better than that horrid little Janska you had here last night.”

  Olivia, it appeared, had thought of the young men whom she might meet in Boston. “All of them black or brown, “she raged, “and all of them looked down on! If you think I want my children to feel toward their father as I felt toward—”

  She stopped then, realizing that she had gone too far. Janet finished the sentence for her. “As you felt toward your father! Toward Lee Blanchard, the best and finest man that ever lived!” How horrible this was, she thought, to almost hate one’s own child.

  “Listen, Olivia. I’m going to Boston. I’m going to live there with my own people as completely colored as though I were the color of coal. If you want to stay here and work in the mills—well, you’re seventeen, and you may do as you choose. But if you want food and warmth and shelter and decency you’ll come with me. And as long as you live under my roof you’ll treat my friends—and I mean to have plenty of them, all colored—with respect.”

  Olivia did not want to work in the mills.

  The Harvard Extension course brought results not listed in the catalogue. It had taught Janet her way about Cambridge; and the intelligence of her answers made her name immediately recognizable to the professor when she went to consult him about her little project of opening a rooming-house for colored students. The problem of housing them was just sufficiently acute to make her proposition worthy of attention. In the end Professor Inness allowed her to use his name both in order to obtain a house and as security for credit.

  “Since you’re going into this business,” he told her wisely, “you might just as well operate on a worthwhile scale. Better get yourself some good furniture while you’re at it. Cheap stuff never pays.”

  She was astounded at his generosity. “But you know nothing about me,” she reminded him. “You can’t possibly know whether I’m honest or not.”

  “I know you’ve told me you are a colored woman when you might just as well have let me think you white. That assures me that you may be foolish but you certainly are honest,” he told her dryly. After this encounter she thought better of white people.

  For a time everything worked miraculously and magically just as she had planned it. She found the house, an old-fashioned roomy one with four large bedrooms and three small ones. Two of the small ones were next to each other on the second floor. These she took for herself and her daughter. But almost from the start she realized that she would have to abandon her scheme of taking graduate students only. In those days there were probably fewer than a dozen colored graduate students in the whole United States. Certainly if there were any at Harvard they made no application to her, nor were they sent to her. But the four large double rooms went very quickly.

  Her lodgers were all over age—their entrance into, or their continuance within, college represented to each one of them a definite struggle and sacrifice. But this effort, this determination to attain an end, brought with it a steadfastness and a reliableness which resulted in tangible benefits for Janet. None of these serious, earnest young men would ever cheat her—she could tell that. And if a man fell into arrears she never dunned him. Instead she hunted up some extra piece of work for which sooner or later she would have had to call in carpenter or painter and turned it over to the delinquent.

  In this way she was able to pull through that first difficult semester not only without debt but even with a very slight surplus to her credit. Her young men tended the furnace, painted the whole interior of the house, swept the heavy carpets, cleaned windows and jointly and collectively took the place of the best hired man that money could have secured.

  And not one of them after the first week or two ever glanced at, or, apparently, ever thought of Olivia. But then Olivia herself had a hand in this. On the contrary, it was no unusual thing to find two or three of them grouped about Janet in her quaint comfortable parlor in the evenings, in those first comfortable relaxing hours of what had been for many of them a tense and gruelling day.

  On Sunday evenings, especially, the boys sought her; sometimes they brought with them the feminine attraction of the moment. Occasionally on a stormy New England night almost all of them would be there. Janet would play the hymns which most of them, children of praying, god-fearing parents, had heard in their youth; or from time to time she would dash off into a captivating waltz or one of the stirring marches of the day.

  No matrimonial material here. But Janet, happy and comfortable for the first time since her husband’s death, was uncaring. Indeed, secretly, she rather rejoiced, since it meant that the memories of Lee still held full sway in her heart. All in all a happy six months’ interim in her life; a pleasant backwater of usefulness; increasing knowledge and comfort where she would, perhaps, spend the rest of her days.

  The third small room on the top floor was still untenanted. Janet was pondering the idea of fix
ing it up as a small private study whither one or even two of her boys could retreat when in need of extra quiet and seclusion. But at the beginning of the second semester Professor Inness sent her a note which she conned in the quiet of her little room. The bearer, declared her former instructor’s concise missive, was an older man who had just come through an intense emotional and spiritual strain.

  “I think the atmosphere of your house may do something to restore him, Mrs. Blanchard. I’ll esteem it a personal favor if you’ll contrive to make room for him. I think he’ll be best off by himself.”

  She was not anxious to give up the extra room; she was no longer even anxious for another student, but in the case of Professor Inness refusal was, of course, impossible. Rather slowly she went down to see her caller.

  “My goodness,” she said to herself as soon as, rather languidly, he began to speak, “here’s my real Southerner!” And at first sight he seemed to run more truly to type than the type itself—so gaunt he was, so serious, even to sadness, so insistent on absolute seclusion and quiet because his work was so important. Impishly she ventured a pleasantry or so, but he was in no mood for pleasantries. Without demur he accepted her terms, informed her that he would move in late that afternoon, asked for a door-key and was off without further delay to complete his program and to procure his luggage.

  Later in the week she passed him in the hall and on Sunday morning he drifted into her little office, which she had converted from a pantry, and made some trifling inquiry. He was, she found, a man of perhaps thirty-eight, about three years older than herself, of her own general complexion, bluish-grey eyes, tall, thin almost to emaciation and with marks of real suffering in his face.

  It was two months before he joined the boys at her little Sunday gathering and even then he brought with him a sense of not so much seeking company as trying to avoid his own. By summer, in spite of the sparseness of the actual words between them, Janet began to feel in his presence a certain satisfaction and more than that an actual lack if he were not there. A certain expression in his eyes, the merest turn of one of his brief remarks, a lingering quality about his unwilling withdrawals gave her the belief that this satisfaction was felt and returned.

  When the summer came her boys scattered. They were all of them now Sophomores and Juniors. All of them elected to return. Some of them, obtaining jobs as porters on New England trains or as bell-hops on the big coastwise steamers, opined that they would be in from time to time to rest during their brief lay-overs. Blake, however, made no attempt to leave. In answer to Janet’s question as to his need for a brief vacation he told of his desire to spend it there in her house in Boston if it did not inconvenience her.

  Inevitably the two were drawn together. Before long he had told her of his youth, of his ambition to study medicine, of his graduation with distinction from Atlanta University.

  “In those days, Janet, I had about me a sense of consecration. I suppose all of us young colored fellows of that day took ourselves too seriously. Education was and still is such a novel possession. So although I wanted to come North and study medicine, when a call came for a man to take charge of a new struggling school in a small Alabama town I listened to the insistent urging of one of my professors and went there.

  “You never saw such benighted people as there were in that town, both black and white. I married a classmate to whom I had become engaged during my junior year and the two of us, heads and hearts high, set out—poor, little puny fools—to attempt a reform at which the angel Michael might well have blenched.

  “The colored people there, poor things, wanted the school because they thought there was necromancy in higher education. That it would bring palpable and material results. Of course a few of them saw beyond that. The white people didn’t want the school because they were afraid it might make their ‘nigras uppity’ and they didn’t mean to stand for that. Yet they realized the benefit to the town.

  “Well, we were young and brave and dead sure not only that we could succeed but that we were genuine crusaders embarked on a holy cause. I won’t burden you with the details, Janet. You read the papers. But after fifteen years of heart-breaking work, after seeing a school turn from a little elementary primary institution into an academy of high-school rank—after going about hat in hand half over the country to gain funds with which to construct new buildings—after all this I came home from one of these expeditions two years ago to find my school a mass of still smoking ruins; my wife at death’s door; all hope of our baby gone; my life’s work vanished; and the vandals laughing, jesting, skulking like jackals among the debris.”

  “Oh,” said Janet, “and I thought you were just a self-conscious, belated student. I thought you had no sense of humor. What did you do, Ralph? Where did you live during those years before you came here? How have you been existing?”

  “I tell you, Janet, I hardly know what I did. My wife and I had about a thousand dollars saved in a bank in New York. And I had, thank God for it, always carried heavy insurances for both her and myself. A classmate of mine spirited me away, helped me collect and bank my insurance and sent word to the professor at Atlanta through whom I had first undertaken the building of the school. He was, by the way, an uncle of your Professor Inness. For two years I’ve been wandering up and down the country, working at whatever came my way, provided only it induced sufficient weariness.

  “I’ve worked on great Western farms, on forest reservations, even in mining camps, talking to as few people as possible, making no friends, seeking only sleep and forget-fulness. Recently I’ve felt some slight stirrings of my old desires to be useful. As wretched as I have been I’ve come across others in still worse condition—though I doubt if any of them had gone through experiences as harrowing as mine.

  “Professor Inness’ uncle had wound up my affairs in Alabama. I shall never return there. Indeed, my only desire is to stay in this section of the world and to be quietly and unnoticeably useful. And,” he finished simply, “I should like very much to be near you.”

  Janet looked at him smiling, but with tears in her eyes. “Do you think you could learn to laugh?”

  “I used to be a great hand at it. If I learn again, will you let me stay near you?”

  “I think so.”

  “For ever and ever?”

  “For ever and ever. . . . Oh, Ralph, you won’t mind if I keep a little place in my mind, in my heart, for Lee? . . . I loved him so . . . we were so happy.”

  “My dear girl, of course. . . , If we can just help each other not so much to forget the past—as to endure what life has left . . . that would be incalculable. And you might like to know I love you. If you ever love me, will you tell me?”

  “I love you now.”

  Many weeks later he asked her: “What about your daughter? You know she’s around so little. I see her so rarely. Do you think she’ll mind our marriage?”

  Janet’s face went wry. “Ralph, if you could only guess how little she’ll mind! I am the least cog in Olivia’s wheel. She has only one consuming ambition. I suppose she’ll hardly know she has a stepfather. But in any event, I think she likes you.”

  “She always speaks to me pleasantly, and I notice that’s more than she does to any of the other men in the house except to young Christopher Cary.”

  “That’s because you’re the only ones that in any sense fulfill her requirements.”

  “What requirements?”

  “It’s all so silly! Olivia is simply hipped on color. She wouldn’t speak to her own grandfather on the street, I believe, if he showed color.”

  “Absurd!”

  “Of course, but absurdly truthful!”

  “You mean she wouldn’t marry fellows like Stephens and Hall”—he mentioned two of Janet’s most promising roomers—“simply because they’re brown?”

  “My dear, she wouldn’t marry you or Chris Cary or any other colored man, no matter how little he showed his Negro blood. My daughter, your future stepchild, is a confirmed
Negro-hater. She thinks there is no health in us.”

  “You don’t mean she’s willing to marry a white man?”

  “I told you she had one consuming ambition and that is to be white. I suppose the easiest way to attain to that estate is to marry white. . . . Though I don’t see how on earth she’s going to accomplish it.”

  “Do you think it will do any good for me to speak to her? Suppose I were to tell her about those inhuman devils that I met in Alabama?”

  “I don’t think you could make her understand what you were talking about. . . . You see, her argument would be that none of this would have happened to you if they hadn’t known you were colored. . . .”

  “Therefore an additional reason for being white! Oh, Lord, whoever heard of such a girl? . . . You poor child, you must have had a simply terrible time with her.”

  “You can’t imagine how much she hasn’t been a daughter. And I wanted one so . . . !”

  “Oh, well,” he comforted her, “there are daughters and

  daughters.”

  They planned to marry the following Christmas. But as the crisp fall weather closed in, as each became surer and surer that here was haven, security and love, they fell to thinking of the uselessness of a continued separate existence. And suddenly one misty, chilly November morning he came for her from one of his classes and they were married by the colored Presbyterian minister. Not even Olivia was present. They had made their plans. She would keep up the lodging-house until he should finish his medicine, so as not to deplete his small store of money. Then they would take a small house right there in Boston and live quietly “and happily too,” he told her, “ever after.”