Phyllis Morrison loved to start her off. She was fond of discussion, too; only as she cared less for abstractions than did Ellen, she was apt to bring the question home. She had been reading in the paper some comment on the life and training of Colonel Charles Young, now dead, a brilliant colored man, a graduate of West Point.
“Wonder what we’d do,” yawned Phyllis, “if a colored girl were to come here.”
Teresa settled back in her chair. She was alternately amused, mystified and instructed by the girls’ thoughts and ideas on races. This was, strangely enough, the first time that this possibility had come up.
“Do?” Ellen broke in. “I hope there wouldn’t be any question in our minds as to how we’d stand!”
Some of the girls thought there should be no definite “stand” of any sort.
“Why would we have to take one? All we’d have to do would be to treat her decently and politely, just as we do any other girl. Then some of us would probably like her and some wouldn’t be interested and she’d get along like any other girl.”
Marian Tilbury thought she “wouldn’t like to have one around. You know I’ve never spoken to a Negro in my life. I’ve never seen them anywhere except on the street and in the street cars. I wouldn’t know what to say to one.
“Oh, they’re all right,” affirmed Ida Yates. “My mother has a colored cook. She has two children, a little black boy and a little brown girl. And they are the funniest! You ought to see them dance!”
“My goodness me!” Marian exclaimed. “What would we do with one dancing around here like Topsy, and her hair sticking up all over her head!”
Ellen raised her voice indignantly. “It shouldn’t make any difference to us how they look! Suppose she should be someone like Topsy! It would still be our duty to teach her deportment and cleanliness and neatness. It’s our fault that they’re here. We brought them.”
A tall, slender girl with a fine, tanned face had been lolling back in a chair listening intently to the others’ comments, but up to this time saying nothing. Now she spoke:
“You girls make me sick! How can you be so dumb? You don’t suppose the kind of colored girl who would be coming to a school like this would still be in the Topsy state, do you? There are all sorts of colored people, just as there are all sorts of us. Don’t you know that, dumbbells?”
“Yes; Jennie’s right,” Maud Parker replied. “There’re a lot of them very fair, almost as white as we; only they have funny hair and their nails are dark, so you can always tell them. Well, some of them are quite comfortable. They don’t go out to work as servants, you know. And they send their children to school. And then the others are quite dark just as though they had just come from Africa. And they are the working class.” She leaned back, comfortably satisfied with her disquisition.
“How ridiculous!” Jennie Hastings sat upright. “Color’s got nothing to do with it. It’s simply that some are ambitious and some aren’t. Some get ahead and some don’t. Just like anybody else. There were lots of colored girls and boys too in my high school. And there was as much difference among them, in proportion to their number, as there was among us.”
Teresa emerged from the daze of bewilderment and astonishment into which this conversation had thrown her. “Jennie’s right,” she said. “Of course there’s as much difference. I’ve always gone to school with colored girls too. And I’ve never yet seen one of the pure Topsy type; though I suppose there are lots of them. And color has nothing to do with their ambition or success.” She thought of Marise and Phebe. “Why, when I was in the graded schools, the prettiest and the most popular girl there was a dark, brown girl; not black, you know, but brown, like—like a young chestnut. Her skin was just as thin. You could see the red under it.”
She paused, wondering if she could ever make them see from a description, the singular beauty of Nicholas Campbell. An afterthought convinced her that she’d better not say anything about colored boys,
“And I can tell you something else,” she resumed. “There was one girl in that school—very, very blonde, with hair so gold it was almost gilt . . . and she was colored!”
“I know,” Maudie Parker abetted her. “You could tell from her finger nails.”
“I don’t know about that,” Teresa countered. “I never noticed that. No, she stood up in class and said she was colored.”
“My!” exclaimed Ellen Ware. “Wasn’t that fine of her! Wasn’t she brave! Imagine anyone doing a thing like that if she didn’t have to! I’d like to know a girl like that. She’s got hero blood in her veins!”
Jennie snorted. “Hero nothing! Why should it take any courage to acknowledge you are what you are? That girl probably doesn’t mind being colored, because, oh, because—how can I make you see? Being colored is being her natural self and she can’t imagine being any other way. Any more than I can imagine being a boy, or a giant, or a Scandinavian or what have you!”
They were all silent a little, trying to adjust their minds to this entirely revolutionary idea.
“And then anyway,” Marian Tilbury appended thoughtfully, “she has good blood in her veins. Teresa said she looked like white. And of course she’s so proud of her white blood that she won’t let her black blood pull her down and let her be a coward.”
“Oh Lord!” Jennie groaned. “You don’t think you’ve got one-half or two-thirds of your veins filled with one kind of blood, do you, and the other filled with another? And that you can let one part of it govern you and the rest not affect you at all? . . . Ooo-f, this crazy talk makes me sleepy! . . . I’m going to bed. Good-night, Terese . . . good-night, gang!”
CHAPTER II
TERESA could have gone to Philadelphia for the Christmas vacation but she preferred the calmness and the cold of the New Hampshire village to the bleak uncertainties of home. The thought of her mother’s catechism brought back all her timidities and inhibitions. . . . It would be impossible, she knew from the tone of Olivia’s letters, to convince her that she had done little or nothing toward gaining a foot-hold in this world that meant so much to her mother. . . .
So she stayed at Christie’s along with Jennie Hastings and a half-dozen other girls. They skated, they hiked, they played like children in the feathery, drifted snow. Two of the “Academicians” lived just beyond the township in large farmhouses. They invited the stay-overs out to sit after jolly boisterous sleigh-rides before roaring fireplaces where they toasted pop-corn, listening to tall Indian stories as they fell from the lips of oldest inhabitants.
A happy, happy season.
Like a flash the winter and summer vacations were over; the girls had returned and school life was on at full tilt. . . . Examinations lurked around the corner. . . . Some girls were leaving to enter college—although at this time of the year the number was noticeably few.
Teresa let herself be caught up in the flurry of all these activities, feeling almost that she had never known any other existence, so intensely vivid did she find this. . . .
She loved a certain hour late in the dim afternoon when girls might drop into the long drawing-room of one of the residence halls for a cup of tea, a chat, a reflective silence in the embrasure of a deep arm-chair or couch, a bit of music or sometimes, best of all, conversation, desultory but real, with one of the instructors.
As in a dream she remembered one particular tea hour. The January day was intensely cold and still, the grey sky lowering so that it seemed, with the deep snow, to shut the little town into an atmosphere and an aura all its own. . . . Lights were not on full, curtains were still up, without, a lazy determined snow-storm beat gently against the window-pane. Within the drawing-room figures moved a little dimly in the fire-dusk; girls worn out with “midyears” relaxed in easy-chairs, faintly, sorrowfully reminiscent as they reviewed silently, careless or too hurried replies to questions. . . .
Tonight Miss Cathcart was the presiding genius. . . . The girls, remembering the prospectus, used occasionally to murmur adolescent but pointed sarca
sms on the subject of “contacts with superior mentalities . . .” But they liked Miss Cathcart. . . . She was young and pretty, but more than pretty. . . . She had the fine broad brow of the idealist and the brave firm mouth of the doer. The sweetness of the mouth, an index of her entire personality, was, you felt, an extra, supernumerary quality . . . so much the essential she was worthwhile and acceptable.
Without any preliminary of “Attention, please,” she began to talk in her clear, distinctive voice which afforded such a clew to her personal niceness. . . . In a moment everybody was listening.
“We’re going to try an experiment in the school,” she told them, “and yet not an experiment, since we are simply planning to proceed along certain lines which have been indicated for years in our charter. . . . You know we are pledged to open our doors to any pupils of approved scholastic and moral training. . . .
“A girl, answering to these requirements, has made, or rather her parents have made for her, application to be admitted here. She is colored. She is coming from a group which, I am pretty sure, is essentially no different from our own. But most of us don’t know sufficient about her people to be sure of this. . . . It doesn’t seem to me fair to her to make a special plea for her. . . . I am simply asking you to reserve judgment until you really know her. . . . She’ll be here the first of the term.”
In the excitement and comment that followed Teresa could hear Ellen Ware: “I’ll take her under my wing. I’ll see she’s treated all right.”
“You’ll give her some hair pomade, won’t you, Ellen?” asked Jennie Hastings dryly. “And be sure to warn her not to break out into a cakewalk in chapel.”
Teresa wrote her brother about it and received a warning along with some surprising news.
“Since you like your old school so much, for Pete’s sake don’t tell Mother that a colored girl is coming. She’ll yank you away so fast. . . . She’s simply rabid now about color. . . . Christmas week she had a gang of white women there, some old Welfare Workers to lunch . . . and there’s been no holding her since. . . .
“She put a mean one over on Oliver that day too. The poor kid doesn’t know it though, which is a lot better for him. . . . I’ll be looking after him from now on. . . . (Teresa opened her eyes at this and reread the phrase.) I’m going home for good in a few days. . . . Your bright little brother managed . . . and I mean managed, . . . to fail in all his subjects, sis, so he’s being dropped. . . . Ain’t that something?”
February brought the new term and Alicia Barrett. She was a slender girl, golden brown, with carefully “made” hair, soft and wavy. Teresa knew her immediately for what she was, a girl of family, breeding and tradition. She had known a certain sort of prominence too. Her father was a judge in Chicago; her mother a well-known musician of an earlier day. She was young, she was new, she was of a different milieu.
But nothing about this position terrified her or rendered her timid. She was not, of course, rich. But then equally of course, she not only was not poor, but she had never known poverty. Yet with the elasticity of the social tenets which her kind observed she numbered among her friends more than one girl who was genuinely poor. But such a girl possessed education, tradition and undeniable breeding.
In the midst of this new environment Alicia moved freely and easily and with little curiosity. She had always attended schools in which there were large numbers of white people and yet her identity had never been lost or overshadowed. She was a brilliant student; she dressed with a deliberate regard for her coloring; she was perfectly aware of her social background and completely satisfied with it.
In a school such as this she had nothing to gain but a superstratum of the much vaunted Eastern culture plus the poise which comes from being forced to meet new people and to cope with new conditions. She was really expecting, in 1923, neither blind prejudice nor blind patronage. And she was quite able to bide her time and await issues.
As a result, then, she did not rebuff nor did she accept too gratefully Ellen Ware’s zealous overtures nor did she resent the frankly curious scrutiny of Marian Tilbury. As a matter of fact she was herself engaged in some not too overt appraisal. From her angle she had nothing to gain from these girls; her whole concern was really with the curriculum. But she did hope to live in peace and harmony.
She was rather inclined to like Jennie Hastings’ matter-of-fact courtesies and she liked Teresa’s unobtrusive acts of kindness and thoughtfulness, sensing in both these girls attention based on real and spontaneous liking.
Teresa, especially, felt drawn toward her not so much because of the unsuspected tie of blood secretly binding them as because of her admiration. Both proud and sadly envious of Alicia’s assurance and independence she could not but compare the condition of her new friend with her own. Alicia’s whole attitude said serenely: “Here am I, the best of my kind and I am perfectly satisfied with my kind.” Thus she arrived at a ne plus ultra at once personally satisfying and completely baffling to all conjectures on superior bloods, racial admixtures, hybridizations and all the sociological and biological generalizations of the day.
Neither she nor Teresa, of course, was consciously aware of this stand. And yet the latter knew that she had behind herself no such pride either of race or of personality as Alicia constantly displayed. For Oliva’s teachings had urged not so much: “Be white,” as “Don’t be colored.” It was impossible for the child to know esteem for either group.
Something very fine and sweet began to grow up between the three girls, the clearly white Jennie, the apparently white Teresa and the frankly colored Alicia. It became natural for them to be found together at work, at play, at study. And if one were missing, then the other two were certain to be in each other’s company. But Jennie was a senior this term which meant that after January Alicia and Teresa would see each other almost constantly.
By the time of the arrival of the shy New England spring the pair were inseparable. . . . They walked and played tennis and swam; and in the sweet chilly evenings told each other secrets. . . . Or at least Alicia did, for save for her one great mystery, secrets Teresa had none. But Alicia had many. . . . Her brother was to study medicine and she was to become a great bacteriologist. Her parents were unaware of this but her brother Alex and she wrote reams to each other on the subject. Her present training was being given to her with a view of affording her a broad cultural background for an intensive future study of music. And indeed she played already with great accuracy and delicacy but with no special warmth, since her heart had never been in her practice.
And then she had been in love!
“Oh, Alicia,” said Teresa, amazed. “You haven’t!”
“Yes I have . . . more than once! You don’t mean to tell me you haven’t, Tessa!”
“Believe it or not. I never have.”
“But, Teresa, you must have seen some boy you liked.”
She couldn’t explain, how could she, that not until the night of Marise’s party had she come in contact with the boys she’d like to know. . . . That the few boys, brothers of uninteresting white girls whom she had met through a falsely stimulated intimacy, had appealed to her in no way. That the only colored boy, Nicholas Campbell, to whom she had given a second lingering thought, barely, she was sure, remembered her existence.
So she laughed and shook her sleek head. “No, I’ve never known any boy well enough to like him, really, you know. Is it such a crime? . . . Tell me about your beau. . . . Is he very handsome?”
Alicia, for a fleeting moment, dropped her arm about her friend’s slender shoulders.
“You know, Tess, you’re such a surprise to me—you’re so different from most white girls I’ve known. Usually your folks think that no colored person is good-looking because he isn’t white.”
Teresa smiled but was silent thinking once more of Nick and his dark splendor.
“He isn’t my beau any more,” Alicia resumed. “That’s all over now. But it was pretty serious while it lasted. And he’s still
as good-looking as ever. He’s just a little bit darker than I, very dark brown curly hair and dark grey eyes. . . . Funny I didn’t like the eyes themselves, but I did like the way they looked in his face. . . . You see, Tess, you don’t know anything about colored people. If you did you’d know of the surprising differences among them in appearance, I mean. . . . You ought to see a lot of colored girls at a party. . . . Why it’s just like looking at a flock of lovely birds. . . .
“Don’t I make you tired? . . . Did you know Miss Cathcart gave us fifteen pages of ‘Le Monde Où l’On s’Ennuie’? She may be sweet but she certainly can hand out a mean lesson.”
CHAPTER III
ALICIA wanted Teresa to spend the vacation with her. “Do come, Tess. . . . Chicago is hot but it’s wonderful and there’s the lake. We’ve got a big house with a swell porch. . . . And a little shack in a place not far off called ‘Idlewild.’ Alex and Mother and I go up there weekends with a bunch. We have the best times! Swimming and dancing. And old Alex and Henry Bates—that’s that boy I used to go with—getting off such crazy remarks. They’re as funny as end-men in a show. . . . Colored people can be so funny, Teresa! . . . Come along, darling, and see if you can’t get rid of that funny little stiffness of yours and find out what it’s all about!”
Teresa, her blood warming a little under her cool, white skin, was unable at first to restrain her delight. “Oh, Alicia,” she exclaimed, “do you really mean it?” But afterwards she remembered her mother and an awkwardness fell upon her.
“I had forgotten,” she murmured, “my mother. She likes us all to be together for the vacation.”
But Alicia had noted the sincerity of the delight and then the hesitation. To her mind it could mean only one thing. Of course it would be too much, she told herself, to find a mother as completely without prejudice as Teresa. Older white people were often like that, with the traditional dislike of their early days for dark people irrevocably fastened upon them. She tried to be airy, noncommittal.
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