The Blacker the Berry

by Wallace Thurman

  “But, Sugar,” this was growing tiresome. “How can you say they were making fun of you. It’s beyond me.”

  “It wasn’t beyond you when it started. I bet you told them about me before I came in, told them I was black. . . .”

  “Nonsense, weren’t some of them dark? I’m afraid,” he advanced slowly, “that you are a trifle too color-conscious,” he was glad he remembered that phrase.

  Emma Lou flared up: “Color-conscious . . . who wouldn’t be color conscious when everywhere you go people are always talking about color. If it didn’t make any difference they wouldn’t talk about it, they wouldn’t always be poking fun, and laughing and making jokes. . . .”

  Alva interrupted her tirade. “You’re being silly, Emma Lou. About three-quarters of the people at the Lafayette tonight were either dark brown or black, and here you are crying and fuming like a ninny over some reference made on the stage to a black person.” He was disgusted now. He got up from the bed. Emma Lou looked up.

  “But, Alva, you don’t know.”

  “I do know,” he spoke sharply for the first time, “that you’re a damn fool. It’s always color, color, color. If I speak to any of my friends on the street you always make some reference to their color and keep plaguing me with—‘Don’t you know nothing else but light-skinned people?’ And you’re always beefing about being black. Seems like to me you’d be proud of it. You’re not the only black person in this world. There are gangs of them right here in Harlem, and I don’t see them going around a-moa-nin’ ’cause they ain’t half white.”

  “I’m not moaning.”

  “Oh, yes you are. And a person like you is far worse than a hinkty yellow nigger. It’s your kind helps make other people color-prejudiced.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying; it’s because of my color. . . .”

  “Oh, go to hell!” And Alva rushed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Braxton had been gone a week. Alva, who had been out with Marie, the creole Lesbian, came home late, and, turning on the light, found Geraldine asleep in his bed. He was so surprised that he could do nothing for a moment but stand in the center of the room and look—first at Geraldine and then at her toilet articles spread over his dresser. He twisted his lips in a wry smile, muttered something to himself, then walked over to the bed and shook her.

  “Geraldine, Geraldine,” he called. She awoke quickly and smiled at him.

  “Hello. What time is it?”

  “Oh,” he returned guardedly, “somewhere after three.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Playing poker.”

  “With whom?”

  “Oh, the same gang. But what’s the idea?”

  Geraldine wrinkled her brow.

  “The idea of what?”

  “Of sorta taking possession?”

  “Oh,” she seemed enlightened, “I’ve moved to New York.”

  It was Alva’s cue to register surprise.

  “What’s the matter? You and your old lady fall out?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Does she know where you are?”

  “She knows I’m in New York.”

  “You know what I mean. Does she know you’re going to stay?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But where are you going to live?”

  “Here.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “But . . . but . . . well, what is this all about, anyhow?”

  She sat up in the bed and regarded him for a moment, a light smile playing around her lips. Before she spoke she yawned; then in a cool, even tone of voice, announced, “I’m going to have a baby.”

  “But,” he began after a moment, “can’t you—can’t you . . . ?”

  “I’ve tried everything and now it’s too late. There’s nothing to do but have it.”

  Part 5

  Pyrrhic Victory

  It was two years later. “Cabaret Gal,” which had been on the road for one year, had returned to New York and the company had been disbanded. Arline was preparing to go to Europe and had decided not to take a maid with her. However, she determined to get Emma Lou another job before she left. She inquired among friends, but none of the active performers she knew seemed to be in the market for help, and it was only on the eve of sailing that she was able to place Emma Lou with Clere Sloane, a former stage beauty who had married a famous American writer and retired from public life.

  Emma Lou soon learned to like her new place. She was Clere’s personal maid, and found it much less tiresome than being in the theater with Arline. Clere was less temperamental and less hurried. She led a rather leisurely life, and treated Emma Lou more as a companion than a servant. Clere’s husband, Campbell Kitchen, was very congenial and kind, too, although Emma Lou, at first, seldom came into contact with him, for he and his wife practically led separate existences, meeting only at meals, or when they had guests, or when they both happened to arise at the same hour for breakfast. Occasionally, they attended the theater or a party together, and sometimes entertained, but usually they followed their own individual paths.

  Campbell Kitchen, like many other white artists and intellectuals, had become interested in Harlem. The Negro and all things negroid had become a fad, and Harlem had become a shrine to which feverish pilgrimages were in order. Campbell Kitchen, along with Carl Van Vechten, was one of the leading spirits in this “Explore Harlem; Know the Negro” crusade. He, unlike many others, was quite sincere in his desire to exploit those things in Negro life which he presumed would eventually win for the Negro a more comfortable position in American life. It was he who first began the agitation in the higher places of journalism which gave impetus to the spiritual craze. It was he who ferreted out and gave publicity to many unknown blues singers. It was he who sponsored most of the younger Negro writers, personally carrying their work to publishers and editors. It wasn’t his fault entirely that most of them were published before they had anything to say or before they knew how to say it. Rather it was the fault of the faddistic American public which followed the band wagon and kept clamoring for additional performances, not because of manifested excellence, but rather because of their sensationalism and pseudo-barbaric decor.

  Emma Lou had heard much of his activity, and had been surprised to find herself in his household. Recently he had written a book concerning Negro life in Harlem, a book calculated by its author to be a sincere presentation of those aspects of life in Harlem which had interested him. Campbell Kitchen belonged to the sophisticated school of modern American writers. His novels were more or less fantastic bits of realism, skipping lightly over the surfaces of life, and managing somehow to mirror depths through superficialities. His novel on Harlem had been a literary failure because the author presumed that its subject matter demanded serious treatment. Hence, he disregarded the traditions he had set up for himself in his other works, and produced an energetic and entertaining hodgepodge, where the bizarre was strangled by the sentimental, and the erotic clashed with the commonplace.

  Negroes had not liked Campbell Kitchen’s delineation of their life in the world’s greatest colored city. They contended that, like “Nigger Heaven” by Carl Van Vechten, the book gave white people a wrong impression of Negroes, thus lessening their prospects of doing away with prejudice and race discrimination. From what she had heard, Emma Lou had expected to meet a sneering, obscene cynic, intent upon ravaging every Negro woman and insulting every Negro man, but he proved to be such an ordinary, harmless individual that she was won over to his side almost immediately.

  Whenever they happened to meet, he would talk to her about her life in particular and Negro life in general. She had to admit that he knew much more about such matters than she or any other Negro she had ever met. And it was because of one of these chance talks that she finally decided to follow Mrs. Blake’s advice and take the public school teachers’ examination.

  Two years had wrought little change in Emma Lou, a
lthough much had happened to her. After that tearful night, when Alva had sworn at her and stalked out of her room, she had somewhat taken stock of herself. She wondered if Alva had been right in his allegations. Was she supersensitive about her color? Did she encourage color prejudice among her own people, simply by being so expectant of it? She tried hard to place the blame on herself, but she couldn’t seem to do it. She knew she hadn’t been color-conscious during her early childhood days; that is, until she had had it called to her attention by her mother or some of her mother’s friends, who had all seemed to take delight in marveling, “What an extraordinarily black child!” or “Such beautiful hair on such a black baby!”

  Her mother had even hidden her away on occasions when she was to have company, and her grandmother had been cruel in always assailing Emma Lou’s father, whose only crime seemed to be that he had had a blue black skin. Then there had been her childhood days when she had ventured forth into the streets to play. All of her colored playmates had been mulattoes, and her white playmates had never ceased calling public attention to her crow-like complexion. Consequently, she had grown sensitive and had soon been driven to play by herself, avoiding contact with other children as much as possible. Her mother encouraged her in this, had even suggested that she not attend certain parties because she might not have a good time.

  Then there had been the searing psychological effect of that dreadful graduation night, and the lonely and embittering three years at college, all of which had tended to make her color more and more a paramount issue and ill. It was neither fashionable nor good for a girl to be as dark as she, and to be, at the same time, as untalented and undistinguished. Dark girls could get along if they were exceptionally talented or handsome or wealthy, but she had nothing to recommend her, save a beautiful head of hair. Despite the fact that she had managed to lead her classes in school, she had to admit that mentally she was merely mediocre and average. Now, had she been as intelligent as Mamie Olds Bates, head of a Negro school in Florida, and president of a huge national association of colored women’s clubs, her darkness would not have mattered. Or had she been as wealthy as Lillian Saunders, who had inherited the millions her mother had made producing hair straightening commodities, things might have been different; but here she was, commonplace and poor, ugly and undistinguished.

  Emma Lou recalled all these things, while trying to fasten the blame for her extreme color-consciousness on herself as Alva had done, but she was unable to make a good case of it. Surely, it had not been her color-consciousness which had excluded her from the only Negro sorority in her college, nor had it been her color-consciousness that had caused her to spend such an isolated three years in Southern California. The people she naturally felt at home with had, somehow or other, managed to keep her at a distance. It was no fun going to social affairs and being neglected throughout the entire evening. There was no need in forcing one’s self into a certain milieu only to be frozen out. Hence, she had stayed to herself, had had very few friends, and had become more and more resentful of her blackness of skin.

  She had thought Harlem would be different, but things had seemed against her from the beginning, and she had continued to go down, down, down, until she had little respect left for herself.

  She had been glad when the road show of “Cabaret Gal” had gone into the provinces. Maybe a year of travel would set her aright. She would return to Harlem with considerable money saved, move into the Y.W.C.A., try to obtain a more congenial position, and set about becoming respectable once more, set about coming into contact with the “right sort of people.” She was certain that there were many colored boys and girls in Harlem with whom she could associate and become content. She didn’t wish to chance herself again with a Jasper Crane or an Alva.

  Yet, she still loved Alva, no matter how much she regretted it, loved him enough to keep trying to win him back, even after his disgust had driven him away from her. She sadly recalled how she had telephoned him repeatedly, and how he had hung up the receiver with the brief, cruel “I don’t care to talk to you,” and she recalled how, swallowing her pride, she had gone to his house the day before she left New York. Alva had greeted her coolly, then politely informed her that he couldn’t let her in, as he had other company.

  This had made her ill, and for three days after “Cabaret Gal” opened in Philadelphia, she had confined herself to her hotel room and cried hysterically. When it was all over, she had felt much better. The outlet of tears had been good for her, but she had never ceased to long for Alva. He had been the only completely satisfying thing in her life, and it didn’t seem possible for one who had pretended to love her as much as he, suddenly to become so completely indifferent. She measured everything by her own moods and reactions, translated everything into the language of Emma Lou, and variations bewildered her to the extent that she could not believe in their reality.

  So, when the company had passed through New York on its way from Philadelphia to Boston, she had approached Alva’s door once more. It had never occurred to her that any one save Alva would answer her knock, and the sight of Geraldine in a negligee had stunned her. She had hastened to apologize for knocking on the wrong door, and had turned completely away without asking for Alva, only to halt as if thunderstruck when she heard his voice, as Geraldine was closing the door, asking, “Who was it, Sugar?”

  For a while, Alva had been content. He really loved Geraldine, or so he thought. To him she seemed eminently desirable in every respect, and now that she was about to bear him a child, well . . . he didn’t yet know what they would do with it, but everything would work out as it should. He didn’t even mind having to return to work nor, for the moment, mind having to give less attention to the rest of his harem.

  Of course, Geraldine’s attachment of herself to him ruled Emma Lou out more definitely than it did any of his other “paying off” people. He had been thoroughly disgusted with her and had intended to relent only after she had been forced to chase him for a considerable length of time. But Geraldine’s coming had changed things altogether. Alva knew when not to attempt something, and he knew very well that he could not toy with Emma Lou and live with Geraldine at the same time. Some of the others were different. He could explain Geraldine to them, and they would help him keep themselves secreted from her. But Emma Lou, never! She would be certain to take it all wrong.

  The months passed; the baby was born. Both of the parents were bitterly disappointed by this sickly, little “ball of tainted suet,” as Alva called it. It had a shrunken left arm and a deformed left foot. The doctor ordered oil massages. There was a chance that the infant’s limbs could be shaped into some semblance of normality. Alva declared that it looked like an idiot. Geraldine had a struggle with herself, trying to keep from smothering it. She couldn’t see why such a monstrosity should live. Perhaps as the years passed it would change. At any rate, she had lost her respect for Alva. There was no denying to her that had she mated with some one else, she might have given birth to a normal child. The pain she had experienced had shaken her. One sight of the baby and continual living with it and Alva in that one, now frowsy and odoriferous room, had completed her disillusionment. For one of the very few times in her life, she felt like doing something drastic.

  Alva hardly ever came home. He had quit work once more and started running about as before, only he didn’t tell her about it. He lied to her or else ignored her altogether. The baby now a year old was assuredly an idiot. It neither talked nor walked. Its head had grown out of all proportion to its body, and Geraldine felt that she could have stood its shriveled arm and deformed foot had it not been for its insanely large and vacant eyes, which seemed never to close, and for the thick grinning lips, which always remained half open and through which came no translatable sounds.

  Geraldine’s mother was a pious woman, and, of course, denounced the parents for the condition of the child. Had they not lived in sin, this would not be. Had they married and lived respectably, God would not have pun
ished them in this manner. According to her, the mere possession of a marriage license and an official religious sanction of their mating would have assured them a bouncing, healthy, normal child. She refused to take the infant. Her pastor advised her not to, saying that the parents should be made to bear the burden they had brought upon themselves.

  For once, neither Geraldine nor Alva knew what to do. They couldn’t keep on as they were now. Alva was drinking more and more. He was also becoming less interested in looking well. He didn’t bother about his clothes as much as before, his almond-shaped eyes became more narrow, and the gray parchment conquered the yellow in his skin and gave him a death-like pallor. He hated that silent, staring idiot infant of his, and he had begun to hate its mother. He couldn’t go into the room sober. Yet his drinking provided no escape. And though he was often tempted, he felt that he could not run away and leave Geraldine alone with the baby.

  Then he began to need money. Geraldine couldn’t work because some one had to look after the child. Alva wouldn’t work now, and made no effort to come into contact with new “paying off” people. The old ones were not as numerous or as generous as formerly. Those who hadn’t drifted away didn’t care enough about the Alva of today to help support him, his wife, and child. Luckily, though, about this time, he “hit” the numbers twice in one month, and both he and Geraldine borrowed some money on their insurance policies. They accrued almost a thousand dollars from these sources, but that wouldn’t last forever, and the problem of what they were going to do with the child still remained unsolved.

  Both wanted to kill it, and neither had the courage to mention the word “murder” to the other. Had they been able to discuss this thing frankly with one another, they could have seen to it that the child smothered itself or fell from the crib sometime during the night. No one would have questioned the accidental death of an idiot child. But they did not trust one another, and neither dared to do the deed alone. Then Geraldine became obsessed with the fear that Alva was planning to run away from her. She knew what this would mean and she had no idea of letting him do it. She realized that should she be left alone with the child it would mean that she would be burdened throughout the years it lived, forced to struggle and support herself and her charge. But were she to leave Alva, some more sensible plan would undoubtedly present itself. No one expected a father to tie himself to an infant, and if that infant happened to be ill and an idiot . . . well, there were any number of social agencies which would care for it. Assuredly, she must get away first. But where to go?