The Blacker the Berry

by Wallace Thurman

  She was stumped again and forced to linger, fearing all the while that Alva would fail to return home once he left. She tried desperately to reintroduce a note of intimacy into their relationship, tried repeatedly to make herself less repellent to him, and, at the same time, discipline her own self so that she would not communicate her apprehensions to him. She hired the little girl who lived in the next room to take charge of the child, bought it a store of toys, and went out to find a job. This being done, she insisted that Alva begin taking her out once again. He acquiesced. He wasn’t interested one way or the other as long as he could go to bed drunk every night and keep a bottle of gin by his bedside.

  Neither, though, seemed interested in what they were doing. Both were feverishly apprehensive at all times. They quarreled frequently, but would hasten to make amends to one another, so afraid were they that the first one to become angry might make a bolt for freedom. Alva drank more and more. Geraldine worked, saved, and schemed, always planning and praying that she would be able to get away first.

  Then Alva was taken ill. His liquor-burned stomach refused to retain food. The doctor ordered him not to drink any more bootleg beverages. Alva shrugged his shoulders, left the doctor’s office, and sought out his favorite speakeasy.

  Emma Lou was busy, and being busy, had less time to think about herself than ever before. Thus, she was less distraught and much less dissatisfied with herself and with life. She was taking some courses in education in the afternoon classes at City College, preparatory to taking the next public school teacher’s examination. She still had her position in the household of Campbell Kitchen, a position she had begun to enjoy and appreciate more and more as the master of the house evinced an interest in her and became her counselor and friend. He encouraged her to read and opened his library to her. Ofttimes he gave her tickets to musical concerts or to the theater, and suggested means of meeting what she called “the right sort of people.”

  She had moved meanwhile into the Y.W.C.A. There she had met many young girls like herself, alone and unattached in New York, and she had soon found herself moving in a different world altogether. She even had a pal, Gwendolyn Johnson, a likable, light-brown-skinned girl who had the room next to hers. Gwendolyn had been in New York only a few months. She had just recently graduated from Howard University, and was also planning to teach school in New York City. She and Emma Lou became fast friends and went everywhere together. It was with Gwendolyn that Emma Lou shared the tickets Campbell Kitchen gave her. Then on Sundays they would attend church. At first they attended a different church every Sunday, but finally took to attending St. Mark’s A.M.E. Church on St. Nicholas Avenue regularly.

  This was one of the largest and most high-toned churches in Harlem. Emma Lou liked to go there, and both she and Gwendolyn enjoyed sitting in the congregation, observing the fine clothes and triumphal entries of its members. Then, too, they soon became interested in the various organizations which the church sponsored for young people. They attended the meetings of a literary society every Thursday evening, and joined the young people’s bible class which met every Tuesday evening. In this way, they came into contact with many young folk, and were often invited to parties and dances.

  Gwendolyn helped Emma Lou with her courses in education and the two obtained and studied copies of questions which had been asked in previous examinations. Gwendolyn sympathized with Emma Lou’s color hypersensitivity and tried hard to make her forget it. In order to gain her point, she thought it necessary to put down light people, and with this in mind, ofttimes told Emma Lou many derogatory tales about the mulattoes in the social and scholastic life at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The color question had never been of much moment to Gwendolyn. Being the color she was, she had never suffered. In Charleston, the mulattoes had their own church and their own social life and mingled with the darker Negroes only when the jim crow law or racial discrimination left them no other alternative. Gwendolyn’s mother had belonged to one of these “persons of color” families, but she hadn’t seen much in it at all. What if she was better than the little black girl who lived around the corner? Didn’t they both have to attend the same colored school, and didn’t they both have to ride in the same section of the street car, and were not they both subject to be called nigger by the poor white trash who lived in the adjacent block?

  She had thought her relatives and associates all a little silly especially when they had objected to her marrying a man just two or three shades darker than herself. She felt that this was carrying things too far even in ancient Charleston, where customs, houses, and people all seemed antique and far removed from the present. Stubbornly she had married the man of her choice, and had exulted when her daughter had been nearer the richer color of her father than the washed-out color of herself. Gwendolyn’s father had died while she was in college, and her mother had begun teaching in a South Carolina Negro industrial school, but she insisted that Gwendolyn must finish her education and seek her career in the North.

  Gwendolyn’s mother had always preached for complete tolerance in matters of skin color. So afraid was she that her daughter would develop a “pink” complex that she willingly discouraged her associating with light people and persistently encouraged her to choose her friends from among the darker elements of the race. And she insisted that Gwendolyn must marry a dark brown man so that her children would be real Negroes. So thoroughly had this become inculcated into her, that Gwendolyn often snubbed light people, and invariably, in accordance with her mother’s sermonizings, chose dark-skinned friends and beaux. Like her mother, Gwendolyn was very exercised over the matter of intra-racial segregation and attempted to combat it verbally as well as actively.

  When she and Emma Lou began going around together, trying to find a church to attend regularly, she had immediately black-balled the Episcopal Church, for she knew that most of its members were “pinks,” and despite the fact that a number of dark-skinned West Indians, former members of the Church of England, had forced their way in, Gwendolyn knew that the Episcopal Church in Harlem, as in most Negro communities, was dedicated primarily to the salvation of light-skinned Negroes.

  But Gwendolyn was a poor psychologist. She didn’t realize that Emma Lou was possessed of a perverse bitterness and that she idolized the one thing one would naturally expect her to hate. Gwendolyn was certain that Emma Lou hated “yaller” niggers as she called them. She didn’t appreciate the fact that Emma Lou hated her own color and envied the more mellow complexions. Gwendolyn’s continual damnation of “pinks” only irritated Emma Lou and made her more impatient with her own blackness, for, in damning them, Gwendolyn also enshrined them for Emma Lou, who wasn’t the least bit anxious to be classified with persons who needed a champion.

  However, for the time being, Emma Lou was more free than ever from tortuous periods of self-pity and hatred. In her present field of activity, the question of color seldom introduced itself except as Gwendolyn introduced it, which she did continually, even to the extent of giving lectures on race purity and the superiority of unmixed racial types. Emma Lou would listen attentively, but all the while she was observing Gwendolyn’s light-brown skin, and wishing to herself that it were possible for her and Gwendolyn to effect a change in complexions, since Gwendolyn considered a black skin so desirable.

  They both had beaux, young men whom they had met at the various church meetings and socials. Gwendolyn insisted that they snub the “high yallers” and continually was going into ecstasies over the browns and blacks they conquested. Emma Lou couldn’t get excited over any of them. They all seemed so young and pallid. Their air of being all-wise amused her, their affected church purity and wholesomeness, largely a verbal matter, tired her. Their world was so small—church, school, home, mother, father, parties, future. She invariably compared them to Alva and made herself laugh by classifying them as a litter of sick puppies. Alva was a bulldog and a healthy one at that. Yet these sick puppies, as she called them, were the next generatio
n of Negro leaders, the next generation of respectable society folk. They had a future; Alva merely lived for no purpose whatsoever except for the pleasure he could squeeze out of each living moment. He didn’t construct anything; the litter of pups would, or at least they would be credited with constructing something whether they did or not. She found herself strangely uninterested in anything they might construct. She didn’t see that it would make much difference in the world whether they did or did not. Months of sophisticated reading under Campbell Kitchen’s tutelage had cultivated the seeds of pessimism experience had sown. Life was all a bad dream recurrent in essentials. Every dog had his day and every dog died. These priggish little respectable persons she now knew and associated with seemed infinitely inferior to her. They were all hypocritical and colorless. The committed what they called sin in the same colorless way they served God, family, and race. None of them had the fire or gusto of Alva, nor his light-heartedness. At last she had met the “right sort of people” and found them to be quite wrong.

  However, she quelled her growing dissatisfaction and immersed herself in her work. Campbell Kitchen had told her again and again that economic independence was the solution to almost any problem. When she found herself a well-paying position she need not worry more. Everything else would follow and she would find herself among the pursued instead of among the pursuers. This was the gospel she now adhered to and placed faith in. She studied hard, finished her courses at Teachers College, took and passed the school board examination, and mechanically followed Gwendolyn about, pretending to share her enthusiasms and hatreds. All would soon come to the desired end. Her doctrine of pessimism was weakened by the optimism the future seemed to promise. She had even become somewhat interested in one of the young men she had met at St. Mark’s. Gwendolyn discouraged this interest. “Why, Emma Lou, he’s one of them yaller niggers; you don’t want to get mixed up with him.”

  Though meaning well, she did not know that it was precisely because he was one of those “yaller niggers” that Emma Lou liked him.

  Emma Lou and her new “yaller nigger,” Benson Brown, were returning from church on a Tuesday evening where they had attended a young people’s bible class. It was a beautiful early fall night, warm and moonlit, and they had left the church early, intent upon slipping away from Gwendolyn, and taking a walk before they parted for the night. Emma Lou had no reason for liking Benson save that she was flattered that a man as light as he should find himself attracted to her. It always gave her a thrill to stroll into church or down Seventh Avenue with him. And she loved to show him off in the reception room of the Y.W.C.A. True, he was almost as colorless and uninteresting to her as the rest of the crowd with whom she now associated, but he had a fair skin and he didn’t seem to mind her darkness. Then, it did her good to show Gwendolyn that she, Emma Lou, could get a yellow-skinned man. She always felt that the reason Gwendolyn insisted upon her going with a dark-skinned man was because she secretly considered it unlikely for her to get a light one.

  Benson was a negative personality. His father was an ex-preacher turned Pullman porter because, since prohibition times, he could make more money on the Pullman cars than he could in the pulpit. His mother was an active church worker and club woman, “one of the pillars of the community,” the current pastor at their church had called her. Benson himself was in college, studying business methods and administration. It had taken him six years to finish high school, and it promised to take him much longer to finish college. He had a placid, ineffectual dirty yellow face, topped by red mariney hair, and studded with gray eyes. He was as ugly as he was stupid, and he had been as glad to have Emma Lou interested in him as she had been glad to attract him. She actually seemed to take him seriously, while every one else more or less laughed at him. Already he was planning to quit school, go to work, and marry her; and Emma Lou, while not anticipating any such sudden consummation, remained blind to everything save his color and the attention he paid to her.

  Benson had suggested their walk and Emma Lou had chosen Seventh Avenue in preference to some of the more quiet side streets. She still loved to promenade up and down Harlem’s main thoroughfare. As usual on a warm night, it was crowded. Street speakers and their audiences monopolized the corners. Pedestrians and loiterers monopolized all of the remaining sidewalk space. The street was jammed with traffic. Emma Lou was more convinced than ever that there was nothing like it anywhere. She tried to formulate some of her impressions and attempted to convey them to Benson, but he couldn’t see anything unusual or novel or interesting in a “lot of niggers hanging out here to be seen.” Then, Seventh Avenue wasn’t so much. What about Broadway or Fifth Avenue downtown where the white folks gathered and strolled. Now those were the streets, Seventh Avenue, Harlem’s Seventh Avenue, didn’t enter into it.

  Emma Lou didn’t feel like arguing. She walked along in silence, holding tightly to Benson’s arm and wondering whether or not Alva was somewhere on Seventh Avenue. Strange she had never seen him. Perhaps he had gone away. Benson wished to stop in order to listen to one of the street speakers who, he informed Emma Lou, was mighty smart. It seemed that he was the self-styled mayor of Harlem, and his spiel nightly was concerning the fact that Harlem Negroes depended upon white people for most of their commodities instead of opening food and dress commissaries of their own. He lamented the fact that there were no Negro store owners, and regretted wealthy Negroes did not invest their money in first-class butcher shops, grocery stores, et cetera. Then, he perorated, the Jews, who now grew rich off their Negro trade, would be forced out, and the money Negroes spent would benefit Negroes alone.

  Emma Lou knew that this was just the sort of thing that Benson liked to hear. She had to tug hard on his arm to make him remain on the edge of the crowd, so that she could see the passing crowds rather than center her attention on the speaker. In watching, Emma Lou saw a familiar figure approach, a very trim, well-garbed figure, alert and swaggering. It was Braxton. She didn’t know whether to speak to him or not. She wasn’t sure that he would acknowledge her salute should she address him, yet here was her chance to get news of Alva, and she felt that she might risk being snubbed. It would be worth it. He drew near. He was alone, and, as he passed, she reached out her arm and touched him on the sleeve. He stopped, looked down at her and frowned.

  “Braxton,” she spoke quickly, “pardon me for stopping you, but I thought you might tell me where Alva is.”

  “I guess he’s at the same place,” he answered curtly, then moved away. Emma Lou bowed her head shamefacedly as Benson turned toward her long enough to ask who it was she had spoken to. She mumbled something about an old friend, then suggested they go home. She was tired. Benson agreed reluctantly and they turned toward the Y.W.C.A.

  A taxi driver had brought Alva home from a saloon where he had collapsed from cramps in the stomach. That had been on Monday. The doctor had come and diagnosed his case. He was in a serious condition, his stomach lining was practically eaten away and his entire body wrecked from physical excess. Unless he took a complete rest and abstained from drinking liquor and all other forms of dissipation, there could be no hope of recovery. This hadn’t worried Alva very much. He chafed at having to remain in bed, but possibility of death didn’t worry him. Life owed him very little, he told Geraldine. He was content to let the devil take his due. But Geraldine was quite worried about the whole matter. Should Alva die or even be an invalid for any lengthy period, it would mean that she alone would have the burden of their misshapen child. She didn’t want that burden. In fact, she was determined not to have it. And neither did she intend to nurse Alva.

  On the Friday morning after the Monday Alva had been taken ill, Geraldine had left for work as was her custom. But she did not come back that night. Every morning during that week she had taken away a bundle of this and a bundle of that until she had managed to get away most of her clothes. She had saved enough of her earnings to pay her fare to Chicago. She had chosen Chicago because a man who was inte
rested in her lived there. She had written to him. He had been glad to hear from her. He ran a buffet flat. He needed some one like her to act as hostess. Leaving her little bundles at a girl friend’s day after day and packing them away in a secondhand trunk, she had planned to leave the moment she received her pay on Saturday. She had intended going home on Friday night, but at the last moment she had faltered and reasoned that as long as she was away and only had twenty-four hours more in New York she might as well make her disappearance then. If she went back she might betray herself or else become soft-hearted and remain.

  Alva was not very surprised when she failed to return home from work that Friday. The woman in the next room kept coming in at fifteen-minute intervals after five-thirty inquiring: “Hasn’t your wife come in yet?” She wanted to get rid of the child which was left in her care daily. She had her own work to do, her own husband and child’s dinner to prepare; and, furthermore, she wasn’t being paid to keep the child both day and night. People shouldn’t have children unless they intended taking care of them. Finally Alva told her to bring the baby back to his room . . . his wife would be in soon. But he knew full well that Geraldine was not coming back. Hell of a mess. He was unable to work, would probably have to remain in bed another week, perhaps two. His money was about gone, and now Geraldine was not there to pay the rent out of her earnings. Damn. What to do . . . what to do? He couldn’t keep the child. If he put it in a home they would expect him to contribute to its support. It was too bad that he didn’t know some one to leave this child of his with as his mother had done in his case. He began to wish for a drink.