The Living is Easy

by Dorothy West

  The trolley wires began to hum. “Here comes the trolley,” said Cleo, with an expelled breath of profound relief. “Pick up your feet and don’t you dare fall down. If you get yourself dirty before we get to Brookline, I’ll give you to a Chinaman to eat.”

  The trolley halted, and she boosted Judy aboard. She dropped a single fare in the slot — Judy was small for going on six — asked for a transfer, guided Judy down the aisle of the swaying car, and shuttled her into a window seat. She sank down beside her and fanned herself elegantly with one gloved hand, stirring no air whatever.

  She looked herself now, gay and earth-rooted and intensely alive. Her gray eyes sparkled at Judy, at the slyly staring passengers, at the streets that grew cleaner and wider as the trolley left the Negro neighborhood, at the growing preponderance of white faces.

  Judy’s nose was pressed against the glass. Cleo nudged her and whispered, “Judy,” what do I tell you about making your nose flat?”

  Judy sighed and straightened up. The exciting street scene was a whole inch farther away. She withdrew into an injured silence and studied her reflection in the glass. It was not very clear, but she knew what she looked like. She looked like Papa.

  The people on the streetcar didn’t know that. They regarded her in a way that she was quite used to. They were wondering where Cleo got her. They carefully scrutinized Cleo, then they carefully scrutinized her, and raised their eyebrows a little.

  She was dark. She had Papa’s cocoa-brown skin, his soft dark eyes, and his generous nose in miniature. Cleo worked hard on her nose. She had tried clothespins, but Judy had not known what to do about breathing. Now Cleo was teaching her to keep the bridge pinched, but Judy pinched too hard, and the rush of dark blood made her nose look larger than ever.

  A little white dog with a lively face and a joyful tail trotted down the street. Judy grinned and screwed around to follow him with her eyes.

  Cleo hissed in her ear: “Don’t show your gums when you smile, and stop squirming. You’ve seen dogs before. Sit like a little Boston lady. Straighten your spine.”

  The trolley rattled across Huntington Avenue, past the fine granite face of Symphony Hall, and continued up Massachusetts Avenue, where a cross-street gave a fair and fleeting glimpse of the Back Bay Fens, and another cross-street showed the huge dome of the magnificent mother church of Christian Science. At the corner of Boylston Street, within sight of Harvard Bridge and the highway to Cambridge, Cleo and Judy alighted to wait for the Brookline Village trolley.

  Cleo saw with satisfaction that she was already in another world, though a scant fifteen-minute ride away from the mean streets of the Negro neighborhood. There were white people everywhere with sallow-skinned, thin, austere Yankee faces. They had the look that Cleo coveted for her dimpled daughter. She was dismayed by Judy’s tendency to be a happy-faced child, and hoped it was merely a phase of growth. A proper Bostonian never showed any emotion but hauteur. Though Cleo herself had no desire to resemble a fish, she wanted to be able to point with the pride of ownership to someone who did.

  The Village trolley came clanging up Boylston Street, and Judy clambered up the steps, pushed by her mother and pulled by the motorman. Cleo was pleased to see that there were no other colored passengers aboard. The occupants of the half-filled car were mostly matrons, whose clothes were unmodish and expensive. All of them had a look of distinction. They were neither Cabots nor Lowells, but they were old stock, and their self-assurance sat well on their angular shoulders.

  They did not stare at Cleo and Judy, but they were discreetly aware of the pair, and appreciative of their neat appearance. Boston whites of the better classes were never upset nor dismayed by the sight of one or two Negroes exercising equal rights. They cheerfully stomached three or four when they carried themselves inconspicuously. To them the minor phenomenon of a colored face was a reminder of the proud rôle their forebears had played in the freeing of the human spirit for aspirations beyond the badge of house slave.

  The motorman steered his rocking craft down a wide avenue and settled back for the first straight stretch of his roundabout run. Cleo looked at the street signs, and her heart began to pound with excitement. This was Brookline. There wasn’t another colored family she knew who had beaten her to it. She would be the first to say, “You must come to see us at our new address. We’ve taken a house in Brookline.”

  She began to peer hard at house numbers. A row of red-brick houses began, and Cleo suddenly pulled the bell cord.

  “We get off here,” she said to Judy, and shooed her down the aisle.

  Cleo walked slowly toward the number she sought, taking in her surroundings. Shade trees stood in squares of earth along the brick-paved sidewalk. Each house had a trim plot of grass enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. The half-dozen houses in this short block were the only brick houses within immediate sight except for a trio of new apartment houses across the way, looking flat-faced and ugly as they squatted in their new cement sidewalk.

  In the adjoining block was a row of four or five weathered frame houses with wide front porches, big bay windows, and great stone chimneys for the spiraling smoke of logs on blackened hearths. The area beyond was a fenced-in field, where the sleek and beautiful firehorses nibbled the purple clover and frisked among the wild flowers. Near-by was the firehouse with a few Irish heads in the open windows, and a spotted dog asleep in a splash of sun.

  Directly opposite from where Cleo walked was a great gabled mansion on a velvet rise, with a carriage house at the end of a graveled drive. The house was occupied, but there was an air of suspended life about it, as if all movement inside it was slow. Its columned porch and long French windows and lovely eminence gave the house grandeur.

  A stone’s-throw away was the winding ribbon of the Riverway Drive, over which the hooves of carriage horses clip-clopped and shiny automobiles choked and chugged. Beyond were the wooded Fens, at the outset of their wild wanderings over the city to Charlesgate.

  Cleo was completely satisfied with everything she saw. There were no stoop-sitters anywhere, nor women idling at windows, nor loose-lipped loiterers passing remarks. Her friends who lived in Dorchester, or Cambridge, or Everett had nice addresses, of course. But Brookline was a private world.

  She stopped and glanced down at her daughter to see if her ribbed white stockings were still smooth over her knees, and if the bright ribbons on the ends of her bobbing braids were as stiff and stand-out as they had been when she tied them. She scanned the small upturned face, and a rush of protective tenderness flooded her heart. For a moment she thought she had never seen anything as lovely as the deep rich color that warmed Judy’s cheeks. She herself had hated being bright-skinned when she was a child. Mama had made her wash her face all day long, and in unfriendly moments her playmates had called her yaller punkins. Now her northern friends had taught her to feel defensive because Judy was the color of her father.

  “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to,” Cleo warned Judy, and mounted the steps of the house before which they stood.

  In a moment or two a colored maid responded to her ring. She looked at Cleo with open-mouthed surprise, then her look became sly and secret. “Y’all come see about the house?” she asked in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “I beg your pardon,” Cleo said coolly. “I’ve come to see Mr. Van Ryper.”

  The maid’s face froze. She knew these stuck-up northern niggers. Thought they were better than southern niggers. Well, all of them looked alike to the white man. Let this high-yaller woman go down South and she’d find out.

  “Step inside,” she said surlily. “You’re letting in flies.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cleo said sweetly. “I see a big black fly got in already.” With a dazzling smile she entered the house, and instantly drew a little breath at sight of the spacious hall with its beautiful winding stairway.

  “What’s the name?” the maid asked briefly. If this woman wanted to be treated like white folks, at least she wasn’t going
to be treated like quality white folks.

  “The name is Mrs. Judson,” Cleo said readily. She had been asked a proper question, however rudely, and she was perfectly willing to answer it. This peevish incivility was much less insulting than the earlier intimacy. If she had wanted to gossip with the servant before seeing the master, she would have used the back door.

  “Wait here,” the woman said, and began a snail-pace ascent of the stairs, with her rocking buttocks expressive of her scorn.

  “Always remember,” said Cleo loudly and sweetly to Judy, “that good manners put you in the parlor and poor manners keep you in the kitchen.” The maid’s broad back seemed to swell the seams of her uniform. “That’s what I’m paying good money to your governess for,” Cleo added impressively. “So you won’t have to wear an apron.”

  Judy stared down at her shoes, feeling very uncomfortable because Cleo’s voice was carrying to the woman on the stairs. Miss Binney always said that a lady must keep her voice low, and never boast, and never, never say anything that might hurt somebody’s feelings.

  “She heard you,” said Judy in a stricken voice.

  Cleo gave her a look of amiable impatience. “Well, I expected her to hear. Who did you think I was talking to? I certainly wasn’t talking to you.”

  Her eyes grew lively with amusement as she studied her daughter’s distress. Sometimes she wondered where she had got Judy. Judy had no funny bone. Thea was probably responsible. She had no funny bone either. Their diversions were so watery. What was the sense in Judy’s taking delight in a dog’s wagging tail if she was going to miss the greater eloquence of that woman’s wagging rear, and then look shocked when her mother talked back at it? You really had to love Bostonians to like them. And the part of Cleo that did love them was continually at war with the part of her that preferred the salt flavor of lusty laughter.

  Her eyes clouded with wistfulness. The more the years increased between the now and the long ago, the more the broad A’s hemmed her in, the more her child grew alien to all that had made her own childhood an enchanted summer, so in like degree did her secret heart yearn for her sisters. She longed for the eager audience they would have provided, the boisterous mirth she would have evoked when she flatfooted up an imaginary flight of stairs, agitating her bottom. Who did she know in the length and breadth of Boston who wouldn’t have cleared an embarrassed throat before she got going good on her imitation?

  Sometimes you felt like cutting the fool for the hell of it. Sometimes you hankered to pick a bone and talk with your mouth full. To Cleo culture was a garment that she had learned to get into quickly and out of just as fast.

  She put on her parlor airs now, for Mr. Van Ryper was descending the stairs. Her eyebrows arched delicately, her luscious mouth pursed primly, and a faint stage smile ruffled her smooth cheeks. These artifices had no effect on Mr. Van Ryper, who was elderly.

  He reached the bottom step and peered at her. “Carrie should have shown you in here,” he said fussily, piloting Cleo and Judy into the parlor.

  He waved at a chair. “Sit down, Mrs. — uh — Jenkins, and you, young lady. What’s your name, Bright Eyes or Candy Kid? Let’s see if it’s Candy Kid. Look in that box on the table, and mind you don’t stick up yourself or the furniture.”

  Judy murmured her thanks and retired. She had learned to dissolve when grown-ups were talking. They forgot you and said very interesting things.

  “Now, then, Mrs. — uh — Jordan,” said Mr. Van Ryper. “I expect you’ve come about the house.”

  Cleo looked about the gracious room. The lacquered floors were of fine hardwood, the marble above the great hearth was massive and beautiful. The magnificent sliding doors leading into the dining room were rich mahogany, the wallpaper was exquisitely patterned. From the center of the high ceiling the gas chandelier spun its crystal tears.

  “It’s a beautiful house,” said Cleo with awe.

  “Best house on the block. Sorry to leave it, but I’m too old to temper my prejudices.”

  Cleo looked startled and felt humiliated. Were there colored people next door? Was that why Mr. Van Ryper was moving away? Should her pride make her rise and exit with dignity, or should she take the insult in exchange for this lovely house? Who were the people next door? If they were anybody, Miss Binney would have known them. They must be old second-class niggers from way down South, whom she wouldn’t want to live next door to herself.

  “Do you happen to know what part of the South the family came from?” she asked delicately.

  Mr. Van Ryper looked startled now. “What family?” he asked testily, peering hard at Cleo with the intent of reading her foolish feminine mind.

  “The colored family you’re prejudiced at,” Cleo said belligerently.

  Mr. Van Ryper rose to his feet. His face purpled with anger. “Madam, my father was a leader in the Underground Movement. I was brought up in an Abolitionist household. Your accusation of color prejudice is grossly impertinent. I believe in man’s inalienable right to liberty. Let me lecture you a bit for the enlightenment of your long-eared child, who is probably being brought up in cotton batting because she’s a little colored Bostonian who must never give a backward look at her beginnings.

  “We who are white enslaved you who are — to use a broad term, madam — black. We reduced your forebears to the status of cattle. It must be our solemn task to return their descendants to man’s estate. I have been instrumental in placing a good many southern Negroes in the service of my friends. My maid Carrie is lately arrived from the South. She is saving her wages to send for her family. They will learn here. They will go to night school. Their children will go to day school. Their grandchildren will go to high school, and some of them will go to college.

  “Negroes are swarming out of the South. The wheat and the chaff are mixed. But time is a sifting agent. True, the chaff will forever be our cross to bear, but one fine day the wheat will no longer be part of the Negro problem.”

  Cleo looked unimpressed. She had lent an unwilling ear to this long speech, and had stubbornly closed her mind every time Mr. Van Ryper used the word Negro, because colored Bostonians were supposed to feel scandalized whenever they heard this indecent appellation. This fancy talk was just to cover up his saying he didn’t like niggers.

  “Well, it’s nice when people aren’t prejudiced,” Cleo said politely.

  “Madam, I am distinctly prejudiced against the Irish,” Mr. Van Ryper said wearily, thinking that colored women, for all they had to endure, were as addlepated as their fairer-skinned sisters. “The Irish present a threat to us entrenched Bostonians. They did not come here in chains or by special invitation. So I disclaim any responsibility for them, and reserve the right to reject them. I do reject them, and refuse to live in a neighborhood they are rapidly overrunning. I have decided to rent my house to colored. Do you or don’t you want it?”

  “I do,” said Cleo faintly, thinking this was the oddest white man she had ever met. It would take an educated person like Miss Binney to understand how his mind worked.

  “And is the rent within your means? Thirty-five dollars, but it struck me as a fair sum. There are ten rooms. I hope you won’t mind if I don’t show them to you now. The parish priest is waiting upstairs in the sitting room. Seems some neighbors have complained about my attitude. He’s a man of taste and intelligence. Pity he has to be Irish, but I understand that some of his blood is English.”

  Cleo rose, with a little nod at Judy, who came as obediently as a puppy trained to heel. There was a ring of chocolate around her mouth that made her look comical, and a smudge of it on one of her gloves. Cleo sighed a little. Children made a mess with chocolate candy. Any fool ought to know that. What did this old man think lollipops were invented for?

  “About the rent, Mr. Van Ryper,” she said, wiping Judy’s mouth with the cotton handkerchief and taking this opportunity to glare in her eye, “thirty dollars would suit me better. And you wouldn’t have to wait for it. You’d have it ev
ery month on the dot. My husband told me to tell you that.”

  Mr. Van Ryper gestured toward the dining-room doors. His voice was patient and instructive. “Madam, each one of those doors cost two hundred dollars. The staircase cost a small fortune. There is a marble bowl in the master bedroom. The bathtub is porcelain, and so is the — ah — box. But if thirty dollars is all you can afford, I hope you will make up the difference in appreciation.”

  “Indeed I will,” Cleo promised fervently. “It’s been my dream to live in Brookline.”

  “This isn’t Brookline,” Mr. Van Ryper said crossly. “The other side of the street is Brookline. This side is Roxbury, which that thundering herd of Irish immigrants have overrun. They have finally pushed their boundary to here. Time was when Roxbury was the meeting place of great men. Now its fine houses are being cut up into flats for insurrectionists. I’m moving to Brookline within a few days. Brookline is the last stronghold of my generation.”

  Cleo swallowed her disappointment. Several colored families were already living in Roxbury. They didn’t talk about the Irish the way Mr. Van Ryper did. They called them nice white people. They said they lived next door to such nice white people, and made you feel out of fashion because your neighbors were colored.

  She opened her purse, taking great care that its contents were not wholly revealed to Mr. Van Ryper.

  “Just one other thing first,” he said. “Your reference. That is to say, your husband’s employer.”

  “My husband’s in business,” Cleo explained. “He has a wholesale place in the Market. All kinds of fruit, but mostly bananas.”

  Mr. Van Ryper’s eyes filled with interest. “Bart Judson? The Black Banana King? Never met him, but I hear he’s pretty amazing. Well, well. I’m happy to rent my house to him. I like to do business with a businessman. Tell you what. We’ll settle on a rental of twenty-five dollars. Ah, that pleases you, doesn’t it? But there’s a condition to it. I’d want your husband to take care of minor repairs. You see, I’m a tired old man, quite unused to being a landlord. I’d hate to be called out of bed in the middle of the night to see about a frozen water pipe.”