The Living is Easy

by Dorothy West

  “It is kind of you to want to come,” said the Duchess, thinking that anyone who loved children was not as formidable as her first impression had indicated. “I shall expect you at four.”

  “Now I am quite jealous,” said Miss Graham, moving forward. “As the children’s music teacher surely I am not to be excluded from their tea party where you may ask them to play?”

  “I shall be pleased to have you,” said the Duchess, who really was pleased that Miss Graham had a simple heart that could delight in a children’s tea party.

  “I should like very much to come, too,” said Miss Bruce. “After two years of teaching, I’d really like to watch a group that I shan’t be expected to instruct.”

  “Do ask me,” said Miss Codman. “I have no excuse to offer except that it’s my free afternoon and I’d love to come.”

  Other voices joined hers. In a very little while both Simeon and Dean Galloway were quite crowded out by all the ladies, who had deserted Thea completely. Simeon seized Galloway’s arm and piloted him toward her, with jealousy for his sister filling him with hot, unreasonable anger toward his wife.

  “I think,” said Cleo to the Duchess, with a merry laugh, “I should bring the children another day. Any other day will suit them equally well. It will be a nicer tea Wednesday without them. I’m afraid they’d show off before so many grown-ups, and spoil an afternoon I very much mean to enjoy.”

  “Then do bring them Friday,” said the Duchess, carefully keeping the regret out of her voice, for these were Simeon’s friends who, for his sake, were being kind.

  “I beg your pardon, Cleo.” It was Simeon’s voice, coming across the room, colder than she had ever heard it, commanding. She went to him quickly, not meeting his eyes nor Thea’s.

  “It is nearly time for Thea to leave,” Simeon told her. “You forget her duties begin at dawn. You and Lenore lead somewhat easier lives. Dean Galloway arrived this afternoon. He, too, would like to leave as early as possible.”

  Cleo turned to him eagerly, escaping Simeon’s stern sounds. “We are ready and waiting to hear your little talk. Simeon, put him by the piano where we can all see him.” She clapped her hands for attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, our guest of honor, Dean Calloway.”

  There was a scattering of polite applause. Heads were indifferently turned. Somebody scraped a last mouthful of ice. There was a small clatter at the sideboard.

  “It is good to be in Boston,” began Dean Galloway, “for the eyes of the nation still regard it as the city of men on the side of justice, regardless of race or creed or color. You know that I am dean of a Negro college. You may not know that our activities are prescribed by the good white people” — he paused, but there was no ripple of laughter — “who support us. Something has happened in my city that happens every day in the South. A Negro is going on trial for his life before a lily-white jury. The man is not important in himself. He is a symbol of the South’s injustice to black men.”

  His listeners shifted nervously. Dean Galloway was really being terribly earnest on top of such an excellent supper. There were even little beads of perspiration on his upper lip. Why had he chosen this roundabout way of asking them to ask their own good white friends for money to help support his school? Poor Mrs. Judson must be quite embarrassed by this fellow Southerner.

  Cleo was not embarrassed, for she had not listened beyond his opening words. Having heard his flattery of her chosen city, she supposed the rest of his little speech would be the same. She turned to Thea to make amends, dropping her voice to a whisper.

  “Promise me, Thea, you’ll come to Lenore’s tea. I know women. They’ll deliberately misunderstand if you don’t. They won’t say you’re snubbing your sister-in-law. They’ll say you’re jealous of her.”

  “I am,” said Thea. It was such a new emotion that she made no attempt to conceal it.

  “Nonsense,” Cleo hissed. “You’ll be over that feeling before Wednesday.”

  “I have nothing to wear Wednesday,” Thea said, and felt surprised at saying it. She had never been interested in clothes. She had worn the best when there was money. When there wasn’t, she had been too sure of herself ever to wonder if clothes made the woman.

  Dean Galloway cleared his throat, and Cleo started guiltily. But Mr. Galloway was not rebuking her. His eyes were fixed on the lodestar that had brought him to Boston.

  “We are risking our school and its subsidies. But the faculty, the students, and I will make a willing sacrifice of ourselves and our futures to fight the jury system of our state.

  “We need your help. We need the help of The Clarion. If Boston can be aroused, and her mighty voice thunders against this travesty of justice, the nation will listen, and even the world.”

  Cleo again had stopped listening a good while back. “I can’t put my hands on a penny,” she fretted. “I can’t pawn these pearls so soon after Christmas. And after this party, I won’t get another nickel out of Mr. Judson for weeks. Can’t Cole —?” She glared at him. “He’s too married to his old germs to notice if you were buck-naked.”

  Thea stared at Cole, too. For the first time since their marriage she did not feel proud to be his wife. Without money the thing whose luster she had been most sure of seemed shabby. With money one could buy anything, a chinchilla coat, a servant to clean a house for guests to come to tea, and friends across the tea-table.

  Thea’s whisper was harsh. “I’ll have a new dress to wear to Lenore’s and Cole will buy it for me. I’m keeping his house, I’m nursing his mother, I’m denying myself a child. I think all that deserves a new dress. Cole had ways of getting through school. He can find ways of dressing me.”

  “That’s the way to talk to a man,” Cleo said, too loudly in her enthusiasm. She gave a quick glance across the room. Simeon was staring at Thea. She said, under her breath, “Guess we’d better let Calloway talk to us.”

  “Doctor Binney” — and Simeon, too, started guiltily — “will advertise a mass meeting in The Clarion. He has promised to write a front-page story that will burn the hearts of Boston. He has told me of his certainty in getting a famous old hall rent-free. He will see the board tomorrow. And when the night is decided on, I urge you to talk this meeting up. You represent colored Boston. You can help to swell the hall with the white and colored friends who look to you, and to Doctor Binney, for the expression of colored opinion in Boston. I and my school can be here only in spirit, but we will be waiting for Doctor Binney’s flaming words to light the torch with which we will burn out one of the South’s evils.”

  He looked over his audience. “I beg you who are here tonight to lend your respected names to the formation of a committee for the defense of Robert Jones.”

  For the first time his eyes singled out Cleo and sought understanding. She was a Southerner, she was his kinswoman. Cleo averted her eyes. She felt slightly embarrassed. Robert Jones. The same old nigger name as Serena’s husband. Every poor darkey in the world was named Jackson or Johnson or Jones. Dean Calloway needn’t stare at her. He was as bad as white folks who expected all niggers to be one big family. Just because she was from the South didn’t make Robert Jones any nearer or dearer to her than to anyone else in the room. Let him pick on somebody else. If he thought she was going to speak up first, he had another thought coming. She wasn’t going to stick out her neck at her very first party.

  She shifted her eyes around the room. Everyone was looking betrayed because this appeal was not for their money to keep Southerners in Southern schools, but for their virtual alliance with a colored jailbird.

  She scowled at Simeon. He had brought this embarrassing man among them. And Simeon was looking unhappy. It served him right. Maybe he would learn after this that his Boston friends had lost patience with his unpopular causes. It was her hard luck that he had picked her party.

  Simeon did not feel her hot gaze. Over and over in his mind ran a crazy refrain, Committee for the Defense of Althea Binney. He saw her fine head bent before this unj
ust jury, who had found her guilty of no crime but poverty. And he was powerless to help her, for all that he had was a profitless newspaper and a wife whose money proud Thea would never touch. She stood alone, with even Cleo, the upstart Southerner, only coming when commanded.

  No one had filled Dean Galloway’s pause with anything but inward thinking. He began to feel the room’s resentment, but there was nothing he could do, there was nothing he wanted to do, but go on.

  “Robert Jones’s crime was poverty. He was a Negro from South Carolina who came to my city to seek employment.”

  The color drained from Cleo’s face. She listened with every nerve.

  “He was fair enough to pass for white. Because wages for white men are higher, he did. There was trouble in our Negro section. A child had been killed by an automobile. And the drunken young driver had not stopped. The Negroes knew his identity. The father of the dead child went to see the young man’s father, who said that his son had been ill at home all day. There was even the doctor’s visit to prove it. But the doctor had been called at one. And the child had been killed at noon.

  “The Negroes grew mean. They began to brush against whites on the street, they grew sullen on their jobs. The white people felt that trouble was coming and swore in extra policemen. Robert Jones was one of them. He armed himself against his brothers for three dollars a day. The need of money can reduce men to the level of beasts who eat their own kind. Two days later, at sundown, the Negroes began a march on the town. And Robert Jones killed a man. He killed a frenzied policeman, a Klansman sworn in that day, who had emptied his gun into the orderly crowd and was reaching in his pocket for another cartridge box.

  “The Negroes were not armed. They had not come to kill. It was their plan to march to the center of town to show their unity and their strength. I will tell you that we in our school had been as upset by the smoldering resentment of these poor Negroes as any of the whites. We did not want any trouble either. Nice Negroes never want trouble with whites. But the night we watched that silent march all of us felt ashamed to be inside our darkened school.

  “When the white man fell, the Negroes knew their protest march was over. They picked up their dead and wounded and ran.

  “Robert Jones ran, too. He crossed the state line that night. At dawn he reached his father-in-law’s, and hid there all day. That night the old man tried to help him escape across the river on his flight North.

  “But the river was swollen, and the boat capsized. The old man drowned, and Robert Jones reached the shore after hours in the water. He was too weak and ill to move. He was found and extradited.

  “And now he sits in a cell in my city. No medical attention has been given him. There has been no attempt to lynch him. My city remembers that unarmed march. They will do nothing to incite an armed one.

  “We have won a partial victory in the very fact of the trial. We will win a total victory when every bitter truth is illumined. Robert Jones must not stand trial alone. The poverty of Negroes, their segregation, their terrorization, their wanton murders must go on trial, too. We must talk through Robert Jones for the whole embittered black South. We must pack that meeting hall. Doctor Binney does not doubt, and I, too, have his faith, that some brilliant fearless lawyer will rise to offer his services to the cause of justice.”

  Dean Galloway’s impassioned voice dropped. Perspiration stood on his forehead. A little rivulet ran down his neck. “There is nothing more to say. Robert Jones refuses to tell beyond what I have told you. The neighbors in his own town will not talk either in their understandable ignorance and fear. There is a wife and child who came North to escape the South’s oppressions. He will not reveal their whereabouts. But when his story reaches the farthest corner of this nation, they will step forward to stand by his side.”

  Dean Galloway took out his large handkerchief and mopped the emotion from his hands and face.

  Cleo stepped forward. Her shoulders were very erect and her head very high, her eyes a luminous gray. The others looked at her. They had been moved by Dean Galloway against their will. He had brought the dehumanized South to their doors. They had felt their oneness with Robert Jones. Through the soft iridescence of tear-filled eyes they saw their Southern brothers as themselves. They waited for a straw in the wind.

  Cleo spoke. Her voice, in which there was no longer any brittleness, was beautiful and compelling in its depth and quietness.

  “Dean Galloway, I am sorry to say I do not see what benefit will be derived from making the name of Robert Jones a household word. He had a reason for killing. But when one colored man commits a crime, the whole race is condemned. Tell Robert Jones’s story to the world, and the world will be stirred by the drama and tragedy of the killing. But the rest of the race will be the real martyrs. Wherever white people see them, they will watch them for danger signs. They will be frightened by a dark face, or a slow answer, or a quick step. They will think that all Negroes are armed.

  “I am no different from other colored women. And colored men will never understand us. They feel mean and low at every slight, at every setback, and want to weep on the world’s shoulder. But colored women can’t afford self-pity. They’re the ones that raise the children. What kind of children would they raise if they let them see their grief and despair? They’d raise humble dogs or mad dogs. They wouldn’t raise human beings.

  “Simeon, you know how Boston mothers feel about The Clarion. We keep it out of our children’s way. If you print the story of a — colored killer, I will never again permit it in my house.”

  She stepped back and grasped a chair for support, her knuckles showing white and her eyes so luminous that they looked wet.

  “Despite your very sympathetic speech, Dean Galloway, I feel I must agree with Mrs. Judson,” said Miss Elliot, kindly but firmly. “And the same is true for The Clarion, Simeon,” she said sternly, as an old friendship should permit. “Our daily papers have treated our race with the utmost consideration. Not one of them has ever splashed the story of a colored murderer across its front pages. It will be an unforgiveable error if your paper should establish the precedent.”

  “A shame indeed . . . really monstrous . . . a dreadful mistake,” the ladies passionately assented. At last the opportunity had been given them to tell Simeon in unison how thoroughly embarrassing was a colored newspaper that devoted most of its space to exposing the worst elements of the race.

  Simeon listened to their open hostility. It was no new story to hear disapproval expressed. But the barrage had never been so vigorous. He had never been assailed by so many people en masse. If he printed the story of Robert Jones, he might alienate them forever. Even Cleo, whom tonight he had commanded to Thea’s side, might close her ears to him hereafter. She was capable of cruelty, as were all these women, as they had brutally demonstrated when they canonized the Duchess, who had been nothing until he had given her the name that was Thea’s before it was hers.

  The Duchess had asked these women to tea. She would give other affairs. Thea’s friends would flock to the house in which Thea had presided. And the Duchess would win them over. She had started her campaign tonight. Well, he would start one of his own. He was handsome, brilliant. Women liked him, had even wanted him. They would learn that the road to his heart lay through Thea.

  “Dean Galloway,” said Simeon, forcing his tone to be frivolous, “I think we must bow to the command of the ladies of Boston. We made a gallant try. Let us lower our flag with the same gallantry.”

  “Bravo, Simeon,” said Miss Codman, with Wellesley élan, and her eyes were soft as they met his.

  “May we go now?” said Dean Galloway, moving quietly to the Duchess. “I haven’t your husband’s resilience. Perhaps I am too tired.”

  “I am ready to leave,” said the Duchess. “I am sorry my husband failed you. It is because I have failed him. A wife should be a man’s conscience. I am not his.”

  A nightcap was suggested. The ladies flew for their wraps. A toast was propose
d to Mrs. Judson for her lovely, lovely party. And really it had all been delightful despite the unfortunate injection of Dean Galloway with his sentimental story about some Robert Something-or-other. Mrs. Judson — Cleo! — had brought Simeon back into the fold. She had given them that Viking’s daughter, Lenore. She had wined and dined them royally. And, of course, she herself, with the becoming tired smudges under her beautiful eyes, with her lashes looking almost wet with the happiness that was welling inside her, with her smile almost heartbreaking in its softness — she deserved to sleep like a weary angel at the end of this exciting evening that saw her accepted as an integral part of Boston society.

  The storm door closed behind their bright laughter, their tinkling good nights. Cleo locked the inner door and crossed the hall to the parlor fire. She stretched out her hand to it. In the emptied room she felt cold.

  Shivering violently she knelt beside the hearth and wrapped her arms around her body. She saw the drowned face of her father.

  “Pa,” she moaned softly. “Pa.” But the held-in tears would not fall.

  CHAPTER 27

  UPSTAIRS, Bart stirred on Cleo’s bed. This begrudged concession had not included his passage between the sheets. He had been instructed to lie on top and cover with a quilt. Children, Cleo had told him shouldn’t sleep next to grown people, who sapped their strength. Except the mothers who had borne them, she had added hastily to forestall any discussion of this delicate subject. Her last command had been that Bart must take a bath and put on a fresh nightshirt. Since his last bath he had probably picked up enough germs to kill the hardiest child. And God knew they had a fertile field in which to stay alive.

  Bart stirred again and came awake. The sudden silence in the house was as loud as an alarm. He lay and listened and heard no company sounds. He looked down at his daughter, knowing without need of the faint glow cast by the fire her smallness, her roundness, how the long straight lashes lay on her cheeks, how her lips were curved in a smile at the angel that guarded her. He touched her outstretched hand, and his heart shook a little at the wonder of his child.