The Living is Easy

by Dorothy West

  Even in its title, The Living Is Easy stands outside the more familiar descriptions of Afro-American life as harsh and painful if not pathological. The Living Is Easy is the story of Cleo Jericho Judson, as daughter, wife, mother, aunt, and friend, seen through the eyes of her only child, Judy. Cleo, born in the South and now living in Boston, is the wife of Bart Judson, twenty-three years her senior and proprietor of a successful business—Bartholomew Judson, Foreign and Domestic: Choice Fruits and Vegetables, Bananas a Specialty. He is a Southern-born, self-made man who is no match for his young, scheming wife, who frequently calls him “Mr. Nigger.”

  This is the story of a strained marriage, with each partner seeking from the other what is not forthcoming. Cleo always wants more money than Bart can or will give her, and Bart always wants more affection and warmth than Cleo can or will give him. It is a story of a family where love, control, and weakness weave together in a web of dependency, despair, and power.

  It is a story of a fragile black community in the North, where janitors and caterers were the leaders and blacks who could afford it hired Irish maids. In these circles pigmentation was very important. A dark complexion often made people, especially women, feel insecure and different. Status did not endure beyond one generation in this community, but Cleo believed that being alive and young made the living easy.

  It is a story about life style—which parties and churches to attend and which to avoid. It is the story of black businessmen and black professionals attempting to survive without either a separate constituency on which to build or a real welcome from the larger society.

  Northern blacks took pride in not living in a segregated society. They were, however, an insular group, a black village, a world apart in a white city. Whites controlled their destinies but hardly knew them; blacks were physically visible but socially invisible. On their part, blacks knew little beyond their psycho-social village boundaries and even less beyond their actual city limits.

  Dorothy West, an exception to this insularity, chronicled the secret city. It was a vivid and proud world, not characterized by a search for African roots or survivals or Pentecostal churches. It was as American as apple pie—made of the best apples. She undersood the values of this world. There were places blacks wanted to live, for example—Brookline or hardly-discovered Roxbury rather than the South End. (Cambridge was acceptable, no doubt because of the smaller number of blacks living there). Blacks in this Boston understood the complexity of status within white society. They viewed Jews, Irish, and Italians according to ethnicity and class, not color—in contrast to the way they viewed Brahmins. And Dorothy West knew the scandals or events that could upset the black village insularity—a gambling house run by a black woman, illegal abortions, the marriages of white (especially Irish) women to black men, business failures, unsuccessful professional practices, drinking, broken marriages—and marred the expectation of easy living in Boston.

  West took pains both to inform and to disguise. The Binneys, the Harnetts, and the Judsons are all based on real people. For example, Simeon Binney was modeled on Monroe Trotter, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and indefatigable editor of the Boston Guardian. He and George Forbes started the paper at the turn of the century to resist the infiltration of segregation into the Northern social system. The novel also introduces readers to such successful black businessmen as J. H. Lewis, whose tailoring establishment stood on the present site of Filene’s department store. Lewis paid $10,000 a year in rent and employed more than fifty men and women.17 Henry C. Turner’s Boarding Stable and Garage catered to wealthy Bostonians; the building now houses Boston University’s School of Engineering.

  Last but not least, we meet, in the guise of Bart Judson, Dorothy West’s father, Isaac Christopher West, “The Black Banana King.” Isaac West used his contract with the United Fruit Company to build a thriving business, located on Market Street across from Fanueil Hall, and won special renown for his ability to ripen bananas. These men were forced out of business by economic modernization rather than race per se. It was difficult for black men to compete with corporations which could wield considerable capital and information about economic forces. However, their existence demonstrates the potential of black entrepreneurs who were able to extend beyond the needs and resources of the black community.

  The Living Is Easy is also about black women—specifically about Cleo and the sisters she dominated and ultimately destroyed as wives and as people. (The West family home on Brookline Avenue at one time included thirteen persons, all relatives of Rachel West, who was one of twenty-two children.) Cleo is not reminiscent of the familiar black women in American literature. She controls Bart, but she is not really a matriarch. Others accept her control as much from their weakness as from her strength, and she does not control through love, as many black matriarchs do. For her, any expression of love is weakness, and the exercise of power seems to bring no happiness. She wants money and the comforts of the good life for herself. Judy is the tie that binds. She will keep Bart giving, and her dark brown color, the permanent reminder of her parents’ bond, is a fact that Cleo must always acknowledge to disbelievers. How could so fair a woman have so dark a child?

  Cleo does not have the warmth as a person or toward her husband of a Mamma Younger in Raisin in the Sun, or the quiet strength and courage of a Vyvy in Jubilee, nor does she seek God to give her the power to cope and control as does Sister Margaret in James Baldwin’s Amen Corner. As a strong, determined, controlling, beautiful woman of some means with an adoring husband, Cleo is new to black literature. She is reminiscent of Regina Giddons in Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes or Big Mamma in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  It is time for The Living Is Easy to be read again, to introduce Dorothy West to a new generation of readers. There are, however, other reasons for reading this novel now. At this writing, Boston is a city in economic crisis and racial turmoil, a city which has lost its image of being the birthplace of freedom and a pioneer in educational excellence. The deplorable state of the school system—the stage on which the play of discrimination has been publically acted out—illustrates more than anything else the cost of racism to this city.

  The small group of blacks about whom Dorothy West wrote has all but disappeared in mythology and in fact. Ironically, few of these people had children, and those who did sought other environments in which to rear them. The black community today, however, is far from invisible—its growing size and complexity result not only from a continuing stream of southern migrants like Bart and Cleo, but also from immigrants from Jamaica, Barbados, the Cape Verde Islands, and, most recently, Haiti. This community is conscious of itself, at least to the extent of breeching the wall of segregation and discrimination built around it. Protests have been made and some changes have occurred. The physical boundaries of the larger black community have extended far beyond the South End up the line of the rail beyond Roxbury and into Dorchester and Mattapan. The movement by blacks into Brookline, Newton and the surrounding suburbs has been fueled by the expansion of economic opportunity—not for individual entrepreneurs like Lewis, Turner and West, but for organization men and women and professionals in law and medicine.18

  The greatest progress has occurred, perhaps, in the fields of medicine and politics. Today, black doctors are affiliated with all the hospitals in the city, and teach on the faculties of the local medical schools. Black nurses, too, are commonplace. Except for an occasional political appointment, blacks held no offices in Cleo and Bart’s Boston (although they had been politically active before the 1890s). Now blacks serve as members of the General Court (five in the House, one in the Senate), and a black chairs the school board. The first black United States Senator since Reconstruction owed some of his success to political support from the black community. On the other hand, there is only one, recently elected, black member of the Boston City Council, and only five of the eighteen judges in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts above the district level are black.
This is a Boston neither Cleo nor Bart would have understood; it is likely that they would have felt alienated from and threatened by this new black community. Only Simeon Binney would have understood and fought for this change.

  A group that does not know its history—all of it—is not only in danger of repeating its mistakes, but is vulnerable to the charge of never having achieved anything. Dorothy West’s novel furnishes the reader of the present generation a glimpse of a black American past in contrast to the horrors of slavery or the blatant racism in the Chicago of Bigger Thomas. The Living Is Easy—if it really is easy—gives one reason to hope, or at least an understanding of another dimension of the black experience in this country. From her island retreat, Dorothy West has expanded our knowledge of black America.

  Adelaide M. Cromwell is Professor of Sociology and Director of Afro-American Studies at Boston University.

  NOTES

  1.The same might be said of Margaret Walker, although she wrote Jubilee in the 1960s (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).

  2.Saturday Evening Quill (1929). Back cover.

  3.The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1925).

  4.Countee Cullen to Dorothy West (DW), 16 April 1931, 23 August 1933, 21 September, 1933. Special Collections, Mugar Library, Boston University. All letters are from this collection.

  5.Langston Hughes to DW, 30 January 1934.

  6.Harry T. Burleigh to DW, June 1933. Burleigh (1866–1949) was the first black to achieve national distinction as a composer, arranger, and concert singer.

  7.Henry Lee Moon, for many years director of public relations for the NAACP, later edited the Crisis. Ted Poston wrote for several newspapers, including the Amsterdam News and the New York Times.

  8.Challenge 1, no. 1 (March 1934): 39.

  9.Zora Neale Hurston to DW, 24 March 1934.

  10.Langston Hughes to DW, 22 February 1934.

  11.Arna Bontemps to DW, n.d.

  12.Carl Van Vechten to DW, 27 February 1937. Van Vechten (1880–1964) was a music critic who turned to fiction. The most famous or infamous of his novels was Nigger Heaven (New York: London, Knopf, 1926). Van Vechten was a personal patron of many of the aspiring writers, artists, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance. According to Dorothy West, he enjoyed sending fanciful gifts such as penguin feathers and an owl.

  13.Wallace Thurman to DW, 2 September 1934.

  14.New Challenge 2, no. 2 (Fall 1937). There is some confusion in the chronology of the magazine. The first issue of Challenge, in March 1934, was vol. 1, no. 1. The last issue published under the name of Challenge was vol. 2, no. 1 (April 1937). In fact, six issues of Challenge were published. New Challenge began publishing as vol. 2, no. 2 (Fall 1937). Clearly, there was an attempt to maintain a semblance of continuity despite the change of name.

  15.Claude McKay to DW, 10 June 1937.

  16.For a description of what this project meant to writers of the day, see Ellen Tarry, “How the History Was Assembled: One Writer’s Memories,” in The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626–1940, ed. Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. x-xii.

  17.Dora Cole Lewis, unpublished manuscript (Afro-American Studies Department, Boston University).

  18.John Daniels, In Freedom’s Birthplace: A Study of Boston’s Negroes (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), pp. 100, 102.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dorothy West (1907-1998) wrote her first story at the age of seven, became a regular contributor to the Boston Post at the age of fourteen, and tied with Zora Neale Hurston for the coveted Opportunity short-story prize in 1927, before the age of twenty. Langston Hughes nicknamed West “The Kid,” after she moved to New York from Boston, and became the youngest writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance. In 1934 she founded and edited the influential African American literary magazine The Challenge, followed later by New Challenge. The author of The Wedding and The Richer, The Poorer, she lived on Martha’s Vineyard from 1943 until her death.

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