The Ways of White Folks

by Langston Hughes

  “Can I use this phone?” she asked me that very morning.

  “Sure, Madam,” I answered.

  “Call me Pauline,” she said, “I ain’t white.” And we got on swell. I cooked her some bacon and eggs while she called up her sweetie. She told him she’d hooked a new butter and egg man with bucks.

  Well, the days went on. Each time, the boss would show up with Pauline. It looked like blondes didn’t have a break—a sugar-brown had crowded the white babies out. But it was good for Mr. Lloyd. He didn’t have the blues. And he stopped asking me to drink with him, thank God!

  He was crazy about this Pauline. Didn’t want no other woman. She kept him laughing all the time. She used to sing him bad songs that didn’t seem bad when she was singing them, only seemed funny and good natured. She was nice, that girl. A gorgeous thing to have around the house.

  But she knew what it was all about. Don’t think she didn’t. “You’ve got to kid white folks along,” she said to me. “When you’re depending on ’em for a living, make ’em think you like it.”

  “You said it,” I agreed.

  And she really put the bee on Mr. Lloyd. He bought her everything she wanted, and was as faithful to her as a husband. Used to ask me when she wasn’t there, what I thought she needed. I don’t know what got into him, he loved her like a dog.

  She used to spend two or three nights a week with him—and the others with her boy-friend in Harlem. It was a hell of a long time before Mr. Lloyd found out about this colored fellow. When he did, it was pure accident. He saw Pauline going into the movies with him at the Capitol one night—a tall black good-looking guy with a diamond on his finger. And it made the old man sore.

  That same night Mr. Lloyd got a ring-side table at the Cabin Club in Harlem. When Pauline came dancing out in the two o’clock revue, he called her, and told her to come there. He looked mad. Funny, boy, but that rich white man was jealous of the colored guy he had seen her with. Mr. Lloyd, jealous of a jig! Wouldn’t that freeze you?

  They had a hell of a quarrel that morning when they came to the apartment. First time I ever heard them quarrel. Pauline told him finally he could go to hell. She told him, yes, she loved that black boy, that he was the only boy she loved in the wide world, the only man she wanted.

  They were all drunk, because between words they would drink licker. I’d left two bottles of Haig & Haig on the tray when I went to bed. I thought Pauline was stupid, talking like that, but I guess she was so drunk she didn’t care.

  “Yes, I love that colored boy,” she hollered. “Yes, I love him. You don’t think you’re buying my heart, do you?”

  And that hurt the boss. He’d always thought he was a great lover, and that women liked him for something else besides his money. (Because most of them wanted his money, nobody ever told him he wasn’t so hot. His girls all swore they loved him, even when he beat them. They all let him put them out. They hung on till the last dollar.)

  But that little yellow devil of a Pauline evidently didn’t care what she said. She began cussing the boss. Then Mr. Lloyd slapped her. I could hear it way back in my bedroom where I was sleeping, with one eye open.

  In a minute I heard a crash that brought me to my feet. I ran out, through the kitchen, through the living-room, and opened Mr. Lloyd’s door. Pauline had thrown one of the whisky bottles at him. They were battling like hell in the middle of the floor.

  “Get out of here, boy!” Mr. Lloyd panted. So I got. But I stood outside the door in case I was needed. A white man beating a Negro woman wasn’t so good. If she wanted help, I was there. But Pauline was a pretty tough little scrapper herself. It sounded like the boss was getting the worst of it. Finally, the tussling stopped. It was so quiet in there I thought maybe one of them was knocked out, so I cracked the door to see. The boss was kneeling at Pauline’s feet, his arms around her knees.

  “My God, Pauline, I love you!” I heard him say. “I want you, child. Don’t mind what I’ve done. Stay here with me. Stay, stay, stay.”

  “Lemme out of here!” said Pauline, kicking at Mr. Lloyd.

  But the boss held her tighter. Then she grabbed the other whisky bottle and hit him on the head. Of course, he fell out. I got a basin of cold water and put him in bed with a cloth on his dome. Pauline took off all the rings and things he’d given her and threw them at him, lying there on the bed like a ghost.

  “A white bastard!” she said. “Just because they pay you, they always think they own you. No white man’s gonna own me. I laugh with ’em and they think I like ’em. Hell, I’m from Arkansas where the crackers lynch niggers in the streets. How could I like ’em?”

  She put on her coat and hat and went away.

  When the boss came to, he told me to call his chauffeur. I thought he was going to a doctor, because his head was bleeding. But the chauffeur told me later he spent the whole day driving around Harlem trying to find Pauline. He wanted to bring her back. But he never found her.

  He had a lot of trouble with that head, too. Seems like a piece of glass or something stuck in it. I didn’t see him again for eight weeks. When I did see him, he wasn’t the same man. No, sir, boy, something had happened to Mr. Lloyd. He didn’t seem quite right in the head. I guess Pauline dazed him for life, made a fool of him.

  He drank more than ever and had me so high I didn’t know B from Bull’s Foot. He had his white women around again, but he’d got the idea from somewhere that he was the world’s greatest lover, and that he didn’t have to give them anything but himself—which wasn’t so forty for them little Broadway gold diggers who wanted diamonds and greenbacks.

  Women started to clearing out early when they discovered Mr. Lloyd had gone romantic—and cheap. There were scandals and fights and terrible goings on when the girls didn’t get their presents and checks. But Mr. Lloyd just said, “To hell with them,” and drank more than ever, and let the pretty girls go. He picked up women off the streets and then wouldn’t pay them, cheap as they are. Late in the night he would start drinking and crying about Pauline. The sun would be rising over the Hudson before he’d stop his crazy carryings on—making me drink with him and listen to the nights he’d spent with Pauline.

  “I loved her, boy! She thought I was trying to buy her. Some black buck had to come along and cut me out. But I’m just as good a lover as that black boy any day.”

  And he would begin to boast about the women he could have—without money, too. (Wrong, of course.) But he sent me to Harlem to find Pauline.

  I couldn’t find her. She’d gone away with her boy-friend. Some said they went to Memphis. Some said Chicago. Some said Los Angeles. Anyway, she was gone—that kid who looked like an Alabama moon.

  I told Mr. Lloyd she was gone, so we got drunk again. For more’n a week, he made no move to go to the office. I began to be worried, cutting so many classes, staying up all night to drink with the old man, and hanging around most of the day. But if I left him alone, he acted like a fool. I was scared. He’d take out women’s pictures and beat ’em and stamp on ’em and then make love to ’em and tear ’em up. Wouldn’t eat. Didn’t want to see anybody.

  Then, one night, I knew he was crazy—so it was all up. He grabs the door like it was a woman, and starts to kiss it. I couldn’t make him stop pawing at the door, so I telephoned his chauffeur. The chauffeur calls up one of Mr. Lloyd’s broker friends. And they take him to the hospital.

  That was last April. They’ve had him in the sanatorium ever since. The apartment’s closed. His stuff’s in storage, and I have no more job than a snake’s got hips. Anyway, I went through college on it, but I don’t know how the hell I’ll get to dental school. I just wrote Ma down in Atlanta and told her times was hard. There ain’t many Mr. Lloyd’s, you can bet your life on that.

  The chauffeur told me yesterday he’s crazy as a loon now. Sometimes he thinks he’s a stud-horse chasing a mare. Sometimes he’s a lion. Poor man, in a padded cell! He was a swell guy when he had his right mind. But a yellow woman sure did d
rive him crazy. For me, well, it’s just a good job gone!

  Say, boy, gimme a smoke, will you? I hate to talk about it.

  6

  ——

  REJUVENATION THROUGH JOY

  MR. EUGENE LESCHE IN A MORNING COAT, handsome beyond words, stood on the platform of the main ballroom of the big hotel facing Central Park at 59th Street, New York. He stood there speaking in a deep smooth voice, with a slight drawl, to a thousand well dressed women and some two or three hundred men who packed the place. His subject was “Motion and Joy”, the last of his series of six Friday morning lectures, each of which had to do with something and Joy.

  As the hour of his last lecture approached, expensive chauffeured motors turned off Fifth Avenue, circled around from the Park, drew up at the 59th Street entrance, discharged women. In the elevators leading to the level of the hotel ballroom, delicate foreign perfumes on the breasts of befurred ladies scented the bronze cars.

  “I’ve just heard of it this week. Everybody’s talking about him. Did you hear him before?”

  “My dear, I shall have heard all six.… He sent me an announcement.”

  “Oh, why didn’t I …?”

  “He’s marvellous!”

  “I simply can’t tell you …”

  The great Lesche speaking.

  As he spoke, a thousand pairs of feminine eyes gazed as one. The men gazed, too. Hundreds of ears heard, entranced: Relax and be happy. Let Lesche tell you how to live. Lesche knows. Look at Lesche in a morning coat, strong and handsome, right here before you. Listen!

  At $2.50 a seat (How little for his message!) they listened.

  “Joy,” said the great Lesche, “what is life without joy?… And how can we find joy? Not through sitting still with our world of troubles on our minds; not through taking thought—too often only another phrase for brooding; not by the sedentary study of books or pamphlets, of philosophies and creeds, of ancient lore; not through listening to me lecture or listening to any other person lecture,” this was the last talk of his series, “but only through motion, through joyous motion; through life in motion! Lift up your arms to the sun,” said Lesche. “Lift them up now! Right now,” appealing to his audience. “Up, up, up!”

  A thousand pairs of female arms, and some few hundred men’s, were lifted up with great rustle and movement, then and there, toward the sun. They were really lifted up toward Lesche, because nobody knew quite where the sun was in the crowded ballroom—besides all eyes were on Lesche.

  “Splendid,” the big black-haired young man on the platform said, “beautiful and splendid! That’s what life is, a movement up!” He paused. “But not always up. The trees point toward the sun, but they also sway in the wind, joyous in the wind.… Keep your hands skyward,” said Lesche, “sway! Everybody sway! To the left, to the right, like trees in the wind, sway!” And the huge audience began, at Lesche’s command, to sway. “Feet on the floor,” said Lesche, “sway!”

  He stood, swaying, too.

  “Now,” said Lesche suddenly, “stop!” Try to move your hips!… Ah, you cannot! Seated as you are in chairs, you cannot! The life-center, the balance-point, cannot move in a chair. That is one of the great crimes of modern life, one of the murders of ourselves, we sit too much in chairs. We need to stand up—no, not now my friends.” Some were already standing. “Not just when you are listening to me. I am speaking now of a way of life. We need to live up, point ourselves at the sun, sway in the wind of our rhythms, walk to an inner and outer music, put our balance-points in motion. (Do you not remember my talk on ‘Music and Joy’?) Primitive man never sits in chairs. Look at the Indians! Look at the Negroes! They know how to move from the feet up, from the head down. Their centers live. They walk, they stand, they dance to their drum beats, their earth rhythms. They squat, they kneel, they lie—but they never, in their natural states, never sit in chairs. They do not mood and brood. No! They live through motion, through movement, through music, through joy! (Remember my lecture, ‘Negroes and Joy’?) Ladies, and gentlemen, I offer you today—rejuvenation through joy.”

  Lesche bowed and bowed as he left the platform. With the greatest of grace he returned to bow again to applause that was thunderous. To a ballroom that was full of well-dressed women and cultured men, he bowed and bowed. Black-haired and handsome beyond words, he bowed. The people were loath to let him go.

  Lesche had learned to bow that way in the circus. He used to drive the roan horses in the Great Roman Chariot Races—but nobody in the big ballroom of the hotel knew that. The women thought surely (to judge from their acclaim) that he had come fullblown right out of heaven to bring them joy.

  Lesche knew what they thought, too, for within a month after the closing of his series of Friday Morning Lectures, they all received, at their town addresses, most beautifully written personal notes announcing the opening in Westchester of his Colony of Joy for the rebuilding of the mind, the body, and the soul.

  Unfortunately, we did not hear Lesche’s lecture on “Negroes and Joy” (the third in the series) but he said, in substance, that Negroes were the happiest people on earth. He said that they alone really knew the secret of rhythms and of movements. How futile, he said, to study Delsarte in this age! Go instead, he said, to Cab Calloway, Bricktop’s, and Bill Robinson! Move to music, he said, to the gaily primitive rhythms of the first man. Be Adam again, be Eve. Be not afraid of life, which is a garden. Be all this not by turning back time, but merely by living to the true rhythm of our own age, to music as modern as today, yet old as life, music that the primitive Negroes brought with their drums from Africa to America—that music, my friends, known to the vulgar as jazz, but which is so much more than jazz that we know not how to appreciate it; that music which is the Joy of Life.

  His letter explained that these rhythms would play a great part in leading those—who would come—along the path to joy. And at Lesche’s initial Westchester colony, the leader of the music would be none other than the famous Happy Lane (a primitif de luxe), direct from the Moon Club in Harlem, with the finest Negro band in America. To be both smart and modern in approaching the body and soul, was Lesche’s aim. And to bring gaiety to a lot of people who had known nothing more joyous than Gurdijieff was his avowed intention—for those who could pay for it.

  For Lesche’s proposed path to life was not any less costly than that of the now famous master’s at Fontainebleau. Indeed, it was even slightly more expensive. A great many ladies (and gentlemen, too) who received Lesche’s beautifully written letter gasped when they learned the size of the initial check they would have to draw in order to enter, as a resident member, his Colony of Joy.

  Some gasped and did not pay (because they could not), and so their lives went on without Joy. Others gasped, and paid. And several (enough to insure entirely Lesche’s first season) paid without even gasping. These last were mostly old residents of Park Avenue or the better section of Germantown, ladies who had already tried everything looking toward happiness—now they wanted to try Joy, especially since it involved so new and novel a course as Lesche proposed—including the gaiety of Harlem Negroes, of which most of them knew nothing except through the rather remote chatter of the younger set who had probably been to the Cotton Club.

  So Lesche opened up his house on an old estate in Westchester with a mansion and several cottages thereon that the crash let him lease for a little or nothing. (Or rather, Sol, his manager, did the leasing.) Instead of chairs, they bought African stools, low, narrow, and backless.

  “I got the best decorator in town, too,” said Sol, “to do it over primitive—modernistic—on a percentage of the profits, if there are any.”

  “It’s got to be comfortable,” said Lesche, “so people can relax after they get through enjoying themselves.”

  “It’ll be,” said Sol.

  “We’re admitting nobody west of Fifth Avenue,” said Lesche.

  “No Broadwayites,” said Sol.

  “Certainly not,” said Lesche. “Only
people with souls to save—and enough Harlemites to save ’em.”

  “Ha! Ha!” said Sol.

  All the attendants were French—maids, butlers, and pages. Lesche’s two assistants were a healthy and hard young woman, to whom he had once been married, a Hollywood Swede with Jean Harlow hair; and a young Yale man who hadn’t graduated, but who read Ronald Firbank seriously, adored Louis Armstrong, worshipped Dwight Fisk, and had written Lesche’s five hundred personal letters in a seven-lively-arts Gilbert Seldes style.

  Sol, of course, handled the money, with a staff of secretaries, bookkeepers, and managers. And Happy Lane’s African band, two tap dancers, and a real blues singer were contracted to spread joy, and act as the primordial pulse beat of the house. In other words, they were to furnish the primitive.

  Within a month after the Colony opened in mid-January, its resident guests numbered thirty-five. Applications were legion. The demand for places was very great. The price went up.

  “It’s unbelievable how many people with money are unhappy,” said Sol.

  “It’s unbelievable how they need what we got,” drawled Lesche.

  The press agents wrote marvellous stories about Lesche; how he had long been in his youth at Del Monte a student of the occult, how he had turned from that to the primitive and, through Africa, had discovered the curative values of Negro jazz.

  The truth was quite otherwise.

  Lesche had first worked in a circus. He rode a Roman chariot in the finale. All the way across the U. S. A. he rode twice daily, from Indianapolis where he got the job to Los Angeles where he quit, because nobody knew him there, and he liked the swimming at Santa Monica—and because he soon found a softer job posing for the members of a modernistic art colony who were modeling and painting away under a most expensive teacher at a nearby resort, saving their souls through art.

  Lesche ate oranges and posed and swam all that summer and met a lot of nice, rich, and slightly faded women. New kind of people for him. Cultured people. He met, among others, Mrs. Oscar Willis of New Haven, one of the members of this colony of art expression. Her husband owned a railroad. She was very unhappy. She was lonely in her soul—and her pictures expressed that loneliness. She invited Lesche to tea at her bungalow near the beach.