All of a sudden Judy felt sick. She knew her mother’s burning beauty had not been for her, nor was it now for Mr. Brady. She did not want to hear her mother make the telephone call. She went and stood at the door and stared up at a star snug among its elders. The star began blinking so hard that it made her eyes water.
When she heard the nickel ring in the telephone box, she began to sing shrilly and kept on singing until her mother came out of the booth and bade Mr. Brady a wonderful good night.
All the way home Judy would not look at her mother. She played a skipping game that kept her a pace ahead. Her mother kept saying loving things, but Judy pretended not to hear and would vive no loving answers.
At the door her mother reminded her, “My precious, don’t bother to mention to your father about the telephone call. I dialed the wrong number and lost my nickel, so I really didn’t make it after all.”
When Judy went in she said good night (to her) father with her head hanging down. She hated him too and ran off to bed without once begging to stay up.
In the morning Judy made herself believe that last night had been a bad dream. She ran all the way home from school. Her mother greeted her with a hug and kiss. She looked very alive and kept smiling at Judy with the blood flooding her cheeks and her eyes star bright in her head.
Judy ate her lunch. The table was pretty but there was unwashed China in the sink. The plate her mother placed before her was not a company plate.
The lunch was soft things but they stuck in Judy’s throat. She felt excited and sad. Suddenly her mother was saying, “Darling, I sent your money off myself. I was passing the post-office this morning and it seemed rather silly to make a second trip this noon. You won’t tell your father, will you? He thought it would please you to send it yourself. But you’re mother’s big girl, aren’t you, my precious? And you aren’t disappointed, are you?”
“No’m,” said Judy, and she never said no’m. Her heart was standing in her throat. She thought it would burst.
That night she went to bed before the father came for dinner. She said she felt sick in her stomach, and in fact, she did. She did not want the light, nor a book, nor her doll. She shut her eyes tight. The father tiptoed into the room. She lay very still. His lips brushed her forehead. He tiptoed out. She put her mouth in the pillow and sobbed herself to sleep.
It was not so bad the first week. After every mail, she would make herself believe the moving picture machine would surely come on the next. But the week passed. Another week began. The father said it ought to come this week, anyway. Her mother added cheerfully, “Oh, yes.”
The second week ended. The third week began. Then the father said, “Shall I help you write them a letter, Judy?”
Her eyes met her mother’s bright unwavering ones. I forgot the address, she said.
Thereafter the father did not speak of the matter again. He said Judy must just consider it an unfortunate experience and profit by it.
Saturday morning of the fourth week it was Judy who got the mail that the elevator boy had pushed under the doorsill. There was a letter addressed to herself. It bore Mr. Fisher’s return address. The other letters fell from her hand. She stumbled blindly into her room and opened the envelope.
It was not really a letter. It was a newspaper page. There was a picture of a little girl and a story with easy words about how she had kept some pictures that belonged to Mr. Fisher, though he had written her twice to return them. The police had come and taken her to jail, where she had stayed forever and ever. Her mother got sick and died from worrying. Her father lost his job because his daughter was a thief and had to beg on the streets.
Judy was terrified she could not stir. Her eyes dilated. She could not swallow. She began to itch all over.
After a long time she folded the newspaper page and hid it under her mattress. She flung herself across the bed, quivering and unable to cry. She would suffer like this at the peal of a bell, at an unfamiliar voice, at an unexpected sound, and she would share this pain with no one. For she knew even if she screwed up the courage to go to a grownup, she would get the untruthful answer, children don’t go to jail, when there was that picture of that little girl which proved that they did.
The doorbell jangled. Judy jumped off the bed, scuttled under it, and drew herself up into a ball, banging her head against the floor, and holding her breath hard.
“God,” she prayed, “let me die.”
But children do not die. They grow up to be the strange things called mothers and fathers. Very few parents profit by childhood experiences. When they look back they do not really remember. They see through a sentimental haze. For childhood is full of unrequited love, and suffering and tears.
When Challenge faltered in the late 1930s, West and Richard Wright launched New Challenge. It too showcased the work of new black writers but like its predecessor, was short lived. West worked as a welfare investigator during these lean, sometimes uncertain years. She also found work among the New York Writer’s Project of the Work Progress Administration.
As a writer for this ambitious project, West wrote a variety of sketches about Harlem and the people she met while living there.
Some of the sketches she wrote include those in the next section of this collection. All were non-fiction sketches intended to be part of a folklore collection of WPA narratives.
Part III
The WPA Years
Ghost
NOVEMBER 18, 1938
Prologue: This bizarre story was told by a Harlem woman identified only as Mrs. Laura M. She was interviewed in her apartment at 300 W. 114th Street over a period of several days. Mrs. M. was a woman who had none of the personality traits which one ordinarily expects to find in a person who relates personal experiences of the kind given in this interview.
She is phlegmatic, unimaginative, practical, and apparently a materialist, except for the variations imposed upon her by the set of events which she has described. She is a staunch churchgoer, a Presbyterian, but shows and expresses no pre-occupation with the supernatural. She has a high school education and has none of the attitudes toward the supernatural that is often found among ignorant and uneducated persons.
No doubt her stoicism caused her to act as she did under the circumstances which she described. After a discussion of the possibility that aliens from Mars had invaded earth, (as described in an Orson Well’s radio broadcast) she said she believed the behavior of those who were frightened as “stupid” and “ridiculous.”
“I didn’t hear it,” she said, “but if I had, I wouldn’t have been frightened. And even if it had been true, I wouldn’t have run out of the house. I would have just waited. If a catastrophe is coming, it’s coming.”
I went to see Mrs. Laura M. with whom I once roomed, and during a conversation that somehow got around to ghosts, I expressed the opinion that I hoped my luck would continue and that I would never see or hear anything that might be described as a ghost. Mrs. M. looked at me curiously, as if she might say something on the subject, but apparently changed her mind. A neighbor who was visiting Mrs. M. and was on the verge of going, was persuaded by the sudden turn in the conversation to tell about a strange thing that had happened to her.
In the apartment in which she had lived before moving to her present address, Mrs. M. had had a strange experience upon moving. She had placed her baby’s playpen in a certain corner in her living room. Soon after she had settled in the apartment, she noticed that the baby began to cry a lot, unnaturally, as if in terror.
She would go to the playpen, and none of the physical things, which irritate a baby to the point of crying, would be apparent. The baby was in good health and there was nothing to cause the constant terrified screaming. Mrs. M. found it very difficult to understand the change in the baby’s disposition as it had formerly been an even-tempered child.
One day she mentioned the baby’s behavior to her next door neighbor. This friend listened, and then with some reluctance, asked where the bab
y’s playpen was. Mrs. M. told her. The neighbor then explained that another baby’s crib had stood in that identical spot. The mother of this child had died, and the family had immediately moved away. Mrs. M. had almost immediately moved in.
The neighbor’s explanation was that the dead woman, the baby’s mother, was coming back to see her child, not knowing that it had been taken away, and that it was this strange spirit form that was frightening Mrs. M.’s child. She advised Mrs. M. to move her baby’s playpen to another corner of the room. She did and the baby did not cry anymore.
Mrs. M. sat down again, and Mrs. M. looked at me in a strained way. Then she blurted out, “I’ve had a similar experience.
“Not long after we moved (she was then living with a brother) to 117th Street, I had a funny thing happen to me. It was a seven-room apartment, and I had one of the rooms on the street fixed up as a sewing room. The sewing room, bathroom and kitchen were on one side of the hall, the storage room (a small room which she used for trunks and suitcases) and two bedrooms were on the other side. My living room was at the end of the hall and there was a bedroom off from that.
“Well, one day I was sitting in the sewing room when I heard a rustle in the hall. It sounded like the swish of a taffeta skirt. I looked up at the door and saw the figure of a woman go past. She had on a black taffeta dress and I didn’t see any head. I called out, ‘Who’s there?’ Of course, nobody answered. I jumped up and looked down the hall. Just as the figure reached the door of the living room, it disappeared. I went in and looked around, but I didn’t anything.
“I went back to the sewing room and picked up my work. I just shrugged my shoulders and said I was seeing things. Nothing else happened like that for a long time. Then one day, (a friend) was sitting in the sewing room with me, and I heard the rustle again. I looked up and saw the figure again. My friend saw it too and she said, ‘Good God, L.! What’s that?’ I laughed and said, “What’s what?” She told me what she had seen.
“I told her that it was just her imagination, that she had seen a reflection from the street. She insisted that she had seen the headless figure of a woman. She was nervous for about ten minutes, then she quieted down, but she kept insisting that she had seen something. She said that it must have been somebody who had died in the house, and was coming back to look for something. Well, I know that I had seen something, so I said to myself that it must have been a good spirit since it hadn’t bothered me, so I didn’t worry about it any more while I was in that house.”
Then a woman who lived across the street came over and said, “You’ve stayed in this house longer than the last three families.” I asked her what she meant, and she said that she had lived in the house when it was first opened to Negroes, but that she had lived in an upstairs apartment. The first family that had my old apartment in that house on the first floor had stayed there a long time, and so had the people who had lived in there after that. Then she had moved downstairs into the apartment I then had.
She had put her bed in a certain place in one of the bedrooms and she felt like she was choking to death in the middle of the night. She didn’t know what to do at first, but finally she had moved her bed to another position. After that she didn’t have that choking sensation. But other little things happened, and she moved out.
She said that the next two families had moved in and stayed a month or two and had then moved out. I’d been in that apartment about a year and a half when she told me that. She asked me if I had had any experiences in that room. I told her that I hadn’t heard my brother speak of anything funny happening. She just shook her head and said it was queer.
I used to hear sounds like steps very often. At first I thought it was my brother coming in from work. He didn’t get in then until one-thirty, or two in the morning. I used to call out but there’d be no answer, so I just thought I was mistaken and I’d go back to sleep. One night in particular I remember hearing the steps very distinctly. I thought maybe he’d had an accident, so I got up and went to the door of my bedroom and called out. There wasn’t a soul there, so I went back to bed.
Then you remember (she turned to me) you used to hear little noises which you thought were mice. Well, some of them were and some of them weren’t. I didn’t want to frighten you, so I just let you think that every sound you heard was a mouse scampering around.”
I remember hearing noises in the closet of the bedroom which I had, heavier than the sound a mouse makes, but I finally decided that it was Mrs. M. moving around in her bedroom next door.
“When you used to ask me what I was doing up so late at night, (I heard the noises as late as three o’clock in the morning) I gave you some kind of answer because I was always asleep at the hour you mentioned. Before you moved up with me, I had the bedroom you had. I used to hear noises in that closet, too. One night the door kept swinging and I got up and shut it. The latch clicked and I got back in bed. Before I could get the covers up over me again, the door was open and swinging a little again. Now, I know that door latch was caught. But I went on to sleep. There wasn’t anything I could do.
While I slept in that room, I had another experience. One night I got in bed and after awhile I felt something that felt like somebody trying to stand up under the bed. It was pushing right in the center of the bed. I reached up and turned the light on and looked under the bed. There wasn’t a thing there, so I turned off the light, and in a little while, the pushing stopped, and I went to sleep.
After you moved up there, I shifted the bedrooms. I took the room my brother had had, the room where the woman across the street had felt like she was choking in, and my brother took the next room. I didn’t ever feel anything choking me, but I did feel that pushing again. Again I got up and turned on the light, but there wasn’t anything there. I never felt it again.
Then once after you moved up, too, I was coming down the hall - you were in the bathroom - and it felt like somebody come along behind me and blew my hair up.
It felt like a breeze that a human being makes, not like the wind. Like this -(she pursed her lips and blew as one blows up a balloon). I brushed my hair down but it wouldn’t stay. (Mrs. M. has very light, thin hair). All of it in the back stood straight out from my scalp. I kept brushing it down but it wouldn’t stay. After I had brushed it down about a dozen times, it returned too normal.
There wasn’t any draft, and the front door wasn’t open to let air blow down the hall. And what little air comes in the cracks wouldn’t have been strong enough where I was standing in front of the living room almost to blow my hair up like that. I never believed in anything like ghosts or things like that. I don’t know how I feel now except that I do think whatever it was meant no harm to me, so that’s probably why I didn’t get frightened.”
I asked her if she moved because of those experiences. “Goodness, no. After you moved, and my brother moved, I just didn’t need a seven room flat.”
A TALE CALLED “PLUTO”
November 28, 1938
Prominent on my bookcase stands a collapsible wooden image of the long-eared, sad-eyed hound known as Pluto, and immortalized by Mr. Walt Disney. There is no child, and almost never an adult, who does not, upon entering my house, immediately pick Pluto up, pull the strings that make him flop, and play happily for at least five minutes or at most to the end of the visit.
Today though, a child came to my house who did not run straightaway to Pluto. Maybe it was because he was a hungry child. And when is a child not a child? When he’s hungry. This one had hollows under his eyes, and his body was too thin, and his clothing was not much comfort against the wind.
My apartment house has a prosperous exterior. Several times a week somebody comes to your door with a hard luck story. Generally it’s a man, and so because I’m a woman, I simply say I’m sorry through a crack in the door, and shut the door quickly. In New York you have to be on the lookout for stick-up men.
But today it was a woman who answered my “Who is it?” There was something about
her plaintive, “Me, lady,” that made me open the door wider than I usually do when the voice is unknown. I saw them both then, the thin little black boy and the thin black woman, both staring anxiously, and neither looking as if they had the strength or will to harm the most helpless female.
“Yes?” I said.
The woman swallowed hard and said, “Could you give me a quarter, missus, to buy something to eat for the boy?”
“Why aren’t you on relief?” I asked suspiciously, although in my heart I was disarmed by her southern accent.
“They said I’d get a check next week,” she said helpfully. “They was nice to me,” she added.
My neighbor opened her door. She was smartly dressed. Her little boy ran across the hall and stared up at the ill-clad child. I was ashamed of all of us.
“Come inside,” I said coldly.
The boy and his mother entered and stood awkwardly in the center of my floor, the boy clinging to his mother’s hand as if my sunny room were a dungeon.
“Sit down,” I said.
They sat down together on the couch and Pluto was plainly visible. I saw the little boy look at it, and then he looked at me.
For a moment I started to urge him to pick it up and play with it. But then I remembered he had come begging for bread and I could not offer him a toy.
The boy’s grave eyes turned back to Pluto. I wanted him to get up and go to it. It made me mad that he recognized the place of his poverty. And then I remembered again that he had come for a quarter and not for a plaything.
I didn’t have a quarter to spare. I had only sufficient carfare until payday.
“I don’t have a penny in the houses” I lied. “But I’ll be glad to give you something to eat. You like bacon and eggs?”
The Last Leaf of Harlem Page 12
