Fear took hold of her and rattled her teeth. “Mr. Johnson, what about the funeral?”
“I give the baby to the student doctors.”
Oh my God, Mr. Johnson! Oh my God!”
“I bought her some flowers.
She turned and went blindly p the stairs. Drooping in the front doorway was a frost-nipped bunch of white flowers. She dragged herself up to her flat. Once she stopped to hide the package under her coat. She would never look at that little white dress again. The 10 five dollar bills were 10 five-pound stones in her purse. They almost hurled her backward.
She turned the key in her lock. Mr. Edmunds stood at the door. He looked rested and confident.
“I been waiting for you. I just started to go.”
“You had any breakfast?” she asked tonelessly.
“I made some coffee. It was all I wanted.
“I shoulda made some oatmeal before I went out.”
“You have on the gig pot time I come home. Bet I’ll land some thing good,” boasted. “You brought good luck in this house. We ain’t seen the last of it.” He pecked he cheek and went out, hurrying as if he were late for work.
She plodded into the bedroom. The steam was coming up fine. She sank down on the side of the bed and unbuttoned her coat. The package fell on her lap. She took the 10 five dollar bills and pushed them between a fold of the package. It was burial money. She could never use it for anything else. She hid the package under the mattress.
Wearily she buttoned up her coat and opened her purse again. It was empty, for the few cents remaining from hr last relief check had been spend indiscriminately with her prize money.
She went into the kitchen to take stock of her needs. There was nothing from their feasts. She felt the coffeepot. It was still hot, but her throat was too constricted for her to attempt to swallow.
She took her paper shipping bag and started out to Mr. Spiro’s
The Assimilationist Period
After “Jack in the Pot” appeared in 1940, West began a new era in her career. She was now able to sell her fiction regularly to the New York Daily News and the News Syndicate. The syndicate bought and distributed her short stories to member newspapers in cities throughout the world.
It is not clear how many newspapers picked up these stories but it is safe to say her readers now numbered in the millions. Syndicates make their money selling the features they publish to a large number of newspapers in the same way they sell comic strips. The fiction Dorothy West was writing after 1940 now appeared regularly in the New York Daily News, one of the largest daily circulated newspapers in the United States with a daily circulation of well over a million readers.
The same stories seen in the New York metropolitan area were even more widely circulated when they were picked up by newspapers which subscribed to the News Syndicate. This fact alone suggests that Dorothy West may have been among the most widely read writers of the Harlem Renaissance due to this long relationship with the News and the syndicate. It continued for more than twenty years with West writing between one and three stories a year.
As you will see, these stories are driven by plots in which a moral message is the central theme. Significantly, her characters are not identified in the narrative as members of any particular racial group. When examined closely, in fact, these are raceless characters for the most part. If the narrative stood alone, a reader could safely assume West and her publishers intended to avoid the issue of the author’s race or the issue of race altogether.
While West was never identified as a black writer, the more than forty stories she wrote for the News during this period were illustrated with drawings that clearly depict white characters. This editorial decision to drop in sketches of white men, women and children in stories where the race of the central characters is obscured, suggests that the editors deliberately intended to obscured the race of the author.
This situation never became a major issue during West’s long life although she has said she was criticized for writing pulp fiction instead of the literary fiction she was known for writing.
This brings up an obvious question. Was she passing herself off as a white writer?
Most likely, not.
A more likely story concerns the politics of race and publishing the work of blacks in the 1940s and succeeding decades. According to West, she was instructed to write stories about whites, not blacks.
The so-called “protest literature” her contemporaries from Harlem and other regions were writing, decried the plight of Negroes in America. After the Renaissance period of the late 1920s, this genre of writing from blacks was not well received or widely read in wider publishing circles. In order to be published, West and other black writers deliberately began to write stories with plots that were no longer dependent upon a black perspective or point of view.
So, this was a literary and political strategy to continue to be published in a market that had previously excluded black writers altogether. What ever you might think of this tactic, it worked for West and the others who emerged from the Harlem Renaissance era to find their stories about Negroes and their communities weren’t as popular outside of the small literary circles they had formed in the late 1920s in Harlem. West and a handful of other black writers, who recognized these limits on their creative ideas, continued to be published in wider and wider literary circles.
The stories collected here were first seen in the News or the News Syndicate. They represent a stylistic departure from the rich language of West’s earlier and later fictions. These stories are melodramatic with simple plots that are more closely aligned with the popular pulp fiction genres of American story telling.
West, like her contemporary Frank Yerby, was now writing genre fiction, not literary fiction. In their own ways, both West and Yerby had dabbled in the protest literary movements of their time. Yerby, like West, had gathered the stories of blacks they encountered in the years when both writers lived and worked in Harlem. But in the lean years that followed the Renaissance, Yerby left America and was hailed from his new home in Spain as the best selling author of romance and adventure novels with swash-buckling, romantic characters of all races. Most of Yerby’s heroes, however, were white.
Quietly, West too went down this seldom talked about path and began writing pulp fiction too.
The first story she wrote for the News, “Jack in the Pot,” depicted the life and times of a couple living on welfare in Harlem. Thereafter, however, the more than forty stories she wrote under this lucrative arrangement never identified the author or her characters by race except in a few instances when they were called Caucasians. West was paid a standard $400 per story at a time when the average American workers brought home a little more than twenty five dollars a week.
This fact when juxtaposed along side of the idea that black writers were not accepted as equals, makes West a sort of cross-over pioneer in my eyes in an era when crossing over to sell to white audiences was considered “passing” as white.
It wasn’t true. The politics of the times made it impossible for black writers to sell stories about the down trodden Negro to white publishers. The protest literature of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and other writers was being written and published. But works like Native Son, Invisible Man and the Simple stories, all set in black urban settings were an emerging genre of black writing in the decades West was struggling to make a living as a writer.
To say West turned her back on her people or that she was passing herself or her fiction off as white, simplifies the long and complicated career of a black woman who had always seen herself as a writer, not a colored or Negro writer.
This new career as a genre writer began with publication of the next story, “The Penny.”
The Penny
News Syndicate, Inc.
June 25, 1941
Summary: A little boy who is given a penny by his father, races for the candy story and has a chance encounter with Miss. Halsey, who prides he
rself on her great acts of charity.
The little boy ran happily down the village street. His sweater and gaping shoes were inadequate to keep out the cold, but he felt nothing but a burning joy. For the first time in months he had a penny to spend. His father had given it to him five minutes before.
His father had brought home his piddling pay and dropped it into his mother’s lap. She had counted it carefully and sighed. As usual, there was not enough to last the week. Midway (through) the week, there would not be food enough or fuel enough to carry them until payday.
The little boy’s stomach would growl in school. His grimy face and faded shirt would show the scarcity of soap. His mother would leave her freezing house and sit by the blazing fires of the neighbors, gratefully gulping the coffee they gave her, and slyly pocketing the big buttered slices of homemade bread. His father would beg for a drink from some familiar at the bar to steel himself against the cold and hunger of this wife and child.
Neither the wife nor the child complained. The man was their husband and father. They had shared his good times. They loved him no less when his luck was bad. But his boy was so little, only six and six was so young for sacrifices. Other boys had baseball bats and boxing gloves, and milk and butter in their bellies, and stout shoes and clean shirts, and pennies mixed with the marbles in their pockets.
WHEN A FELLER WANTS TO CRY ALONE
The man could not remember the last time he had given the boy a penny to spend. It was surely in another and better world. To this pale creature with the pinched face and hollow eyes he had never given him anything.
The man had snatched a penny from the aproned lap of his wife and folded the boy’s fingers over it. Instantly, there had been a miraculous transformation. The gnome who clutched the penny had turned into a child.
And so the child raced towards the candy store, and his heart almost burst with happiness. There were beautiful things the other kids pulled out of their pockets at recess. The things that could make a boy’s mouth water with wanting.
He could have his choice of any of these. He could show his penny to the shopkeeper and take as long as he liked to choose. He could stand outside and press his nose against the glass and not feel bad, for after a while he could go inside and put his penny on the counter. He could turn to knob of an ordinary door and walk straight into heaven.
The little boy’s head was in the clouds. He did not know he had reached the curb. His feet slid into space. When he picked himself up, his hands were empty. His frantic eyes saw the penny rolling toward the gutter. It vanished as he lunged.
He limped back to the curb and sat down. A bruise was swelling on his cheek. His body was wrenched and sore. But just as he had not felt the cold, now he did not feel the pain. The round, shiny penny was gone. The end of the world has come as quickly as it’s bright beginning. The boy dropped his head on his knees and whimpered like a whipped puppy.
Miss Hester Halsey came down the street, walking in her prim way, with her nose, as always, a little disdainful. She had worked in the same office for twenty years, and saved her money. She had no patience with people who were poor. They were simply shirtless.
Miss Halsey saw the huddle figure of the boy. His back was to her, but she recognized his rags. He was the son of that worthless drunk and that lazy slattern (tramp). Miss Halsey’s mouth grew grim. Her small neat feet quickened their pace. Presently, she stood over the boy. Delicately she touched him with her foot.
“Little boy?”
His head jerked up. He scowled and snuffled. His grief was too immense for speech with this strange woman. He turned his face away and went on whimpering quietly.
Miss Halsey saw the ugly bruise. She touched the boy with her foot again.
“Who hit you?” she asked in a soft, strained voice.
The boy did not answer.
“Your mother?” she urged, “Your father?”
The little boy was frightened. He could not have answered if had wanted to. He moved crabwise along the curb.
Miss Halsey moved along the curb with him. She did not move crabwise. She made a fluid movement after him. Her gloved hand touched his cheek. He winced and drew a sobbing breath.
“Does it hurt bad?” asked Miss Halsey eagerly. “Anyone who could beat a child --” her voice grew hoarse with righteousness, “ought to be reported to the proper authorities.” She stooped, and her mouth was level with his ear. “Tell me who did it, little boy?”
The boy took a quick terrified look at her. Her burning eyes pulled him to his feet. He tried to escape but his stiffening leg buckled under him. He sat down hard on the curb again.
“Your leg, your leg, too.” the relentless voice insisted. “Did they take a stick to you?” Did they use a -- a poker?”
The little boy felt as if he were drowning. This strange woman was pushing him down, down and he was too tired to struggle. Once when he was three he had leaned too far over the rain barrel. He had fought his way to the surface and his father had heard his cries. Now he wanted the water to close over him to shut this woman out of sight and sound.
Feverishly Miss Halsey dug in her purse. She selected a coin, a shining penny, and held it out to him.
“Look, little boy, a nice new penny. Wouldn’t you like a nice new penny?”
Once more he looked at her. His eyes were black with pleading. He did not want the penny. He only wanted to drown.
“You can have the penny,” said Miss Halsey warmly, seeing the pleading look. “You can have it as soon as you tell me what happened. Poor little neglected boy, you’d be better off in a home.”
Home, thought the little boy. If he drowned, he could never go back home. Tonight there would be fire and food. There would be hot water and a bath. He didn’t want to drown. Oh, why didn’t the lady let him go?
Miss Halsey was purring softly. “You can go and buy candy if I give you the penny. If you tell me what happened, you can go and buy candy.”
He could feel the water receding. She was going to let him go. She was going to give him a penny for candy. Everything would be as it was before. He stood up and smiled shyly at Miss Halsey. He was not afraid of her now. He felt happy and excited. Heaven was half a block away. In another minute, he would enter it.
Miss Halsey let the penny lie in her open palm. The boy looked at it with an open mouth that began to moisten with wanting. Miss Halsey was as happy and excited as the boy. In a moment the long day would have some meaning. The dreary day of dull endeavor would end on a high note of moral victory.
“It was your father, wasn’t it?” said Miss Halsey in a rich full voice. “He came home drunk as usual and struck you with a poker. Your mother wasn’t there to stop him. She was off gallivanting at some neighbor’s. You crawled as far as this corner and I found you.”
A PHILANTHROPIST AND A HAPPY CHILD
The thought of candy was driving him crazy. He was a timid little boy, but he could not restrain his hand any longer. The penny snuggled inside it, but Miss Halsey’s fingers did not quite release it. He looked at her brightly, expectantly, ready to die for the penny.
“That’s how it was, little boy, wasn’t it?”
Her inflection told him what answer she expected. When he gave her that answer, she would give him the penny.
“Yes’m,” he said joyously.
Miss Halsey released the penny. The little boy turned and scooted away. His leg was not sore anymore. He was not walking on earth anyway. He was walking on air.
Miss Halsey continued down the street. She too, was afloat in the clouds. She was thinking about the letter she would write to the minister.
In the whole town, there were no two people happier than Miss Halsey and the little boy.
Papa’s Place
News Syndicate Co., Inc. 1941
Summary: This story begins when a man identified only as Papa dies. Papa is replaced by his daughter, Bessie, as head of the household. Bessie, lords over all, including Mama, until Bessie’s daughter pull
s a fast one.
This story was published in September of 1941. It was illustrated by a line drawing showing a sick and dying man in bed who appears to be white. The characters Bessie and Mama also appear to be white although no characters are identified in the narrative by race.
Mama helped her daughter with the dinner dishes. Bessie washed and Mama wiped. It had been a very good dinner and Mama felt as full and content as a kitten. Bessie looked perfectly furious. She was Mama’s own child, but Mama had to resist an impulse to run.
It was hard to remember that Bessie had been a fat jolly baby. She tried to remember when Bessie had stopped being her daughter. It was so long ago, thirty five years. Mama had just been widowed and Bessie was only twelve years old. All of Mama’s friends had said that Bessie was wonderful. Overnight, she turned into a little woman. Only Mama could see Bessie turning into something else.
At Papa’s funeral she did not shed a tear. Instead she took command and comforted Mama and led Mama’s friends up to see the remains. Indeed, she took Papa’s place with Papa hardly cold in his coffin.
She had never liked Papa. Papa never knew it but Mama did. All day long Bessie was one way, but when Papa came home Bessie was another way. She was quiet, never chattering to Papa like she did to Mama about the wonderful things she would do for him some day. She was touchy, slipping like an eel from Papa’s side whenever he tried to caress her.
She was calm as an oyster when Papa fell ill. When she watched by the bedside while Papa lay a long time dying, her expression was one of exasperation. When Papa breathed for the last time and Mama flung herself across his (body) Bessie pulled Mama away and said in a clear triumphant voice, “You’ve got me to take care of you now.”
THE IMAGE IN THE COPPER
Mama stacked the dishes carefully giving them pats to keep them even the way Bessie wanted them. She stole a glance at her daughter. Bessie had not unbent. She was attacking the copper pots and pans as if she saw reflected the image of her enemy. Yet Mama knew the shinning copper gave back the image of Bessie’s own face.
The Last Leaf of Harlem Page 17
