She started toward him, and felt something pull her, though nothing and no one was touching her. The little boy was smiling straight at her, wanting her to come and hug him, and she took another step forward. Something pulled her again. Now she turned, feeling her mile erase itself from her face and some nameless ache rising inside her. A little brown girl, with an almost unearthly beauty, was tucked in at the head of the bed. She was not sitting up like her brother, who was full of euphoria at being in a warm house, in a warm bed, with good food warming his belly. She lay flat, she lay still. They stared at each other, silent, not smiling, their hearts interlocking. And Deedee heard her own heart say as clearly as if the words were said aloud, “I’m going to love you best of all.”
It was over, but the spell was not broken. It had become part of her. She felt at ease. She joined her sisters and gave the little boy a big welcome hug and a big welcome kiss. They played with him until they’re called to supper. They tiptoed past the little girl because she had fallen asleep.
Deedee filled a large part of the little boy’s life. But the little girl was Deedee’s life, and she was the little girl’s existence. The affinity between the two could not be explained. It was as if they had both been born for this encounter, as if they had once been one flesh. Then one day Deedee came home from school, and Sister was not at the door to greet her. She was upstairs in bed, as she was the next day, and the next day, and the day after that. And then one day she was not there at all. They had taken her to the hospital. A wee passed, and another week passed. The grown ups closed their faces, and nothing could be read in them.
There came a night when the telephone rang, and Deedee jerked awake, and then fall asleep again, surface sleep that was easily shattered. There were sounds in her room. She woke up. There was a bureau across the room with a mirror above it. Her mother and her Aunt Minnie were facing the mirror. Their faces were reflected, but they were not seeing what the mirror saw. They were standing there because it was the farthest away from Deedee’s bed.
Her mother spoke: “I don’t know what to do about Deedee. If I wake her up and tell her, she’ll never forget it. If I don’t wake her up, she may never for give me.”
Perhaps Deedee stirred, for suddenly her mother and aunt were really looking in the mirror, and they saw her lying in bed with her eyes wide open.
Her mother came quickly and stood over her, “Deedee,” she said, “the hospital just called. Sister died. She doesn’t have to suffer anymore. She’s in heaven now. Now close your eyes and go back to sleep.”
She closed her eyes and went back to sleep. When she awoke, it was morning. She felt excited. Something had happened in the night. What was it? Then she remembered. Sister had died. She jumped up and ran into her sister’s room. “Genia, Helen, wake up, wake up. Sister died last night.” She saw tears splash their faces. Then she was right. Something exciting really happened.
Her mother said she didn’t have to go to school that day. She looked surprised. She wanted to go. She went to school and told everybody that her little cousin was dead. Somebody told her teacher. Her teacher said she could go home. She was surprise again.
The say of the funeral was a lovely day to go see Sister. Now they were all in the funeral parlor, where there were flowers and sad-faced friends. Deedee’s mother pointed to a coffin and said, “Go look at Sister.” Deedee went to the coffin and peered into it. She came back to her mother. “There’s a little dead girl in there. Where’s Sister? I came to see sister.”
Her mother said, “That was Sister you saw.” That was the moment she came out of the shock that she had been in for three days. She had come to the funeral to take Sister home. It was not that she did not know about death. It was just that she did not know it could touch her. How could she know until it touched her? The smell of carnations was all around her. For years she could not bear the smell, for even more years, she could not touch one.
They were home now, she dry-eyed, icy. Brother had stayed home with an aunt. He ran to greet her. She turned away without touching him. She called her mother and took her aside. What she had to say she had to say outside of anyone else’s hearing. She stared hard at her mother, and said the terrible thing, asked the haunting question.
“We’re a colored family are3n’t we? Why did God take our brown baby and let our white baby live?” Then she ran out of the room, knowing there was no answer to so cruel a questi0on, knowing that only a mother would never reveal her wickedness. She had to strike out at someone, someone who would forgive her.
For days, for weeks she was mean to the little boy, dropping his bread on the floor to make him eat dirt, squeezing his hand so tightly when she held it that tears started in his eyes, doing every little hurtful thing she could get away with. And the little boy clung to her through it all, because he needed her now more than ever with Sister not there to play with, to sleep with, to talk to. Deedee hand loved him once, and he did not know she had stopped.
It was summer, and the family came down from Boston to their summer cottage on the island. Deedee’s little meanness continued, and Brother continued to trust her because love is forgiving.
One early evening, Deedee’s sisters went to visit some friends their age, saying firmly she was too young to go but she was used to that, and watched them go. Then her mother said she was going to walk to a cottage down the road to sit awhile with an ailing friend. She put Brother to bet and told Deedee to go to him if he called.
Deedee went outside and sat on the porch, sitting as still as a mouse, so that Brother would think she had gone out too, and feel scared being by himself. After awhile she could hear him talking and she wouldn’t comfort him by saying, “Go back to sleep, I’m right her.”
He went on talking, and she was answering, and he didn’t sound scared.
It made her feel funny. Now it was she who began to feel scared. Who was he talking to? What was happening? She had to get up and see.
She went to the little bedroom at the back of the house. He scarcely noticed her coming. He was talking away, and he didn’t stop. “What are you talking about,” she said crossly. “You go straight to sleep or you’ll catch it.”
“I’m talking to Sister,” he said.
“Where is she?” Deedee asked softly.
“Right here,” he said in surprise at the question.
“Do you see her?”
“Don’t you?”
“No,” said Deedee. “She doesn’t want to see me. Will you tell her I’m sorry?”
“Deedee’s sorry.”
The tears that she had never shed began to fall. “Oh, Brother,” she said, “I love you, let me love you.”
She lay down beside him, and his hand crept into hers, the dark hand, the fair hand, entwined together.
That was the way her mother found them, asleep together. And the mother smelled a faint scent of carnations.
Then it was home again. The summer ended. They were home again, and it was Christmas again. And there they were around the tree, all of the faces filled with Christmas joy.
Deedee went over to Brother. She bent down to him. “Is she here?” He understood
“Yes. Can you see her?”
“No.”
And the ghost was laid.
Selected Literary Chronology
1907
Born in Boston June 2 to Isaac Christopher and Rachel Benson West. Her father, a former slave, owned a restaurant and a wholesale fruit company. He was called the Banana King.
West was tutored privately and graduated from Girls Latin School in Boston.
1926
July. The Typewriter appears in Opportunity magazine
July Hannah Byde appears in Messenger
1928
June An Unimportant Man appears in Saturday Evening Quill, a local literary newsletter.
West appears as an actor in the Theatre Guild’s production of Porgy (1928-29)
1929
April Prologue to a Life appears in Saturday
Evening Quill.
1932
West travels to the Soviet Union to appear in a failed production about Negroes in America.
1934-37
West launches Challenge, a literary magazine later renamed New Challenge.
1934
Cook appears in Challenge under the name Jane Isaac
May The Black Dress Opportunity
1936
Mary Christopher
The Five Dollar Bill appears in Challenge under the pen name
1938
Dorothy West joins a New Deal work relief program, the New York Writer’s Project for the Work Progress Administration, an arm of the Federal Writer’s Project commonly known as the WPA. Under the WPA she wrote the following pieces:
Sept. 6
David Lawrence
Sept. 9
Gardenia Banta
Sept. 14,
Mrs. Tommie Clicko
Sept. 21
Mayme Reese
Oct. 20
Mrs. Ella Johnson
Oct. 26,
Anecdotes (interview with Mrs. Ella Johnson)
Oct. 7-14,
Games, Songs, Rhymes of Children
Nov. 2
Mrs. Emma Ayer
Nov. 9
Mrs. Martha L.
Nov. 18
Ghost Story
Nov. 28
Pluto
Dec. 1
Amateur Night
Dec. 8
My Baby
Dec. 21
Temple of Grace, Berry Picking
1939
Jan 1.
Cocktail Party
1941
June 25
The Penny New York Daily News (NYDN)
Sept. 8
Papa’s Place (NYDN)
Nov. 3.
Bessie (NYDN)
1942
April 21
Mother Love (NYDN)
May 9
The Puppy (NYDN)
1944
Aug. 9
Fluff and Mr. Ripley (NYDN)
Aug. 24
A Boy in the House (NYDN)
1946
Apr. 15
Mrs. Carmody (NYDN)
Apr. 29.
Skippy (NYDN)
Nay 15
A Matter of Money (NYDN)
1947
March 7
Wives and Women (NYDN)
August 13
The Letters (NYDN)
1948
The Living Is Easy, a novel is published by Houghton and Mifflin.
1949
August 25
Made For Each Other, page 8 (NYDN)
1957
March 6
The Lean and the Plenty, page20 (NYDN
April 17
Homecoming, page 8, (NYDN)
May 21
Summer Setting, page 20
July 11,
Babe, (NYDN)
August 23,
The Maple Tree, page 6, (NYDN)
Dec. 28,
The Blue Room, page k3, p 16, (NYDN)
1958
May 14,
The Richer, The Poorer, (NYDN)
Aug 2,
The Summer Of Wonderful Silence, (NYDN)
June 5,
Interlude, 4 B3 between pp. 18-20, (NYDN)
1959
Nov. 2,
The Long Wait, page 8, (NYDN)
1960
April 29
The Birthday Party (NYDN)
1960
June 6,
Mrs. Creel (NYDN)
1961
Feb. 10
The Fun Ball (NYDN)
Dec. 11
The Stairs, page 8, (NYDN)
1962
March 17
The Bent Twig, (NYDN)
July 5,
The Dinner Party, (NYDN)
1963
July 23,
Nothing Lasts Forever, (NYDN)
1964
August 24,
The Bird Like No Other
1967
The Richer, the Poorer appears in The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers: An Anthology from 1899 to the present, Boston: Little, Brown.
1970
Jack in the Pot appears in Harlem: Voices from The Soul of Black America. The story originally appeared in the New York Daily News in the 1940s.
1983
The Living is Easy is republished by The Feminist Press
1995
The Wedding is published by Doubleday.
1995
The Richer, the Poorer : stories, sketches, and reminiscences, New York : Doubleday
Selected Bibliography
Andrews, William L. Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
Baker, Houston A. Jr. Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic. Madison: U of Wisconsin P., 1988.
Dalsgard, Katrine. “Alive and Well and Living on Martha’s Vineyard: An interview with Dorothy West, October 29, 1988.” Langston Hughes Review 12.2 (fall 1983): 28:44
Ferguson, SallyAnn H. “Dorothy West and Helene Johnson in Infants of the Spring.” Langston Hughes Review 2.2 (Fall 1983): 22-24.
Jones, Sharon L. “Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: The ‘Folk’, Bourgeois,’ and ‘proletarian’ Aesthetics in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West.” DIA 57.9 (Mar. 1997)” No,: DA9705428
McDowell, Deborah E. “Conversations with Dorothy West.” The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined. Ed. Victor A. Kramer. New York: AMS, 1987. 265-82.
Roses, Lorraine E. “Interviews with Black Women Writers: Dorothy West at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, July, 1984.” SAGE 2.1 (Sprg 1985): 47-49.
Rueschmann, Eva. “Sister Bonds: Intersections of Family and Race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun and Dorothy West’s The Living is Easy.” The Significance of Sibling Relationships in Literature. Ed JoAnna Stephens-Mink. Bowling Green, OH: Popular, 1992. 120-31.
Wade-Gayles, Gloria. “The Truths of Our Mothers’ Lives: Alice Walker, Dorothy West, Paule Marshall.” Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners. Eds. Ruth Perry and Martine W. Brownley. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984.
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