A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories

by Bettye Collier-Thomas

  “If they had not been hedged about by a wall of race prejudice, they would have outstripped the whites. My life work is to elevate and improve the condition of the colored people of Brooklyn. Why I have been so moved to do [so] is no business of the New York Recorder and I demand it not try to pry into my private matters. This institution is duly incorporated and recorded—the desired information not given by me can be found in the public records at City Hall—good morning,” and she politely pointed the reporter the way to the door.

  About ten or twelve days after Ella “Hope” (as she is now recorded) gave her Christmas dinner and well filled baskets to the poor of “Chicago Row,” the New York Recorder published the following upon its editorial page:

  A STRANGE COINCIDENCE

  That the world is growing better and brighter; that man’s inhumanity to man is growing less as the sun of civilization gets nearer and nearer its zenith, can be seen on all sides without the aid of field glasses; still, the door of charity is often opened by strange hands, as the clipping below from one of our far Western exchanges will show:

  [From the Oakland (Cal.) Times]

  Three Hundred homeless or poor men and boys of this city were given a Christmas dinner between the hours of 12:30 and 6:00 p.m. at the hotel and restaurant of Mr. Amos B. Clark, on Railroad avenue, opposite the Grand depot. Mr. Clark is one of our few colored citizens and one of our leading business men and richest property owners. He came here from Chicago several years ago (where, he says, he was born, and with strange foresight bought up all of the then worthless land west of the new Grand depot. He graded the same, built a hotel opposite the depot and built flats upon the rest of his land. These houses are all rented to worthy white people, as there are only twenty colored men residing in the city, all employees in the houses of the rich.) The strangest fact about Mr. Clark’s dinner was that all of it’s partakers were white, as there is not a Negro beggar or tramp in the city. Men of Mr. Clark’s stripe are a credit to the State, and the Pacific slope, regardless of the hue of their skin, and we hope that Mr. Clark (who, we learn, is a bachelor and worth over $400,000) will continue to be one of our foremost charitable citizens for years, but not as a bachelor, but a benedict.

  The strange coincident in the above is that at that time or near about (allowing for the difference between New York and California time) a white lady was doing the same kindly deed for the worthy Negroes of Brooklyn. The coincident points the way to a brighter future, when all Americans regardless of race, color, or other accidents of birth or misfortune will bask alike in the noon-day sun of a “country of the people, by the people, for the people.” God speed the day.

  The following summer a colored Pullman palace car porter stopped at Amos B. Clark’s hotel. He was a stranger; he was talkative. He said he was from New York City and a native of the place. When Clark heard this, he confessed that he was also a native of the great city, and asked many questions about the places and the changes during the past few years. He also asked his guest if he had any New York or Brooklyn newspapers, no matter how old, as news from home was always new news.

  The porter told him that he had only a few old papers (mostly Brooklyn ones) wrapped around some packages in his room on the car, across the street, but he would run over and get them. He did so, and gave Clark a bundle of papers about six months’ old. As he handed them to Clark he looked into his face and through his full beard, and exclaimed, “As I live! it’s Jerry Stratton! Why, Jerry, don’t you know me, Ike Randolph? How came you here? How—” The whistle of his train blew and he was obliged to run out before he finished his questions or [heard] the answers to the same.

  When he was gone Jerry Stratton (Amos B. Clark was no other) carefully read the papers, which were thick with the history pictures and the like of “Ella Hope” and the Jerry Stratton Mission and Old Colored Folks Home. He read them thrice and, as he put them in a pigeon hole in his safe, he remarked to himself, like the stoic he had grown to be, “Her atonement.”

  IT CAME TO PASS: A CHRISTMAS STORY

  Bruce L. Reynolds

  Except for the years he wrote for the Chicago Defender, little is known about Bruce L. Reynolds. His career as a short story writer and columnist for the Defender began in 1935 and ended in 1945. His writings, published in the newspaper’s national edition, were widely read. During the Great Depression, Reynolds wrote weekly stories that focused on the everyday issues African Americans were grappling with. In the early 1940s, he ceased writing short stories and became the newspaper’s national “Church Editor,” a position he held until 1945.

  “It Came to Pass” is a traditional Christmas story that reinforces the power of religious faith, a religious cornerstone in African American history and culture. In the words of the apostle Paul, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It is a belief that God’s power is infinite. In this story, Edward and Ella, an elderly couple beset by poverty, lacking food, and unable to obtain decent medical care, share a deep love for each other and an abiding faith in God.

  The story opens on Christmas Eve in a large northern city whose public spaces reflect the beauty and benevolence of Christmas frequently seen in the business sections of large urban centers. Reynolds juxtaposes the opulence reflected in the private and public celebratory displays of Christmas with the abject poverty and suffering of people like Edward and Ella. He demonstrates that there are two worlds: one highly visible world of privilege and one obscure world of despair and suffering.

  In 1939, during a time when the world was beset by war and America was wracked by the Great Depression, it appeared that many people had forgotten God. Reynolds reminds the reader that God is real and that he answers prayers. Arriving in the guise of a doctor, Dr. Wayne, God heals Ella and reminds Edward that all things are possible if you “just keep faith in your heart, nourish it, cherish it until it reflects in your thinking and dreaming and doing.”

  Edward and Ella represent the deep and transcending faith of African Americans, who survived the holocaust of the Middle Passage; the horrors of slavery; the unremitting struggle to survive poverty, lynching, and mental and physical abuse; and who fervently believed that God would also see them through the Depression. During a time of great poverty and despair, Reynolds reinforced the message of faith and hope in God.

  It Came to Pass

  It was Christmas Eve. The city was covered with a fresh blanket of crunchy, white snow, and more was falling. Christmas wreaths hung in windows and on doors. Passersby could glimpse many a brightly-kited and tinsled tree. In the public park was a Christmas tree that dwarfed the humans who clustered around its base, singing carols. In the metropolitan section, a skyscraper office building had formed a striking cross with lighted windows. The clamor of church bells mingled with the stately, beautiful melody of “Silent Night, Holy Night,” as played on a giant carillon in a nearby university. Hearts, unfeeling throughout a rather hectic year, were bursting with good will and good cheer and gratitude.

  But it was another story in two bare, chilly basement rooms. In one of the rooms and ill [in] a bed, lay an old lady. Her suffering had pulled in her cheeks, and her eyes were like burning coals deep in two dark wells. At her bedside sat an elderly man in tattered clothes. He squinted through oval shaped glasses at an open Bible on his knees. And now he turned his eyes to the still face of his wife of nearly forty-two years.

  “I can’t read any more, Ella,” he told her wearily. He closed the Bible disconsolately. “With so much going on in the world—war and the like—seems like we’ve slipped God’s mind. I’m not blaming anybody or anything, Ella. But when I think of all the money spent for tomorrow, I get a little shaky knowing we have about a dollar. Of course, we’ll get our basket tomorrow. Goodness knows I’m grateful for kind hearted folks. But you won’t be able to eat anything, Ella. It’ll be the first time we have not eaten together on Christmas.”

  Ella turned her head slowly to face him. “I’m sorry to spo
il things, Edward.” Her voice was just a whisper. “But I can’t seem to hold a thing on my stomach.”

  “If you only had decent medical treatment,” old Edward muttered. “The city doctor is all right. But he admits there isn’t much he can do. Besides, he has so many calls to make, he can’t take up much time with any one patient. Oh, Ella, if we could only get that specialist, Dr. Wayne, to come out. I know he could do something. The city doctor said he could. He’s the best in the city.”

  Ella closed her eyes. “But he’s a rich doctor. They say he charges five dollars a visit. He has no time for poverty stricken old folks like us. You called him twice. Each time he flatly refused to see me.”

  “Yes. He told us to see the city doctor.”

  There was a knock on the door. Edward looked quizzically at his wife.

  “Wonder who that is?”

  “Maybe it’s that nice couple down the street, Edward.”

  He went to the door and opened it. A man stood smiling. He carried a small bag in one hand.

  “You’ve been trying to contact Dr. Wayne,” the man said, coming in. He opened his coat to shake off the snow. “I have come. Where is the patient?”

  Old Edward fell upon his knees at the man’s feet. “Thank God you’ve come, Dr. Wayne. Everybody seems to think you can do what others can’t.” He rose. “Let me help you out of your coat.” He touched the doctor’s arm.

  Dr. Wayne shook his head. “That won’t be necessary.”

  Old Edward jerked his hand back as though he had touched a live wire. For a moment he stared incredulously into the doctor’s eyes. The uncertain light from a lamp fell across the doctor’s face, revealing that his eyes were his most singular feature. They baffled description. They were not like eyes, it seemed. Rather, more like windows, across which a veil had been drawn.

  “You wait here,” Dr. Wayne told the old man. He went into Ella’s room and closed the door.

  Edward sat down and waited. That look of incredulity was still on his face. What manner of man was this Dr. Wayne? He had no sense of time. But he got to his feet when the doctor came out of Ella’s room.

  “Your wife wants to see you,” he said. “Don’t worry about tomorrow. She will be able to eat with you.”

  “How did you know—”

  “Just keep faith in your heart. Nourish it, cherish it until it reflects in your thinking and dreaming and doing.”

  “What a strange thing for a doctor to say,” Edward murmured.

  “But not strange for me,” the doctor said. “And now I must be going. Merry Christmas to you.”

  With that, he opened the door and was gone. Edward looked down at the steps leading out of his basement rooms. He blinked his eyes hard. Grass seemed to be growing out of the doctor’s footsteps in the snow! Edward closed the door and hurried to his wife’s side. He found her sitting up in bed, reading the Bible. She had not been able to sit up in bed for three months! He fell upon his knees by the bed.

  “Ella—Ella, who was that?”

  She smiled at him. “What does your heart tell you? You saw his eyes, Edward. You see me now.”

  “I touched his arm, Ella,” he remembered. “I saw grass growing in the snow where he walked. Ella—”

  Some carolers were singing outside. It was “Joy To The World.” Understanding dawned upon Edward. His eyes filled as he found Ella’s hand. Their faces were radiant. Their eyes met in mutual and glorious acknowledgment.

  “He came to our bare rooms to give us the greatest Christmas gift of all.”

  “Yes, Edward. But remember, he was born in a manger.”

  A CHRISTMAS JOURNEY

  Louis Lorenzo Redding

  Louis Lorenzo Redding was born in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1901 and grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1923, he received an undergraduate degree from Brown University and subsequently taught English at Morehouse College, in Atlanta. At the time he wrote “A Christmas Journey,” he was a student at Harvard University Law School. Among the first of his race to graduate from the law school, in 1929, Redding became the first African American admitted to the bar in Delaware. Beginning as an attorney in private practice, Redding later worked with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and as a public defender in Wilmington.

  In 1950, Redding, a pioneer in the fight for the desegregation of schools and housing, represented nine African American students at Delaware State College denied admission to the all-white University of Delaware. Pursing this case, he won two landmark decisions, Parker v. University of Delaware and Bulah/Belton v. Gebhart, which provided the legal basis for desegregation in Delaware. These decisions were forerunners of the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, which led to the desegregation of the nation’s public schools, and they also served as catalysts for legislation ending segregation and discrimination in housing, voting, public transportation, and public facilities.

  Redding’s life and work were motivated by the belief that the best way to achieve racial equality was through the passage of laws. In “A Christmas Journey,” he uses social realism to explore the meaning of Christmas for the dispossessed. Published in Opportunity in December 1925, the story reflects the pessimism and chaos that was so evident in the period following World War I. Redding employs the Christmas theme to bring attention to societal ills that he felt needed to be addressed.

  Set in Boston, “A Christmas Journey” is the story of Jim and Elsie, whose lives have been led in the margins of mainstream society. Jim, a white man, is described as an incurable consumptive who knows that death is near. He believes that his condition resulted from being gassed while serving as a soldier in World War I. Elsie is a light-complexioned African American woman who is passing for white. These two characters are bonded by their love in a common-law marriage. Through the story of their lives and their personal reflections, Redding explores social issues such as interracial marriage, the social impact of tuberculosis, and society’s indifference to human suffering.

  Redding forces the reader to reflect upon the real meaning of Christmas: loving, sharing, and caring for others. He suggests that, for many people, Christmas has become merely another holiday in which to engage in consumerism. Although Redding demonstrates the callousness and lack of concern that can seem to permeate the Christmas celebration in a large urban center, he overlooks several central themes that have fueled mankind’s existence for centuries and which force us to reflect on the meaning of Christmas and life. Christmas in the best of traditions represents a rebirth of life. It holds out the possibility for change. It stresses faith, hope, and love. Jim and Elsie, feeling disconnected from society, embrace the cynicism of the time and abandon their faith and hope. In the end, they are left with only their love for one another.

  A Christmas Journey

  For Love the master symphonist

  Ignoring [vanity], creed and hue,

  Mocks dicta that stifle and twist

  To give consonant souls their due.

  The raw sting of the cold, night air struck the consumptive’s [shrunken] chest. He gasped, coughed, gasped again, and with a slender hand, quivering from the exertion of his coughing, drew up the collar of his overcoat.

  “This thing’s got me all right! That fool of an army doctor! A lot he knew about gas! And he told me that I’d wear it off in a few months! Wear it off! Well, it’ll soon be off now—but not in the way he said.”

  Abstractedly he had taken his habitual route homeward. It led through the street market, which was thronged with Christmas-eve buyers, stocking up for the season that the morrow would usher in. The air was full of shrill babel and of the fresh smell of raw foodstuffs; the street was a jumble of motley wares. Nowhere else in great Boston could be found more eloquent proof of the cosmopolitanism of the city. Improvised signs in Yiddish, Italian, and Spanish, as well as in English, leered at the purchasers from all angles. Creeping, pipe-puffing Chinese with American overcoats over their loose native jackets bought greens from Italian merchants. Buxo
m Irish housewives bought red meat from German butchers. Greeks, Negroes, Poles—everybody, bought a great variety of things from that ubiquitous merchant, the Jew. Peanuts and cabbages, carrots and shoestrings, turkeys and bandannas, trousers and cheap jewelry, silk stockings and codfish—all were bargained for with equal gusto. Here, verily, was a paradise for the poor; but despite the low prices, no sale was complete without haggling.

  The consumptive, as he weakly jostled his way through the alien melange, saw nothing that interested him. He was more than sated with the world. He loathed everything, even the scrawny, yellow fowl that a red-bearded Jew was swinging in the air and offering for sale in a rasping falsetto. Nor did he mask his contemptuous feelings under a hypocritical look of complacency; his wan countenance was frankly sardonic.

  “Fools,” he muttered between coughs, “poor, ignorant fools, to whom life is a dollar, a loaf of hard bread, an imitation diamond, and a suit of shoddy, woolen underwear! Preparing to celebrate Christmas! Bah! What do they know about Christmas—or what do they care? It’s just another holiday for them!”

  A heavy foreign sounding voice sang out:

  “Dancin’ monkeys here, only a quarter. Git a dancin’ monkey.”

  The words shattered the cynical musings of the consumptive and sent a train of incoherent and confused images swirling through his brain.

  “Dancin’ monkeys——”

  The sound came with haunting urgency and the man moved toward the spot from which it seemed to come. He beheld a short, unkempt, alien seeming peddler standing at the edge of the curb. On the ground beside him was a huge basket filled with bits of painted metal. In one hand the peddler held a string from the end of which dangled a monkey, crudely fashioned in tin, with a red coat and black trousers painted on his body in burlesque of the apparel of man. While the peddler lustily proclaimed his toy, he pulled the string and the monkey hopped and jumped, spun and danced. Occasionally a passer-by ventured from the main current of the crowd to look and pass on, but rarely to buy. There was no fascination for the consumptive in the terpsichorean efforts of the monkey, but he did find himself interested in the degree of imbecility that could cause anyone to invest money in such a glittering, senseless bauble. He looked at the bawling vendor with a feeling of contempt not unmixed with pity. “Why doesn’t he get a real job? Anything would be more profitable than this.”