The Richer, the Poorer Read online

  TO MY MOTHER

  The author would like to express her thanks to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who hounded her until this collection became a reality; to Rosemary Csapo, for all of her good offices; and to the Vineyard Gazette and its staff, for a relationship that has brought her nothing but joy over the years.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE BY MARY HELEN WASHINGTON

  INTRODUCTION

  STORIES

  THE TYPEWRITER

  THE FIVE-DOLLAR BILL

  JACK IN THE POT

  MAMMY

  THE RICHER, THE POORER

  FUNERAL

  THE PENNY

  THE BIRD LIKE NO OTHER

  THE HAPPIEST YEAR, THE SADDEST YEAR

  THE ENVELOPE

  FLUFF AND MR. RIPLEY

  ODYSSEY OF AN EGG

  ABOUT A WOMAN NAMED NANCY

  THE ROOMER

  THE MAPLE TREE

  AN UNIMPORTANT MAN

  TO MARKET, TO MARKET

  SKETCHES AND REMINISCENCES

  RACHEL

  FOND MEMORIES OF A BLACK CHILDHOOD

  THE GIFT

  THE PURSE

  THE SUN PARLOR

  REMEMBRANCE

  AN ADVENTURE IN MOSCOW

  THE CART

  ELEPHANT’S DANCE

  A DAY LOST IS A DAY GONE FOREVER

  THE LEGEND OF OAK BLUFFS

  LOVE

  THE FLIGHT

  PREFACE

  by

  Mary Helen Washington

  I first met Dorothy West in February 1980 when I went to the town of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, to interview her for an article I was writing on black women’s literary history. I was new to the East Coast, living in Cambridge, teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Boston—and not at all sure I wanted to stay in a place where one was constantly being judged by social class, by family background, by academic credentials. I moved to Boston from Detroit, the Motor City, home of Motown—the Supremes and the Temptations; of black revolutionary theaters like Concept East; of one of the early black publishing houses, Broadside Press; of militantly political bookstores like Vaughn’s on Dexter; of a working-class university, Wayne State. Boston of the eighties seemed almost apolitical by comparison with Detroit of the seventies, as though the clouds of the radical sixties and seventies had passed over the East, scattering a few raindrops left over from the downpour that deluged Detroit. I discovered later, partly through Dorothy West’s groundbreaking first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), that Boston is a city of conflicting, sometimes opposing forces: its history of virulent racism exists side by side with a proud abolitionist past; the same social class that produced its elitism and pretentiousness also produced Monroe Trotter, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and a prominent member of the black elite who became one of the most active race leaders of the twentieth century.

  West is a writer who both reflects and critiques the attitudes and ideals of the black bourgeoisie. By birth and breeding she is “a proper Bostonian,” which, in the days of her youth, meant that she belonged to a genteel, aspiring middle class. She was born in 1909 in Boston to Isaac West and Rachel Benson West. Her father, an ambitious and industrious ex-slave from Virginia, was a wholesale banana merchant in downtown Boston, known as the Black Banana King. West’s light-skinned, beautiful mother, one of twenty-two children, had been sent North by her family, who feared her good looks would get her into trouble with white men in the South. Dorothy West attended the prestigious Girl’s Latin School and Boston University and later the Columbia School of Journalism. Isaac West’s prosperous business allowed the family to become among the first blacks to own vacation homes and to spend their summers on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, specifically in Oak Bluffs, that part of the island that blacks claimed for their own. West’s sketches of the island represent the Vineyard of her childhood as an idyllic time and place:

  The days were full. There were berries to pick, a morning’s adventure. There were hand concerts for an evening’s stroll. There were invitations to lemonade and cookies and whist. There was always an afternoon boat to meet, not so much to see who was getting off, but to see and talk to whatever friends had come for that same purpose. (“Fond Memories of a Black Childhood”)

  There were good reasons for the title of her first novel. For these people with education, surrounded by other blacks of achievement and financial security, and access to a summer resort that boasted the largest number of vacationing blacks in the country—the living did seem easy. It even seemed as though, through elegance of style, manners, and bankbook, these proper Bostonians could conquer racism: Dorothy’s mother once told her that among people of proper background she would never have to worry about being called a nigger because people of class and breeding never sink to that.

  But West’s fiction reveals the shadow side of this idyllic picture of island summers and genteel aristocrats. In The Living Is Easy she adopted a tone of ironic humor, which she learned from her mother, to satirize the pretensions of the Boston black elite, especially their desire to distinguish themselves from “ordinary” blacks:

  Though they scorned the Jew, they were secretly pleased when they could pass for one. Though they were contemptuous of the Latins, they were proud when they looked European. They were not too dismayed by a darkish skin if it were counterbalanced by a straight nose and straight hair that established an Indian origin. There was nothing that disturbed them more than knowing that no one would take them for anything but colored.

  The tradition of writing about black life from the point of view of the privileged narrator or character goes back to the nineteenth century and novels like William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) and Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), whose light-skinned, aristocratic characters were examples of racial propriety. Intelligent, superior, and white-looking, these figures embodied the cultural values that supposedly would enable the race to elevate itself from its lowly past in slavery. By the turn of the century, however, these dramas of racial uplift were being severely questioned by novels like James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), whose main characters, though middle-class themselves, are alienated from the values of the black bourgeoisie. In a contemporary novel, Sarah Phillips (1984) by Andrea Lee, the main character, Sarah, reaffirms the ambivalence of the insider who both appreciates and is critical of the black middle class:

  … a group largely unknown to other Americans, which has carried on with cautious pomp for years in eastern cities and suburbs using its considerable funds to attempt poignant imitations of high society, acting with genuine gallantry in the struggle for civil rights, and finally producing a generation of children educated in newly integrated schools and impatient to escape the outworn rituals of their parents.

  Like Johnson, Larsen, and Lee, West writes about the black middle class from the viewpoint of the marginalized insider, both a fierce critic of the bourgeois life and a loyal daughter upholding the values of family and class. In The Living Is Easy, the story of privilege is constantly disrupted—by tales of slavery and slave suicide, by stories of blacks fighting de facto segregation in the North and Ku Klux Klan terror in the South, and especially by the figure of the child Judy, who, much like West herself, resents and rejects her mother’s desires for status, money, and white acceptance.

  It’s not surprising, then, that in the twenties West left the insular life of her Boston family and community and ventured to New York to become part of the literary movement known popularly as the Harlem Renaissance. Not yet twenty years old in 1926, West went to New York to receive a second-place award in the Opportunity writing contest for the story “The Typewriter.” As par
t of a group of younger writers that included Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, and Zora Hurston, West led a carefree bohemian life that made her feel she had wasted time, talent, and money, and when the Harlem Renaissance party days were over she found herself penitent about her past life. Eager to redeem herself for what she perceived as lack of seriousness about her work, she started a magazine called Challenge to publish the work of younger black writers and “to recapture in the mid-thirties the literary vitality of the Harlem Renaissance, which had not survived the Depression.” Later called New Challenge, the magazine lasted until 1937. This more serious side of West continued to develop in the thirties as she worked as a welfare investigator and on the WPA, and as she produced short stories about issues of race and class (“Mammy,” “The Richer, the Poorer”) that seem as relevant today as they were during the Depression. In the story “Mammy,” the black welfare investigator assigned to eliminate people from public assistance is forced to see how much she has in common with people of all classes: both the welfare official and the elevator operator who insults her in front of whites are doing whatever is necessary to hold on to their jobs. And when the elderly maid (called “Mammy” by her white employer) pleads with the investigator not to cut her assistance, she asks the woman to recognize their common bond: “You’re my own people, child. Can you fix up a story for them white folks at the relief, so’s I could get to stay here where it’s nice.” In these stories from the forties we see West’s genuine empathy for those who struggle to feed and clothe children on a meager allowance and have to depend on welfare, but we also see her larger political statement that, in black communities especially, the privileged and the poor, like house servant and field slave, are sometimes desperately united.

  After 1945, Dorothy West made her home permanently on Martha’s Vineyard, where she wrote The Living Is Easy in 1948 and her second novel, The Wedding, in 1994. Spanning almost seventy years, West’s writing career links the Harlem Renaissance with the social realism of the thirties and forties and popular fiction of the eighties and nineties. In her most recent fiction she continues to observe the tensions and triumphs in the lives of middle- and upper-class blacks, at times critiquing the false values in their lives, yet always representing these lives in vivid detail. West reminds me that there is a strong sense of place in African-American literature: the Middle Passage, Southern plantations, the urban North, Jim Crow railroads, the church—each place has required specific performances, created specific histories, and shaped specific cultural identities. In her focus on the places she knows well—especially Boston and Martha’s Vineyard—which have rarely been written about in African-American literature, Dorothy West has complicated and expanded our knowledge of America.

  INTRODUCTION

  When I was a child I had a bedroom of my own. My mother and her siblings in their growing years had to sleep on top of each other, and they all swore a sacred oath that a similar fate would never befall their children.

  We were a sizable family in a suitably sizable house. There was much coming and going, and a lot of laughter throughout the day. I would not exchange my childhood for any other time or place. But when at five I began to grow into being a self of my own, I wanted to contemplate that private self in solitude.

  I asked my mother if I could shut my bedroom door and be by myself sometimes. She asked me why I wanted that privacy. I said because I wanted to think. Since thinking is reasonable, even an admirable exercise she let me. In any case it was easier for her to say yes than to explain the whys of no.

  When I was seven I asked her if I could lock my bedroom door. She answered with the expected, why? I said I wanted to write stories and that you had to be by yourself when you wrote them because you had to think hard to make them come out right.

  As I grew older my stories began to shape into substance. When I was fourteen I sent my first story, handwritten, to the Boston Post, a well-regarded paper which printed a short story by, I assume, a ripening writer each day. There were three weekly prizes, ten dollars, five dollars, and two dollars. I received the ten-dollar prize with commendable regularity. It added to the family income, and I was proud of my contribution. When I got the five-dollar prize I was embarrassed that my contribution was cut in half. I don’t remember ever getting the two-dollar prize or no prize at all; if I did I buried that disaster too deep in my memory ever to dig up.

  In my sixteenth year an aunt who shared our home was waiting for the trolley that would take her there when a personable young black man approached her, summarily informing her that he was working his way through medical school and thereupon entreating her to buy a subscription to a black magazine called The Crisis. Though my aunt had never heard of a magazine so named she believed in ambition and opened her purse.

  My mother, who had heard of The Crisis, was dismayed when the magazine appeared in our mail slot. The young members in our extended family, all born and raised in Boston, had little if any knowledge of lynching and other obscenities. To see them graphically depicted might discourage us from pursuing our ambition in a world stacked against us.

  But there was also in that magazine an announcement of its third or perhaps its fourth literary contest, persuading me to assume that the preceding contests had reaped such a yield of black talent that the contests were ongoing.

  I wrote, and then sent to The Crisis magazine a story titled “The Typewriter.” In due time I received an invitation to the awards dinner. I was overwhelmed with joy.

  My mother cautioned me that invitations were sent to all contestants, not just to the winners. But I was seventeen, and I refused to believe that God could be so unfeeling as to steer some human hand to write my name on a piece of paper for me to blot with tears. I persuaded my mother to let me go to the magical city of New York, an unforgettable thrill. She was right, of course, in her assessment of award invitations.

  But God, with whom I had lengthy conversations in my childhood and presumed had got to know me and my aspirations, allowed me to share a second prize with the now legendary Zora Neale Hurston. At first she had mixed feelings about sharing a prize with an unknown teenager. But in time I became her little sister, and my affection for her has never diminished. In time I was to play my part in the Harlem Renaissance. I was nineteen and its youngest member.

  The Harlem Renaissance can never be repeated. It was an age of innocence, when we who were its hopeful members believed that our poems, our plays, our paintings, our sculptures, indeed any facet of our talents would be recognized and rewarded.

  My own writing was now more mature. I saw life with a larger eye. But the important magazines were not in the market for stories about blacks. They surmised that neither were their readers. And they did not relish canceled subscriptions from various sections of the country.

  In time we became pets of sophisticated whites, the Park Avenue people, as we called them. One of them encouraged me to use his name—that name now long forgotten—and contact George Bye. He was, I was told, the most influential literary agent in New York. Eleanor Roosevelt and other people of importance were his clientele. If anyone could sell a black writer, it was Bye.

  But even he couldn’t, though the challenge made him continue to try. It took a miracle. The day that I read of a short story contest in a newspaper that somebody had abandoned on a park bench was the day the miracle began to unfold. I made myself believe that a newspaper, since everybody read newspapers, would have relaxed requirements as to color.

  I wrote a story called “Jack in the Pot.” I had come late to knowledge of the contest, and the closing date was only a short time away. But I couldn’t find the slip of paper on which I had written the required information, which information, in my panic, completely escaped me. To this day I put important notes on pieces of paper and in less than a day I have no recollection of where I put them for safekeeping. In that area I am incurable.

  In my disappointment and self-bashing, I did not know the miracle was waiting to happen. In sackc
loth and ashes I sent the story to George Bye, my accompanying letter telling him how I had tried and miserably failed. But if he saw any merit in the story, maybe he would like to give it a try, since I had botched mine.

  At that time the New York Daily News was devoting a whole page of its Sunday paper to a section called “Blue Ribbon Fiction.” I did not know that. I knew that the News was a tabloid, so of course I read The New York Times, or at least I said so, if asked. George Bye sent my story to the editor of the “Blue Ribbon” section. I did not know about it until he sent me a check for four hundred dollars, an enormous sum in those days, and a congratulatory note.

  The owners of the News were General Joseph Patterson of the powerful Patterson-McCormick chain, and his lovely wife, Mary King Patterson (who sent me a Christmas card every year until her death. I never sent her a card. I somehow felt she wanted it that way).

  I did not see them in person until one day I received a call from a staff member who said that they would be pleased to have me come to their office at some time convenient to me. I readily said I would gladly come at any day and hour that was suitable to them.

  We met within the week. Mrs. Patterson was a true beauty. She had stage presence, and I wondered, and certainly didn’t ask, if she had been an actress. Colonel Patterson was also an impressive figure. They told me how much they had liked “Jack in the Pot,” and they wished me a successful writing career. The “Blue Ribbon Fiction” page was being replaced by four columns essential to the state of the nation.

  The page that gave part of its space to a daily short story of limited length was still intact, however. They would be glad to let me write two such stories a month, an accommodation they invented for me. The sum for a story was fifty dollars, but they knew and I knew it was not the money that mattered. They were helping me keep my writing hand ready and my mind alert. In any case I have never been a person who cared about money; I’ve always said cheerfully that I would die a happy pauper. I care about people and they care about me. That’s all I want.