The Richer, the Poorer Read online

However, with praiseworthy courage he had shut one ear against the sensuous blandishments of spring in the South and let old Marse’s droning voice pour into the other just sufficient knowledge to enter him in high school.

  It was then his mother had gotten out the old cotton stocking that was heavy in her hand. “The No’th,” she had said with something like awe, and her eyes had been like stars.

  He was a shy, sullen boy of seventeen when he entered high school. The North had fallen so far short of his dream of it. Boston bewildered him. It was a bustling, unfriendly place where the young Irish hurled “Nigger!” at you on every other corner. He dreaded the classroom, feeling his bigness and his blackness and vaguely resenting them. He thought, after the first few days, he would rather die than rise to his awkward feet and recite, in his hesitant Southern drawl, in that crowded, hostile room.

  Thus he learned to bar it out of his consciousness by continuous and absorbing daydreams.

  He spent seven years in that high school.

  Zeb helped his mother after school in the house where she worked by the day. There was scarcely a moment, after he flung down his books, when there wasn’t something to do. The house thronged with children and careless older people, and Miss Lily and Zeb did the thorough work of a competent staff for the salary of an underpaid cook.

  It was funny, watching them both going about that delightful house, knowing their thoughts: “This place ain’t nothing to what we’ll have some day.” They had, poor, tragic things, to live in the future.

  Zeb graduated when he was twenty-three. Miss Lily went. Neither the building, nor the teachers, nor the parents awed her. She thrilled to everything. She thought her heart would burst with happiness. It was the one great moment of her life. She, too, like other Negro mothers, God knows why, had lived in the hope of this exalted hour. To her, as to so many others, that stereotyped stretch of paper was, for her son, the passport to a higher life.

  She had not learned the pitiable wrongs of living for one’s child.

  Afterward there was the long-debated question of college. It was that which shook Zeb out of his apathy. He had looked down at his little gray mother and been suddenly honest and somewhat shamed. He had been overwhelmed with a strange sense of failure. He wasn’t, he saw with brutal clarity, dependable. His future was too uncertain to risk the slim savings of his mother. For a moment he had a horrid foreboding that he would forever disappoint her. He decided then, dejectedly, to go out and get a job.

  But they had compromised. Zeb, too, oddly eager, the fervor of Miss Lily inspiring him. He would work until he had saved enough to pay his own way to college.

  He got the none-too-strenuous job of redcap in South Station.

  It was there, two years later, on a Thursday afternoon, he met Minnie Means, a slim, shy girl like a lost white bird in the vastness of the station. Impersonally he had taken her proffered bag and led her to a cab, alone deploring the smallness of the expected tip.

  At the door she halfway turned, apologetically slipping a thin dime into his hand. Her face all lovely confusion, she asked in a slow, soft whine, “Look heah, Mister Redcap, could you please be so kin’ as to tell me whar Ah could get a room ’round heah with a nice, quiet cullud fam’ly?”

  He gave the driver his own address with his heart pounding like a hammer.

  In the days that swiftly followed, for the first time in his life, his mother’s counsel could not guide him. Past and future were forgotten in the immediate beauty of Minnie. He would have rejected his hope of salvation for a single moment of complete possession. He was, however, honorable enough about his wooing. Two weeks later they slipped away and were quietly married.

  In the blissful month that passed all too quickly, they had a perfectly riotous time on his two years’ accumulated savings.

  Thus it was four years later he had the small-salaried job of second cook in a self-service lunchroom, a little larger flat that his mother helped pay for, and an exemption from overseas service because of a dependent wife and child.

  At first he had been glad he had escaped the draft. It was a white man’s war. The President had said so. Well, let him fight it unaided by his darker brother. And why, Zeb reasoned, not without logic, should the black man avenge others’ wrongs when he himself struggled in a maze of them?

  And then one day he was caught in a cheering crowd that was watching a Negro regiment march by. In the first few moments he was stifled by the embarrassment he always felt at the sight of a concourse of colored people. And he felt a swift indignation that they should be grouped in a separate regiment. Even the war could not reveal them brothers under the skin. They were going, poor fools, ironically enough, to fight for justice.

  But suddenly all of his bitterness was swept away in the beauty of a tall black boy, straight and fine and gloriously eager, marching sternly on because he was free and proud, and he wanted, a little bewilderedly, to do the right thing.

  And in that instant Zeb wanted frantically to break into that line. He didn’t want to go home to Minnie, and a fretful baby, and a mother whose reproachful eyes spoke her unsatisfied hopes. He wanted, with all of his heart, to redeem himself on the battlefield. To return to a proudly sad family with a Croix de Guerre and a wooden leg.

  There was something, he found, watching that boy’s splendid back, bigger than one’s prejudice, bigger than one’s President, to be fought for. And that, he saw, with his eyes squeezed hard against tears, was the country God saw fit to have one born in.

  The next day he sneaked into a recruiting station on the Common and was kindly but firmly rejected because of his flat feet.

  In 1919 he was thirty-two. And he didn’t want to be. He was afraid of the advancing years. He had done nothing. He had gotten nowhere. All that remained were unfulfilled dreams.

  It was then young Parker drifted into his life. Parker, the kitchen slavey, with his youth, and his courage, and the will to do. He hadn’t a tenth the advantages Zeb had had. He was the illegitimate son of an intense dark woman and a worthless black man. But he had vowed, all of his unhappy, struggling years, to outreach their littleness.

  In slack hours Zeb taught him the few things he had remembered, and later lent him the few books he had kept. Young Parker’s eager brain absorbed like a sponge. In a year and a half he was ready for night high school. In two years he had finished with honors.

  That was only the first lap, he told Zeb. And immediately he decided to go again to night school to study law. There were no visions in his eyes. They were bright with reality. He knew, this young Parker, what he wanted. God alone could have stood in the way of it.

  Miss Lily talked with him eagerly. Her eyes were wet. Her voice was not quite steady. And instantly Zeb knew.

  “Look here,” he had said, growing frightfully warm, “say, guess I’ll go along with you.”

  Parker passed his exams at the end of the four-year term. He had known, of course, that he would. With little surprise from either, it had been Parker, during those four years, who was teacher and adviser. However, despite his tutelage, Zeb failed to pass. For the first time in her life, Miss Lily openly cried. For the first time, too, Zeb was sorrier for himself than for his mother.

  With her tremulous pleas ringing in his ears, he obediently repeated the year, and again took his bar exams, feeling only a vague curiosity concerning the outcome. He dared not doubt his passing, but he somehow could not honestly believe he would. Perhaps it was a merciful indifference steeling him. For the second time he failed.

  And then there was Miss Lily, bravely undismayed. “Times was hard las’ year, son. It was a struggle to make both ends meet. It would sorta have surprised me if you had gone and passed them exams, worryin’ an’ all like you was. Jus’ you try again, son. God will hear my prayers.”

  Zeb was thirty-nine the third year he repeated. He entered the class with dogged determination. He could not fail again. He knew that he would not. It wasn’t egoism. It was only that he could not see bey
ond his failing. The hour must strike for him now. He read his Bible daily and prayed with childlike earnestness.

  He had felt only an intense relief the morning the post brought the succinct letter informing him he had passed.

  The family was at table when he entered the dining room. Miss Lily was pouring his coffee. “Jus’ set right down, son.”

  He said expansively: “You look right bright, Ma … How’s Essie?”

  She screwed up her little eager face. “Good mornin’, Papa.”

  He sat down at the head of the table and helped himself liberally to pork chops and hominy.

  “You all certainly got a nice breakfast this morning, Min.”

  But she wasn’t pleased by his compliment. “It must be cold now,” she told him. “I never in my life saw a man so slow. I bin waitin’ ’bout an hour to get in that bathroom. Looks like we never will be on time for church.”

  She rose, dragging her kimono about her. “Don’t you spill nothin’ on that dress now, Essie. Miss Lily, you oughtn’t to of let her put it on until jus’ time for church. She’s a don’t-care young one like her father. And, Zeb, no need o’ you eatin’ slow so’s you won’t be ready when we start. We’re all goin’ out o’ this house together this mornin’.”

  She left them visibly breathing sighs of relief.

  “I declare,” said Miss Lily, finishing her biscuit, “Minnie don’t speak one pleasant word from one week to another.”

  “You kinda fussy, too, Gramma,” Essie observed.

  “Your pa,” said Miss Lily, hurt, “never said a thing like that to me in all his life.”

  She went on with her game of spooning the grounds in her milk-diluted coffee. “Papa was scared of you, wasn’t you, Papa? I ain’t.”

  He corrected her gently. “Don’t say ain’t, dear. Papa wants you to grow up a lady. You never hear a lady using English like that.”

  The eyes in her beautiful, little dark face glowed somberly at him. She had all of the youthful loveliness of her mother in brown. She was thin and nervous and passionately eager.

  “But I don’t want to be a lady, Papa—that kind. I don’t want to go to college and learn things. It hurts my head, Papa, it does. That’s why I’m glad,” she said with the honesty of children, “you’re going to be a lawyer, and buy a big house, and be rich an’ ev’rything. Then I won’t have to be smart and make money for you and Mama and Gramma. And I can just be whatever I want. And I guess I’ll be a dancer.”

  The word was anathema to Miss Lily. “Not while they’s strength in my body to keep you off the stage. You’ll have your own dear mammy to bury if you keep that wil’ idea in your head. Both o’ our fam’lies is church-going people. None o’ ’em’s ever done nothin’ bad.”

  “Actresses ain’t got the name they used to have, Ma,” Zeb interposed. “There’s good and bad women in all walks of life. And I don’t b’lieve in stifling a child’s natural impulse. Sow the seed and let it sprout unaided.”

  “Choked by rank weeds,” said Miss Lily grimly. “They never was a garden yit that didn’t need a gardener.”

  “But you can’t force a flower that hangs its head to stare up at the sun, or a plant that lifts its face to the rain to bend toward the earth without,” he said coldly, “breaking its stem.”

  “Then I’d far rather see this chile dead,” she said quietly, “than a half-naked dancer on the stage.”

  “I think, Ma,” Zeb answered seriously, “the one thing that matters is Essie’s happiness.”

  Miss Lily got to her feet. She stood above her son, this little, stooping old lady whose hands and lips were trembling. Nervously she smoothed her neat black gown and patted her soft, crinkly hair, while a torrent of eager words beat against her mouth.

  “An’ could Essie be happy livin’ in sin? Could I say without shame my son’s only chile is a dancer? Zeb, listen, son, I don’t know how it’ll be later on, but to us po’ cullud people right now our chilien is all we got. They is our hope, an’ our pride, an’ our joy. They is our life. We live for them, and oh, son, we gladly die for them. An’ all us po’, strugglin’ niggers want is to send our chilien to school, so’s we can tell them white folks we slave for my chile’s jus’ as good as yours.”

  She wet her dry lips and blinked her eyes free of tears. Her voice was sharp.

  “Essie’s a chile. She don’t know what she wants. She jus’ heard somebody talkin’ ’bout dancin’. But we know, Zeb, we older ones.” Her voice dropped to soft pleading. “Don’ she bring in nothin’ but ones and twos on her card? She’s smart, Zeb. That gal’s got a head on her shoulders. She’s like me. I want her to do all I might ‘a’ done if I’d had her eddication. And, Zeb, if you died, or somep’n went wrong, I’d work these old fingers to the bone to sen’ that gal to college.

  “She’s got some’n in her. I see that. This chile’s got the power to be anything. She don’t want to sit down and trade on her looks. They’s too many good-looking girls in the gutter. Let your brain work for you, chile, not your face. You got to remember that always.”

  Essie’s eyes were on Miss Lily, wide, and serious, and intent. She was interested but unmoved. Grandmother was an old woman. Old people were fools.

  Miss Lily went on. “Do you think I ain’t a proud woman today? My son’s a lawyer. Miz Bemis’ son’s a lawyer, too. It means you’re his equal. An’ I’d tell her so in a minute. But when you was only a cook, you wasn’t. You was a white man’s servant. And young Fred Bemis was his own boss. Oh, son, nobody knows the anguish I bin through. Nobody knows how I’ve prayed to my Maker. If it’d taken a thousand years, I would ‘a’ waited and hoped. They ain’t nothin’ I’ve done for you I regret. They ain’t a gray hair on my head, they ain’t a line on my old face, they ain’t a misery in my old bones that I ain’t glad it’s there, if it’s meant the independence of my chile!”

  She fled the room then, with her hand pressed hard against her lips, but both of them heard her sob.

  It was Essie who broke the silence. “I hate women, Papa,” she said dispassionately. “They’re sissies.”

  And before he could frame a shocked reply, she had asked him, off on another tangent, “What is a sin, Papa? Isn’t it lying and stealing and not helping blind people? Then how is dancing a sin?”

  She was bewildering him, but he was suddenly very proud to be a parent. He saw himself at the outset of a “talk” with his daughter, and he was immensely flattered. There had never before been this intimacy between them.

  He had meant to answer, “Because good women never go on the stage. And good women never sin.” But on the verge of it, he looked at her, and her eyes were too clear and honest and eager for him to put her off with a platitude. He must grope, rather blunderingly, toward her honesty.

  “Dancing isn’t a sin,” he told her, “unless you make it one. There is no good, there is no evil in the world really. The good and the evil lie within you.”

  He didn’t quite believe that, and he half thought he had read it somewhere, but Essie seemed to understand.

  She said quietly, “Like Reverend Dill, huh, Papa, winning all that money on the numbers?”

  He was just a little annoyed. “You mustn’t repeat things, Essie.”

  But she ignored that. Her voice was confidential. “Gramma doesn’t know, does she, Papa? Dancin’ can be beautiful. Maybe she thinks I mean just jazz, but dancin’ can be other things, beautiful things, Papa. Like on your toes, and like birds and things. You—you know, Papa.”

  He was beginning to. And he saw, suddenly, that his little daughter was growing up and learning to express the thoughts that had heretofore found chaotic release through symbols on scrap paper.

  “When I was younger,” he said, “I used to go a lot to theayters, and I’ve seen some real pretty dancing.”

  “Like fairies in a wood, huh, Papa? Like—like thistle-blowing.”

  He tasted his coffee and found it cold and set it down. He pushed back his plate and folded his napkin.r />
  “Is your heart really set on dancing, dear? Tell you the truth, Papa sorta wishes there was something else you wanted more to do. But if there isn’t, nothing could induce me to stand in your way.”

  She smiled at him and stretched her slim fingers across the table to pat his hand.

  “You’re orful nice, Papa, this morning. Honest you are.”

  He beamed his gratitude. He wanted to kiss that lovely hand, but he hadn’t the courage. To him had now come the inevitable realization that his daughter was better than he was. He felt a certain awe of this exquisite child.

  She said, “You know why I really want to be a dancer, Papa?”

  “It’s the one thing you can do best,” he concluded, trying to help her reason.

  “No”—her eyes were soft—“Nonnie can beat me dancin’. It isn’t that, Papa. It’s something else.”

  She was silent for a moment, and he sensed her struggle for expression. Her face was sharp with the pain of it. Her nails were dug in her palms.

  “I don’t know how to say it, Papa. I know it inside of me, but it won’t come out. I told Gramma dancin’ ’cause I didn’t know how else to put it. I’d just as lief sing. I’d just as lief do anything”—she caught her breath—“beautiful. That’s what I mean, Papa. I—I just want to be something that’s beautiful, I don’t care what it is.”

  With a sharp sigh he averted his eyes from the innocent glory of her face. “It’s hard,” he said gently, “for colored girls to do things that are beautiful, like acting in plays, or singing in op’ra, or dancing in ballets.”

  She got up then and came around to him, putting one foot on the rung of his chair. She rubbed her chin over his closely cropped head, and her long, dark curls fell over his face.

  “Nothin’s ever going to be hard for me, Papa,” she said with conviction. “God didn’t make me that way.”

  They were late for church again. Old Mr. Myrick frowned at them as they entered. But Zeb didn’t mind. Miss Lily hurried down the aisle to her accustomed seat in a front pew. Minnie rustled toward the beckoning Lize Jones, with the whispered admonition: “Now don’t you let me hear your voice, Essie.” Zeb and his daughter sank down gratefully in the back row.