The Blacker the Berry (14 page)

“Guess there ain’t much more to say. Makes me mad to discuss it anyhow.”

“No need of getting mad at people like that,” said Tony Crews simply and softly. “I think one should laugh at such stupidity.”

“And ridicule it, too,” came from the luxurious person sprawled over the floor, for he did impress Emma Lou as being luxurious, despite the fact that his suit was impressed, and that he wore neither socks nor necktie. She noticed the many graceful gestures he made with his hands, but wondered why he kept twisting his lips to one side when he talked. Perhaps he was trying to mask the size of his mouth.

Truman was speaking now, “Ridicule will do no good, nor mere laughing at them. I admit those weapons are about the only ones an intelligent person would use, but one must also admit that they are rather futile.”

“Why futile?” Paul queried indolently.

“They are futile,” Truman continued, “because, well, those people cannot help being like they are—their environment has made them that way.”

Miss Thurston muttered something. It sounded like “hooey,” then held out an empty glass. “Give me some more firewater, Alva.” Alva hastened across the room and re-filled her glass. Emma Lou wondered what they were talking about. Again Cora broke the silence, “You can’t tell me they can’t help it. They kick about white people, then commit the same crime.”

There was a knock on the door, interrupting something Tony Crews was about to say. Alva went to the door.

“Hello, Ray.” A tall, blond, fair-skinned youth entered. Emma Lou gasped, and was more bewildered than ever. All of this silly talk and drinking, and now-here was a white man!

“Hy, everybody, Jusas Chraust, I hope you saved me some liquor.” Tony Crews held out his empty glass and said quietly, “We’ve had about umpteen already, so I doubt if there’s any more left.”

“You can’t kid me, Bo. I know Alva would save me a dram or two.” Having taken off his hat and coat he squatted down on the floor beside Paul.

Truman turned to Emma Lou. “Oh, Ray, meet Miss Morgan. Mr. Jorgenson, Miss Morgan.”

“Glad to know you; pardon my not getting up, won’t you?” Emma Lou didn’t know what to say, and couldn’t think of anything appropriate, but since he was smiling, she tried to smile, too, and nodded her head.

“What’s the big powwow?” he asked. “All of you look so serious. Haven’t you had enough liquor, or are you just trying to settle the ills of the universe?”

“Neither,” said Paul. “They’re just damning our ‘pink niggers’.”

Emma Lou was aghast. Such extraordinary people—saying “nigger” in front of a white man! Didn’t they have any race pride or proper bringing up? Didn’t they have any common sense?

“What’ve they done now?” Ray asked, reaching out to accept the glass Alva was handing him.

“No more than they’ve always done,” Tony Crews answered. “Cora here just felt like being indignant, because she heard of a forthcoming wedding in Brooklyn to which the prospective bride and groom have announced they will not invite any dark people.”

“Seriously now,” Truman began. Ray interrupted him.

“Who in the hell wants to be serious?”

“As I was saying,” Truman continued, “you can’t blame light Negroes for being prejudiced against dark ones. All of you know that white is the symbol of everything pure and good, whether that everything be concrete or abstract. Ivory Soap is advertised as being ninety-nine and some fraction per cent pure, and Ivory Soap is white. Moreover, virtue and virginity are always represented as being clothed in white garments. Then, too, the God we, or rather most Negroes worship is a patriarchal white man, seated on a white throne, in a spotless white Heaven, radiant with white streets and white-apparelled angels eating white honey and drinking white milk.”

“Listen to the boy rave. Give him another drink,” Ray shouted, but Truman ignored him and went on, becoming more and more animated.

“We are all living in a totally white world, where all standards are the standards of the white man, and where almost invariably what the white man does is right, and what the black man does is wrong, unless it is precedented by something a white man has done.”

“Which,” Cora added scornfully, “makes it all right for light Negroes to discriminate against dark ones?”

“Not at all,” Truman objected. “It merely explains, not justifies, the evil—or rather, the fact of intra-racial segregation. Mulattoes have always been accorded more consideration by white people than their darker brethren. They were made to feel superior even during slave days … made to feel proud, as Bud Fischer would say, that they were bastards. It was for the mulatto offspring of white masters and Negro slaves that the first schools for Negroes were organized, and say what you will, it is generally the Negro with a quantity of mixed blood in his veins who finds adaptation to a Nordic environment more easy than one of pure blood, which, of course, you will admit, is, to an American Negro, convenient if not virtuous.”

“Does that justify their snobbishness and self-evaluated superiority?”

“No, Cora, it doesn’t,” returned Truman. “I’m not trying to excuse them. I’m merely trying to give what I believe to be an explanation of this thing. I have never been to Washington and only know what Paul and you have told me about conditions there, but they seem to be just about the same as conditions in Los Angeles, Omaha, Chicago, and other cities in which I have lived or visited. You see, people have to feel superior to something, and there is scant satisfaction in feeling superior to domestic animals or steel machines that one can train or utilize. It is much more pleasing to pick out some individual or some group of individuals on the same plane to feel superior to. This is almost necessary when one is a member of a supposedly despised, mistreated minority group. Then consider that the mulatto is much nearer white than he is black and is therefore more liable to act like a white man than like a black one, although I cannot say that I see a great deal of difference in any of their actions. They are human beings first and only white or black incidentally.”

Ray pursed his lips and whistled.

“But you seem to forget,” Tony Crews insisted, “that because a man is dark, it doesn’t necessarily mean he is not of mixed blood. Now look at …”

“Yeah, let him look at you or at himself or at Cora,” Paul interrupted. “There ain’t no unmixed Negroes.”

“But I haven’t forgotten that,” Truman said, ignoring the note of finality in Paul’s voice. “I merely took it for granted that we were talking only about those Negroes who were light-skinned.”

“But all light-skinned Negroes aren’t color struck or color prejudiced,” interjected Alva, who, up to this time, like Emma Lou, had remained silent. This was, he thought, a strategic moment for him to say something. He hoped Emma Lou would get the full significance of this statement.

“True enough,” Truman began again. “But I also took it for granted that we were only talking about those who were. As I said before, Negroes are, after all, human beings, and they are subject to be influenced and controlled by the same forces and factors that influence and control other human beings. In an environment where there are so many color-prejudiced whites, there are bound to be a number of color-prejudiced blacks. Color prejudice and religion are akin in one respect. Some folks have it and some don’t, and the kernel that is responsible for it is present in us all, which is to say, that potentially we are all color-prejudiced as long as we remain in this environment. For, as you know, prejudices are always caused by differences, and the majority group sets the standard. Then, too, since black is the favorite color of vaudeville comedians and jokesters, and conversely, as intimately associated with tragedy, it is no wonder that even the blackest individual will seek out some one more black than himself to laugh at.”

“So saith the Lord,” Tony answered soberly.

“And the Holy Ghost saith, let’s have another drink.”

“Happy thought, Ray,” returned Cora. “Give us some more ice cream and gin, Alva.”

Alva went into the alcove to prepare another concoction. Tony started the victrola. Truman turned to Emma Lou, who, all this while, had been sitting there with Alva’s arm around her, every muscle in her body feeling as if it wanted to twitch, not knowing whether to be sad or to be angry. She couldn’t comprehend all of this talk. She couldn’t see how these people could sit down and so dispassionately discuss something that seemed particularly tragic to her. This fellow Truman, whom she was certain she knew, with all his hi-faluting talk disgusted her immeasurably. She wasn’t sure that they weren’t all poking fun at her. Truman was speaking:

“Miss Morgan, didn’t you attend school in Southern California?” Emma Lou at last realized where she had seen him before. So this was Truman Walter, the little “cock o’ the walk,” as they had called him on the campus. She answered him with difficulty, for there was a sob in her throat. “Yes, I did.” Before Truman could say more, Ray called to him:

“Say, Bozo, what time are we going to the party? It’s almost one o’clock now.”

“Is it?” Alva seemed surprised. “But Aaron and Alta aren’t here yet.”

“They’ve been married just long enough to be late to everything.”

“What do you say we go by and ring their bell?” Tony suggested, ignoring Paul’s Greenwich Village wit.”

“’Sall right with me.” Truman lifted his glass to his lips. “Then on to the house-rent party … on to the bawdy bowels of Beale Street!”

They drained their glasses and prepared to leave.

“Ahhhh, sock it.” … “Ummmm” … Piano playing—slow, loud, and discordant, accompanied by the rhythmic sound of shuffling feet. Down a long, dark hallway, to an inside room, lit by a solitary red bulb. “Oh, play it you dirty no-gooder.” … A room full of dancing couples, scarcely moving their feet, arms completely encircling one another’s bodies… cheeks being warmed by one another’s breath … eyes closed … animal ecstasy agitating their perspiring faces. There was much panting, much hip movement, much shaking of the buttocks…. “Do it twice in the same place.” … “Git off that dime.” Now somebody was singing, “I ask you very confidentially….” “Sing it man, sing it.” … Piano treble moaning, bass rumbling like thunder. A swarm of people, motivating their bodies to express in suggestive movements the ultimate consummation of desire.

The music stopped, the room was suffocatingly hot, and Emma Lou was disturbingly dizzy. She clung fast to Alva, and let the room and its occupants whirl around her. Bodies and faces glided by. Leering faces and lewd bodies. Anxious faces and angular bodies. Sad faces and obese bodies. All mixed up together. She began to wonder how such a small room could hold so many people. “Oh, play it again …” She saw the pianist now, silhouetted against the dark mahogany piano, saw him bend his long, slick-haired head, until it hung low on his chest, then lift his hands high in the air, and as quickly let them descend upon the keyboard. There was one moment of cacophony, then the long, supple fingers evolved a slow, tantalizing melody out of the deafening chaos.

Every one began to dance again. Body called to body, and cemented themselves together, limbs lewdly intertwined. A couple there kissing, another couple dipping to the floor, and slowly shimmying, belly to belly, as they came back to an upright position. A slender dark girl with wild eyes and wilder hair stood in the center of the room, supported by the strong, lithe arms of a longshoreman. She bent her trunk backward, until her head hung below her waistline, and all the while she kept the lower portion of her body quivering like jello.

“She whips it to a jelly,” the piano player was singing now, and banging on the keys with such might that an empty gin bottle on top of the piano seemed to be seized with the ague. “Oh, play it Mr. Charlie.” Emma Lou grew limp in Alva’s arms.

“What’s the matter, honey, drunk?” She couldn’t answer. The music augmented by the general atmosphere of the room and the liquor she had drunk had presumably created another person in her stead. She felt like flying into an emotional frenzy—felt like flinging her arms and legs in insane unison. She had become very fluid, very elastic, and all the while she was giving in more and more to the music and to the liquor and to the physical madness of the moment.

When the music finally stopped, Alva led Emma Lou to a settee by the window which his crowd had appropriated. Every one was exceedingly animated, but they all talked in hushed, almost reverential tones.

“Isn’t this marvelous?” Truman’s eyes were ablaze with interest and excitement. Even Tony Crews seemed unusually alert.

“It’s the greatest I’ve seen yet,” he exclaimed.

Alva seemed the most unemotional one in the crowd. Paul the most detached. “Look at ’em all watching Ray.”

“Remember, Bo,” Truman counseled him. “Tonight you’re ’passing.’ Here’s a new wrinkle, white man ’passes’ for Negro.”

“Why not?” Enough of you pass for white.” They all laughed, then transferred their interest back to the party. Cora was speaking:

“Didya see that little girl in pink—the one with the scar on her face-dancing with that tall, lanky, one-armed man? Wasn’t she throwing it up to him?”

“Yeah,” Tony admitted, “but she didn’t have anything on that little Mexican-looking girl. She musta been born in Cairo.”

“Saay, but isn’t that one bad-looking darkey over there, two chairs to the left; is he gonna smother that woman?” Truman asked excitedly.

“I’d say she kinda liked it,” Paul answered, then lit another cigarette.

“Do you know they have corn liquor in the kitchen? They serve it from a coffee pot.” Aaron seemed proud of his discovery.

“Yes,” said Alva, “and they got hoppin’-john out there, too.

“What the hell is hoppin’-john?”

“Ray, I’m ashamed of you. Here you are passing for colored and don’t know what hoppin’-john is!”

“Tell him, Cora, I don’t know either.”

“Another one of these foreigners.” Cora looked at Truman disdainfully. “Hoppin’-john is blackeyed peas and rice. Didn’t they have any out in Salt Lake City?”

“Have they any chitterlings?” Alta asked eagerly.

“No, Alta,” Alva replied, dryly. “This isn’t Kansas. They have got pig’s feet though.”