The Ways of White Folks (14 page)

“Here it’s only hard to be poor,” Vivi said.

But Arnie thought he wouldn’t mind being poor in a land where it didn’t matter what color you were.

“Yes, you would mind,” Vivi said.

“Being poor’s not easy anywhere. But then,” and her eyes grew bigger, “by and by the Revolution will come. In Rumania the Revolution will come. In France, too. Everywhere poor people are tired of being poor.”

“What Revolution?” Arnie asked, for he hadn’t heard about it in Mapleton.

Vivi told him.

“Where we live, it’s quiet,” he said. “My folks come from Massachusetts.”

And then the devil whispered to Arnie. Maybe Vivi would like to meet some real Americans. Anyway, he would like the Pembertons to meet her. He’d like to show them that there actually was a young white girl in the world who didn’t care about color. They were always educating him. He
would educate them a bit. So Arnie invited Vivi to dinner at the hotel that very night.

The Pembertons had finished their soup when he entered the sparkling dining-room of the hotel. He made straight for their table. The orchestra was playing Strauss. Gentlemen in evening clothes and ladies in diamonds scanned a long and expensive menu. The Pembertons looked up and saw Arnie coming, guiding Vivi by the hand. Grace Pemberton gasped and put her spoon back in the soup. Emily went pale. Mr. Pemberton’s mouth opened. All the Americans stared. Such a white, white girl and such a black, black boy coming across the dining-room floor! The girl had a red mouth and grey eyes.

The Pembertons had been waiting for Arnie since four o’clock. Today a charming Indian mystic, Nadjuti, had come to tea with them, especially to see the young Negro student they had raised in America. The Pembertons were not pleased that Arnie had not been there.

“This is my friend,” Arnie said. “I’ve brought her to dinner.”

Vivi smiled and held out her hand, but the Pembertons bowed in their stiffest fashion. Nobody noticed her hand.

“I’m sorry,” said Grace Pemberton, “but there’s room for only four at our table.”

“Oh,” said Arnie. He hadn’t thought they’d be
rude. Polite and formal, maybe, but not rude. “Oh! Don’t mind us then. Come on, Vivi.” His eyes were red as he led her away to a vacant table by the fountain. A waiter came and took their orders with the same deference he showed everyone else. The Pembertons looked and could not eat.

“Where ever did he get her?” whispered Emily in her thin New England voice, as her cheeks burned. “Is she a woman from the streets?” The Pembertons couldn’t imagine that so lovely a white girl would go out with a strange Negro unless she were a prostitute. They were terribly mortified. What would he do next?

“But maybe he doesn’t know. Did you warn him, John?” Grace Pemberton addressed her husband.

“I did,” replied Mr. Pemberton shortly.

“A scarlet woman,” said Emily faintly. “A scarlet … I think I shall go to my room. All the Americans in the dining-room must have seen.” She was white as she rose. “We’ve been talked about enough as it is—travelling with a colored boy. For our sakes, he might have been careful.”

The Pembertons left the dining-room. But Grace Pemberton was afraid for Arnie. Near the door, she turned and came over to the table by the fountain. “Please, Arnold, come to my room before you go.”

“Yes, Miss Grace, I’ll come,” he said.

“You mustn’t mind.” Vivi patted his arm. The
orchestra was playing “The Song of India.” “All old people are the same.”

As they ate, Vivi and Arnie talked about parents. Vivi told him how her folks hadn’t allowed her to come away to study music, how they’d even tried to stop her at the station. “Most elderly people are terrible,” she said, “especially parents.”

“But they’re not my parents,” Arnie said. “They are white people.”

When he took Vivi home, he kissed her. Then he came back and knocked on the living-room door.

“Come in,” Grace Pemberton said. “Come in, Arnie, I want to talk to you.” She was sitting there alone, very straight with her iron-grey hair low on her neck. “Poor little black fellow,” she said, as through Arnie had done a great and careless wrong. “Come here.”

When Arnie saw her pale white face from the door, he was a little sad and ashamed that he might have done something to hurt her. But when she began to pity him, “poor little black fellow”, a sudden anger shook him from head to foot. His eyes grew sultry and red, his spirit stubborn.

“Arnold,” she said, “I think we’d better go home, back to America.”

“I don’t want to go,” he replied.

“But you don’t seem to appreciate what we are doing for you here,” she said, “at all.”

“I don’t,” Arnie answered.

“You don’t!” Grace Pemberton’s throat went dry. “You don’t? We’re showing you the best of Paris, and you don’t? Why, we’ve done all we could for you always, Arnie boy. We’ve raised you as our own. And we want to do more. We’re going to send you to college, of course, to Fisk this Fall.”

“I don’t want to go to Fisk,” Arnie said.

“What?”

“No,” said Arnie. “I don’t want to go. It’ll be like that camp in Boston. Everything in America’s like that camp in Boston.” His eyes grew redder. “Separate, segregated, shut-off! Black people kept away from everybody else. I go to Fisk; my classmates, Harvard and Amherst and Yale … I sleep in the garage, you sleep in the house.”

“Oh,” Grace Pemberton said. “We didn’t mean it like that!”

Arnie was being cruel, just cruel. She began, in spite of herself, to cry.

“I don’t want to go back home,” Arnie went on. “I hate America.”

“But your father
died
for America,” Grace Pemberton cried.

“I guess he was a fool,” said Arnie.

The hall door opened. Mr. Pemberton and his sister-in-law came in from a walk through the park.
They saw Mrs. Pemberton’s eyes wet, and Arnie’s sultry face. Mrs. Pemberton told them what he’d said.

“So you want to stay here,” said Mr. Pemberton, trying to hold his temper. “Well, stay. Take your things and stay. Stay now. Get out! Go!

Anger possessed him, fury against this ungrateful black boy who made his wife cry. Grace Pemberton never cried over anything Mr. Pemberton did. And now, she was crying over this … this … In the back of his mind was the word
nigger
. Arnold felt it.

“I want to go,” said Arnie. “I’ve always wanted to go.”

“You little black fool!” said Emily.

“Where will you go?” Grace Pemberton asked. Why, oh why, didn’t Arnie say he was sorry, beg their pardon, and stay? He knew he could if he wanted to.

“I’ll go to Vivi,” Arnie said.

“Vivi?” a weak voice gasped.

“Yes, marry Vivi!”

“Marry white, eh?” said Mr. Pemberton. Emily laughed drily. But Grace Pemberton fainted.

Next door, just then, the piano was louder than ever. Somebody was doing a tap dance. The dancing and the music floated through the windows on the soft Paris air. Outside, the lights were a necklace
of gold over the Champs Elysées. Autos honked. Trees rustled. People passed.

Arnie went out.

——

M
ISS
B
RIGGS HAD A LITTLE APARTMENT
all alone in a four story block just where Oakwood Drive curved past the park and the lake. Across the street, beneath her window, kids skated in winter, and in the spring the grass grew green. In summer, lovers walked and necked by the lake in the moonlight. In fall brown and red-gold leaves went skithering into the water when the wind blew.

Miss Briggs came home from work every night at eight, unless she went to the movies or the Women’s Civics Club. On Sunday evenings she sometimes went to a lecture on Theosophy. But she was never one to gad about, Miss Briggs. Besides she worked too hard. She was the head bookkeeper for the firm of Wilkins and Bryant, Wood, Coal And Coke. And since 1930, when they had cut down the staff, she had only one assistant. Just two of them now to take care of the books, bills, and everything. But Miss Briggs was very efficient. She had been head bookkeeper for twenty-one years. Wilkins and Bryant didn’t know what they would do without her.

Miss Briggs was proud of her record as a bookkeeper. Once the City Hall had tried to get her, but Wilkins and Bryant said, “No, indeed. We can pay as much as the city, if not more. You stay right here with us.” Miss Briggs stayed. She was never a person to move about much or change jobs.

As a young girl she had studied very hard in business school. She never had much time to go out. A widowed mother, more or less dependent on her then, later became completely dependent—paralyzed. Her mother had been dead for six years now.

Perhaps it was the old woman’s long illness that had got Miss Briggs in the habit of staying home every night in her youth, instead of going out to the theatre or to parties. They had never been able to afford a maid even after Miss Briggs became so well paid—for doctors’ bills were such a drain, and in those last months a trained nurse was needed for her mother—God rest her soul.

Now, alone, Miss Briggs usually ate her dinner in the Rose Bud Tea Shoppe. A number of genteel business women ate there, and the colored waiters were so nice. She had been served by Joe or Perry, flat-footed old Negro gentlemen, for three or four years now. They knew her tastes, and would get the cook to make little special dishes for her if she wasn’t feeling very well.

After dinner, with a walk of five or six blocks
from the Rose Bud, the park would come into view with its trees and lights. The Lyle Apartments loomed up. A pretty place to live, facing the park. Miss Briggs had moved there after her mother died. Trying to keep house alone was just a little too much. And there was no man in view to marry. Most of them would want her only for her money now, at her age, anyway. To move with another woman, Miss Briggs thought, would be a sort of sacrilege so soon after her mother’s death. Besides, she really didn’t know any other woman who, like herself, was without connections. Almost everybody had somebody, Miss Briggs reflected. Every woman she knew had either a husband, or sisters, or a friend of long standing with whom she resided. But Miss Briggs had nobody at all. Nobody.

Not that she thought about it very much. Miss Briggs was too used to facing the world alone, minding her own business, and going her own way. But one summer, while returning from Michigan where she had taken her two weeks’ rest, as she came through Cleveland, on her way from the boat to the station there, she happened to pass a dog shop with a window full of fuzzy little white dogs. Miss Briggs called to the taxi man to stop. She got out and went in. When she came back to the taxi, she carried a little white dog named Flips. At least, the dealer said he had been calling it Flips because its ears were so floppy.

“They just flip and flop,” the man said, smiling at the tall middle-aged woman.

“How much is he?” Miss Briggs asked, holding the puppy up.

“I’ll let you have him for twenty-five dollars,” the man said.

Miss Briggs put the puppy down. She thought that was a pretty steep price. But there was something about Flips that she liked, so she picked him up again and took him with her. After all, she allowed herself very few indulgences. And somehow, this summer, Miss Briggs sort of hated going back to an empty flat—even if it did overlook the park.

Or maybe it was because it overlooked the park that had made it so terrible a place to live lately. Miss Briggs had never felt lonely, not
very
lonely, in the old house after her mother died. Only when she moved to the flat, did her loneliness really come down on her. There were some nights there, especially summer nights, when she thought she couldn’t stand it, to sit in her window and see so many people going by, couple by couple, arms locked; or else in groups, laughing and talking. Miss Briggs wondered why she knew no one, male or female, to walk out with, laughing and talking. She knew only the employees where she worked, and with whom she associated but little (for she hated to have people know her business). She knew,
of course, the members of the Women’s Civics Club, but in a cultural sort of way. The warmth of friendship seldom mellowed her contacts there. Only one or two of the club women had ever called on her. Miss Briggs always believed in keeping her distance, too. Her mother used to say she’d been born poor but proud, and would stay that way.

“Folks have to amount to something before Clara takes up with them,” old Mrs. Briggs always said. “Men’ll have a hard time getting Clara.”

Men did. Now, with no especial attractions to make them keep trying, Miss Briggs, tall and rail-like, found herself left husbandless at an age when youth had gone.

So, in her forty-fifth year, coming back from a summer boarding house in Michigan, Miss Briggs bought herself a little white dog. When she got home, she called on the janitor and asked him to bring her up a small box for Flips. The janitor, a tow-headed young Swede, brought her a grapefruit crate from the A. & P. Miss Briggs put it in the kitchen for Flips.

She told the janitor to bring her, too, three times a week, a dime’s worth of dog meat or bones, and leave it on the back porch where she could find it when she came home. On other nights, Flips ate dog biscuits.

Flips and Miss Briggs soon settled on a routine.
Each evening when she got home she would feed him. Then she would take him for a walk. This gave Miss Briggs an excuse for getting out, too. In warm weather she would walk around the little lake fronting her apartment with Flips on a string. Sometimes she would even smile at other people walking around the lake with dogs at night. It was nice the way dogs made things friendly. It was nice the way people with dogs smiled at her occasionally because she had a dog, too. But whenever (as seldom happened) someone in the park, dog or no dog, tried to draw her into conversation, Miss Briggs would move on as quickly as she could without being rude. You could never tell just who people were, Miss Briggs thought, or what they might have in their minds. No, you shouldn’t think of taking up with strange people in parks. Besides, she was head bookkeeper for Wilkins and Bryant, and in these days of robberies and kidnappings maybe they just wanted to find out when she went for the pay roll, and how much cash the firm kept on hand. Miss Briggs didn’t trust people.