The Living is Easy. Dorothy West
goddess had half a mind to change their charted course. Then with habitual perversity thought better of it.
Cleo had come to a halt before a store front, where an exquisite pile of polished fruit was arrayed on a silver tray, the sole and eye-compelling window display. Two men were busy inside the store, one, a fair-skinned man whom Cleo mistook for white and the proprietor, was waiting on the customer, the other man, obviously the colored help, was restocking the counters. The colored man stared briefly, as did Cleo. Then her eyes moved to a wide arch which made convenient access to an ice-cream parlor next door.
Two retail stores on busy State Street was the distance Virginia-born Bart had come in his lucky boots on his way to the banana docks of the Boston Market. Cleo, with ten cents burning a hole in her pocket and her throat parched for a fancy dish of ice cream, slowly walked away, because she wasn’t certain that the owner wanted colored customers. And, as a matter of fact, Bart didn’t.
When he and Cleo met five years later, again it was pure chance. But this time Fate flung them headlong at each other, and for Bart, at least, there was no mistaking that he had met the woman he wanted for his wife.
Cleo was sent to Boston by the relatives of her Springfield benefactress when the old lady’s lingering illness was inevitably leading her to the grave. The relatives rallied around her, for there were always cases of elderly people deciding to leave their estates to faithful servants. They arrived en masse, for there were cases, too, of elderly people deciding that one devoted relative was more deserving than the rest.
They overflowed the small house. There was no room for Cleo, and also no need, for the women industriously cooked and cleaned, went errands, and wrote letters. One of the letters was to a Boston friend of Miss Peterson, who knew Cleo slightly from her occasional visits to Springfield. She was importuned to give shelter to this young Negro girl. With Christian charity, she promptly did so.
She shared her home with a nephew, whom she had raised and educated. The young man, coming of age, was not grateful. He wanted to get married. He intended to leave home. He was so obdurate about these matters that his aunt, Miss Boorum, was nearly resigned to spending her declining years alone, regretting the sacrifice that had caused her spinsterhood.
Cleo seemed a light in the gathering gloom. She was southern, she was colored. From what Miss Boorum had read of southern colored people they were devoted to what they quaintly called “my white folks,” and quite disdainful of their own kind, often referring to them as “niggers.” They liked to think of themselves as an integral part of the family, and preferred to die in its bosom rather than any place else. It was to be hoped that Cleo would show the same sterling loyalty.
In Boston Cleo settled into the same routine that she had endured in Springfield. She was indifferent to the change. One old white woman looked just like any other old white woman to her. Only difference was Miss Boorum wore false teeth that slipped up and down when she talked. She paid the same five dollars a month, the sum that Cleo had been receiving, obliquely, since she was sixteen. It was not considered wages. The amount was not the thing that mattered so much as the spirit that prompted it. Though Cleo’s duties were similar to a servant’s, she was considered a ward. She was fed and clothed, and given a place at table and a chair in the parlor, except when there was company. At such times she put on an apron, held her proud head above the level of everybody’s eyes, and wished they would all drop dead.
Both her Springfield and Boston protectresses felt that Cleo was better off without money. Each month Miss Boorum, as had her predecessor, sent five dollars to Mama affixed to a little note in an aging hand full of fancy flourishes that Mama spent a day deciphering. These custodians of Cleo’s character had no wish to teach her to save. Nothing, they knew, is a greater inducement to independent action than knowing where you can put your hand on a bit of cash.
Their little notes reported to Mama on Cleo’s exemplary behavior. But Cleo was neither good nor bad. She was in a state of suspension. She knew she was paying penance for all the joyous wildness of her childhood. She had been exiled to learn the discipline that Mama’s punishments had not taught her. She did not mind these years of submission any more than she had minded Mama strapping her. If you were bad, you got punished. But you had had your fun. And that was what counted. These meek years would not last forever. The follies of childhood were sweet sins that did not merit eternal damnation. This was the period of instruction that was preparing her for adulthood. Yet she knew she was not changing. She was merely learning guile.
She was going to run away the minute she got her bearings in Boston, leaving a sassy note saying, Thank you for nothing. Good-bye and good riddance. If I never see you again, that will be too soon.
Then she was going on the stage. She was going to sing and dance. That would be wickeder than anything she had ever done, but almost as much fun as there had been in the Carolina woods. Pa would disown her, and Mama would pray for her soul. But she would fix up the house for Mama with furniture and running water, and buy her some store clothes and a horse to hitch the buggy to in place of Pa’s old mule.
She sat in Miss Boorum’s parlor, reading Little Women aloud, looking demure and gray-eyed, hearing the richness of her own voice, being thrilled by its velvet sound, and seeing herself singing and kicking her heels on a stage in a swirl of lace petticoats. The only thing was she wasn’t going to have any partner. She wasn’t going to sing an old love-song with any greasy-haired coon. She wasn’t going to dance any cakewalk with him either, and let his sweaty hand ruin her fancy costumes.
Miss Boorum’s nephew, looking at Cleo across the table, was profoundly disturbed by his emotions. He, too, had heard about Negroes. He had heard mostly about Negro women, and the information was correct. Desire was growing in his loins and there was nothing he could do to stop it. All he could do was try to keep it from spreading to his heart.
He talked no more of marriage now, nor of moving away. He rarely went out in the evening. He gloomed about the house, staring moodily at Cleo. Miss Boorum supposed he was beset by the jealous fear that her ward would supplant him in her affections. To punish him for the pain he had caused her, she made his ears ring with Cleo’s praises. Cleo supposed he was jealous, too, as the Springfield relatives had been, and took a wicked delight in tormenting him by being her most appealing in his presence.
Mama died. The letter came. Nobody down home had sense enough to send a telegram. Mama was buried by the time the letter reached Boston. She died bearing a dead child. Pa had just as good as killed her.
Cleo hadn’t seen Mama since she was fourteen. Mama standing in the station saying, “God watch between me and thee, while we are absent one from another.” Mama with the flush in her face from her fast-beating heart, and the tears held tight in her searching doe eyes, her coral lip trembling between her white teeth, and her arms reaching out, the rounded arms with dimples. Mama was dead, and the lid was shut down. Now Mama could never say, Cleo, I loved you best of all my children.
Cleo’s grief was an inward thing that gave her a look of such purity that Miss Boorum’s nephew was even further enmeshed. The enchantment of knowing that she was no one’s was monstrous. He was seduced by her chastity. He would never be free as long as he knew he could be her first lover. Until he could see the face of her purity replaced by the face of surrender, her image would lie on his lids to torment him.
He grew thin and wan. Cleo looked at him and thought indifferently that he was coming down with something, and hoped it wouldn’t be catching.
Miss Boorum’s nephew began his campaign. He bought Cleo a bicycle. Ostensibly it was to solace her sorrow. Actually it was because he could not afford to deck her in diamonds.
He did not ride with her, nor would he instruct her in the intricacies of balance. Subconsciously he had the bloody hope that she would break every bone in her body and destroy her beauty, if not herself.
She pedaled away as easily as if she had been cycling all her life, for she still did not know there was anything she was incapable of doing. In Norumbega Park she sped around a curve and rode unromantically into Mr. Judson’s stomach.
The impact sent them sprawling on either side of the path, with the shiny new bicycle