Outside, she saw the cover of the garbage pail lying on the ground. She cursed the garbagemen, “You blasted worthliss dirty bitches!” and she carried the pail, covered down now, out of sight and placed it in the small green-painted shed. Then she walked across Marina Boulevard, as if she was the housewife, Mistress Bernice Burrmann, the owner of the largest mansion on this mansioned, luxurious, wealthy, upper-class Jewish conspicuous street. Brigitte held her head out of the window in her third-floor room and shouted, “Hey!” Bernice waved her hand and said, softly so Brigitte couldn’t hear, “You bitch!”
Dots was waiting for her at the Rosedale station. They caught the next subway from Rosedale to take them south to College Street, from where they could walk to the Toronto General Hospital.
“I just had to cuss that bus-driver bastard,” she complained to Dots. She had given the driver a ten-dollar bill for two thirty-five-cent tickets and he had been noticeably and vocally annoyed. It had been worrying her all the way down. It was hurtful that she had to quarrel always for her rights, that she had to be humiliated, and that she had to humiliate herself.
The subway train was making quite a lot of noise, and conversation was impossible to hear. Dots spent the interim picking dead skin from her fingernail and easing her wedding ring further up her finger to get at the white soft mark left by the closeness of the ring. The train slowed down for the Bloor Street station. Dots said, “Guess what happened this morning?” Before Bernice could inquire, she said, “I just gave that woman I work for the best cussing in her life! I gave her my notice, too!” She said it as if it was a great achievement.
When the train stopped again, she sighed and said, “If only I could get Boysie to go out and find a job! If only he would stop hanging round that Henry …”
“Henry is a bad influence.”
“A bad influence.”
“I don’t know what that girl Agaffa sees in that bastard!”
“I was reading a book the other day and that book told me a mouthful ’bout white women and their craving after black men. That book says that one time, a white woman came across a nice black man that she liked and who used to screw her and foop her, and be-Christ, she was so happy to find this goodness in that black man, that she rented him out to all her five club-member-friends. Jesus Christ, gal! all them five bitches enjoyed that black man, too! heh-heh-haaa!”
“God, Dots! You just made that up!”
“No! I saw it in a book.”
“But you believe that?”
“It’s printed in a book, ain’t it?”
“You can’t believe everything you see printed in a book.”
“Bernice, gal, them five bitches rented-out that black man as if he was Mistress Grimes ram-goat back home!” And she laughed out loud. And before she finished the laugh, she cut it short and sighed, not in comment but in embarrassment. For just as she was about to secure her handbag which was slipping as she laughed, and pull the valise near to her legs because the train was making it slide, she saw a white woman sitting immediately behind her, and this white woman had obviously heard everything she had told Bernice. She jabbed Bernice sharply in her ribs to put her on her guard of silence, and with a slight jerk of her head she indicated the enemy behind.
Just as they left the subway at College, the white woman got up deliberately a little before Dots and looked back straight in their faces and said, “Calvin C. Hernton wrote that book! I read it too.” Dots looked at the woman, and didn’t know what to say. So she kept her mouth shut, and wished she could disappear.
Feeling sad, with the terrible guilt and the collective shame of the entire black race heavy on her heart, and the anxious frightened inquiring eyes of the informed white woman still in her mind, Bernice thought what a cruel world she was living in. She did not talk until they had rambled and eventually extricated themselves from the budget floor of the Eaton’s department store among the paint and the cheap clothing at cheap prices and the better quality merchandise on the floor above at higher prices.
“Wait,” Bernice said, “I been thinking all this time of that book. The book you was reading about sex. Talking ’bout that … could that book be really talking about people we know … could that be the case with Henry and Agaffa?”
“I can see you will have to read that book for yourself, gal.”
“I don’t think that book was right, though.” The possibility that Agatha loved Henry merely because he was a black man, because he could give her the most complete sexual satisfaction, bothered Bernice greatly. What about Mr. and Mrs. Burrmann, then? Who were both white. If what Dots said that book said, and if that book was telling the truth, would it not mean that Mr. Burrmann could not give Mrs. Burrmann the most complete sexual satisfaction? “It couldn’ be that, Dots. It must be something else. It must be love. I believes it must be that white woman really do love black men. Just love. I believes in love. I believe it is love. Henry is so damn ugly though, that Agaffa got to love that bastard a whole lot more before she could even look at his blasted face.”
“Love?” Dots said. And she laughed sarcastically and cruelly in Bernice’s face. “Love?” And changing the subject she said, “We’ll walk,” although they were already walking the three blocks to the hospital. Dots put her hand on the back seam of her dress to keep it from sticking up in the crease of her behind. Her dresses always did that in the summer, and it was a miserable feeling.
No sooner had her hand touched her behind, fixing the dress, no sooner had she slackened her pace, and shaken
