“Mods, gal!”
“I wouldn’t be seen dead in one o’ them!” Estelle said. “They’re even wearing paper these days. Tomorrow, they’ll be wearing fig leaves, or coconut leaves, or just plain nakid. We passed out o’ that stage long long ago in history. But these people?”
“What the hell would you be doing in a mod dress, you with such a damn big belly? Heh-heh! look, don’t kill me, eh, gal? You past that stage.”
“For truth.”
“Well, anyhow,” Bernice went on. “I had to work like a damn slave all day yesterday, Friday, preparing things. And I must say she don’t stand up over me whilst I am doing her work, like Mistress Burrmann did. She tells you what and what you have to do, and that is that. Well, after the rum-punches … child, let me tell you about them! I one day, introduced real punches in that house, and Christ! who told me to do that? I must have been mad as hell to do a thing like that! Last Friday gone is three weeks I introduced them to West Indian rum punch. And every day, every lunchtime, she have a flask full of it in her hands, like a baby taking a bottle, taking it upstairs for he and she, heh-heh-heh! and I am downstairs, listening to every movement he and she make in the king-sized bed. The springs tell me every-damn-thing! Well! And I am still damn surprised how they don’t have chick nor child to call them Mammy or Daddy, they always in bed, lovey-doveying-it-up! But I am telling you a story …” Boysie had come back, heard what was going on, and was sitting quietly listening. “… ’bout the paint-in, man! She told me it is the latest things going. Now, all these rich and powerful people arrived in motor cars as long as hell, and they dress in this mod-way, with short clothes, the men in funny-looking clothes looking as if they were old men before they became young, and with ties bright as hell, enough to make a blind woman outta me, and the women, as I say, they are dressed-off in these psychedel-something clothes …”
“Psychedelic!” Boysie told her.
“Thanks. And everybody happy as hell. That is the one thing I grudge them for. They are blasted happy people, or at least they look so, and they surely drink enough liquor every weekend to be so! Now, I am bringing in a new set of food, and my rum punch, and right there in front o’ me with a pretty young white woman in his lap, in his lap, is this black man!” Bernice paused now for emphasis, as she had paused then, through utter shock. “Jesus God, I nearly dropped everything I was carrying in the tray. And that black bitch looked me in my eye and called me, ‘Sister!’ He says to me that all them ladies and gentlemen in the room could hear, ‘How you feel, sister?’ I was so ’shamed, Dots! Boysie, Estelle, I was so blasted ashamed that I prayed something would smite me from the face o’ that nigger! And all the time, my mistress laughing and enjoying it, as if it is a blasted joke, in truth. When I am in her house, I want her to know that I am there as a employee. Not as a friend of her blasted beatnik friends!
“Well, that wasn’t nothing at all. After a few drinks, and more jazz music … they have this pretty thing where you can’t see nothing, you could just hear the music coming outta the walls at you, and she doesn’t play Beethoven at parties like Mistress Burrmann! She hardly plays that kind o’ classics, at all. The Beatles and James Brown all the time! But I am telling you, child. All of a sudden somebody, I think it was my mistress, all of a sudden that young thing screamed, ‘Paint-in! Let’s have a paint-in!’ Well, stupid me, I thinking now they are going to draw pictures on a piece o’ paper, ’cause they have a gallery-full o’ nice priceless paintings in their home, and nice ones too, I mean that! So, I walk out of the room, ’cause I don’t really like these modern paintings too much. Then all this laughing and giggling. All of a sudden from the kitchen I hear this laughing like how, if two people are in a room and you can’t see them, but you know they is two people in there by the two different voices; you could know, Dots, you aren’t a fool, you could know by the giggles coming out of that room what the hell they are up to! You understand what I mean? The sliding door to their big big sitting room, I closed that now. Bernice the servant don’t want to see what goes on in this mansion, this, this … mansion o’ vice and destruction.
“But be-Christ, when they think that I had locked myself out, oh no! Jesus God, I beat it round outside, yes! I went outside. Outside. And I took a box with me. And I stand up. In the shade o’ the trees. On that box, you hear me? Yes, sir! And what my two eyes discerned, as she herself would use that word, what my eyes discerned as happening in that sitting room in the middle o’ Rosedale, it almost made me break my blasted neck through shock! I almost fall off that blasted imported beer box I was standing on, and break my neck. Every man, every man, every individual man, naked as when he come outta the womb of his mother. Naked. Every woman, every woman as she would be in the bathtub. Naked, too! And the he’s have a paintbrush in their hands. And the she’s
