“Down to Flo’s.”
“Who in the hell is Flo?”
“That little yaller broad I picked up at the cabaret last night.”
“I thought she had a nigger with her.”
“She did, but I jived her along, so she ditched him, and gave me her address. I met her there later.”
Braxton was now ready to get into the bed. All this time he had been preparing himself in his usual bedtime manner. His face had been cold-creamed, his hair greased and tightly covered by a silken stocking cap. This done, he climbed over Alva and lay on top of the covers. They were silent for a moment, then Braxton laughed softly to himself.
“Where’d you go last night?”
“Where’d I go?” Alva seemed surprised. “Why I came home, where’d ya think I went?” Braxton laughed again.
“Oh, I thought maybe you’d really made a date with that coal scuttle blond you danced with.”
“Ya musta thought it.”
“Well, ya seemed pretty sweet on her.”
“Whaddaya mean, sweet? Just because I danced with her once. I took pity on her, cause she looked so lonesome with those ofays. Wonder who they was?”
“Oh, she probably works for them. It’s good you danced with her. Nobody else would.”
“I didn’t see nothing wrong with her. She might have been a little dark.”
“Little dark is right, and you know when they comes blacker’n me, they ain’t got no go.” Braxton was a reddish brown aristocrat, with clear-cut features and curly hair. His paternal grandfather had been an Iroquois Indian.
Emma Lou was very lonesome. She still knew no one save John, two or three of the Negro actors who worked on the stage with Arline, and a West Indian woman who lived in the same apartment with her. Occasionally John met her when she left the theater at night and escorted her to her apartment door. He repeatedly importuned her to be nice to him once more. Her only answer was a sigh or a smile.
The West Indian woman was employed as a stenographer in the office of a Harlem political sheet. She was shy and retiring, and not much given to making friends with American Negroes. So many of them had snubbed and pained her when she was newly emigrant from her home in Barbados, that she lumped them all together, just as they seemed to do her people. She would not take under consideration that Emma Lou was new to Harlem, and not even aware of the prejudice American-born Harlemites nursed for foreign-born ones. She remembered too vividly how, on ringing the bell of a house where there had been a vacancy sign in the window, a little girl had come to the door, and, in answer to a voice in the back asking, “Who is it, Cora?” had replied, “monkey chaser wants to see the room you got to rent.” Jasmine Griffith was wary of all contact with American Negroes, for that had been only one of the many embittering incidents she had experienced.
Emma Lou liked Jasmine, but was conscious of the fact that she could never penetrate her stolid reserve. They often talked to one another when they met in the hallway, and sometimes they stopped in one another’s rooms, but there was never any talk of going places together, never any informal revelations or intimacies.
The Negro actors in Cabaret Gal, all felt themselves superior to Emma Lou, and she in turn felt superior to them. She was just a maid. They were just common stage folk. Once she had had an inspiration. She had heard that Cabaret Gal was liable to run for two years or more on Broadway before road shows were sent out. Without saying anything to Arline she had approached the stage director and asked him, in all secrecy, what her chances were of getting into the cabaret ensemble. She knew they paid well, and she speculated that two or three years in Cabaret Gal might lay the foundations for a future stage career.
“What the hell would Arline do,” he laughed, “if she didn’t have you to change her complexion before every performance?”
Emma Lou had smiled away this bit of persiflage and had reiterated her request in such a way that there was no mistaking her seriousness.
Sensing this, the director changed his mood, and admitted that even then two of the girls were dropping out of Cabaret Gal to sail for Europe with another show, booked for a season on the continent. But he hastened to tell her, as he saw her eyes brighten with anticipation:
“Well, you see, we worked out a color scheme that would be a complement to Arline’s makeup. You’ve noticed, no doubt, that all of the girls are about one color, and. …”
Unable to stammer any more, he had hastened away, embarrassed.
Emma Lou hadn’t noticed that all the girls were one color. In fact, she was certain they were not. She hastened to stand in the stage wings among them between scenes and observe their skin coloring. Despite many layers of liquid powder she could see that they were not all one color, but that they were either mulatto or light-brown skin. Their makeup and the lights gave them an appearance of sameness. She noticed that there were several black men in the ensemble, but that none of the women were dark. Then the breach between Emma Lou and the show people widened.
Emma Lou had had another inspiration. She had decided to move. Perhaps if she were to live with a homey type of family they could introduce her to “the right sort of people.” She blamed her enforced isolation on the fact that she had made no worthwhile contacts. Mrs. Blake was a disagreeable remembrance. Since she came to think about it, Mrs. Blake had been distinctly patronizing like … like … her high school principal, or like Doris Garrett, the head of the only Negro sorority in the Southern California college she had attended. Doris Garrett had been very nice to all her colored schoolmates, but had seen to it that only
