“Don’t they ever have anything else but fair chorus girls?”
Alva made a pretense of being very occupied with the business on the stage. Happily, at that moment, one of a pair of black faced comedians had set the audience in an uproar with a suggestive joke. After a moment Emma Lou found herself laughing too. The two comedians were funny, no matter how prejudiced one might be against unoriginality. There must be other potent elements to humor besides surprise. Then a very Topsy-like girl skated onto the stage to the tune of “Ireland must be heaven because my mother came from there.” Besides being corked until her skin was jet black, the girl had on a wig of kinky hair. Her lips were painted red—their thickness exaggerated by the paint. Her coming created a stir. Everyone concerned was indignant that something like her should crash their party. She attempted to attach herself to certain men in the crowd. The straight men spurned her merely by turning away. The comedians made a great fuss about it, pushing her from one to the other, and finally getting into a riotous argument because each accused the other of having invited her. It ended by them agreeing to toss her bodily off the stage to the orchestral accompaniment of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird,” while the entire party loudly proclaimed that “Black cats must go.”
Then followed the usual rigamarole carried on weekly at the Lafayette concerning the undesirability of black girls. Everyone, that is, all the males, let it be known that high browns and “high yallers” were “forty” with them, but that. … They were interrupted by the reentry of the little black girl riding a mule and singing mournfully as she was being thus transported across the stage:
A yellow gal rides in a limousine,
A brown-skin rides a Ford,
A black gal rides an old jackass
But she gets there, yes my Lord.
Emma Lou was burning up with indignation. So color-conscious had she become that any time someone mentioned or joked about skin color, she immediately imagined that they were referring to her. Now she even felt that all the people near by were looking at her and that their laughs were at her expense. She remained silent throughout the rest of the performance, averting her eyes from the stage and trying hard not to say anything to Alva before they left the theater. After what seemed an eternity, the finale screamed its goodbye at the audience, and Alva escorted her out into Seventh Avenue.
Alva was tired and thirsty. He had been up all night the night before at a party to which he had taken Geraldine, and he had had to get up unusually early on Friday morning in order to go after his laundry. Of course when he had arrived at Bobby’s apartment where his laundry was being done, he found that his shirts were not yet ironed, so he had gone to bed there, with the result that he hadn’t been able to go to sleep, nor had the shirts been ironed, but that was another matter.
“First time I ever went to a midnight show without something on my hip,” he complained to Emma Lou as they crossed the taxi-infested street in order to escape the crowds leaving the theater and idling in front of it, even at four a.m. in the morning.
“Well,” Emma Lou returned vehemently, “it’s the last time I’ll ever go to that place any kind of way.”
Alva hadn’t expected this. “What’s the matter with you?”
“You’re always taking me someplace, or placing me in some position where I’ll be insulted.”
“Insulted?” This was far beyond Alva. Who on earth had insulted her and when. “But,” he paused, then advanced cautiously, “Sugar, I don’t know what you mean.”
Emma Lou was ready for a quarrel. In fact she had been trying to pick one with him ever since the night she had gone to that house-rent party, and the landlady had asked her to move on the following day. Alva’s curt refusal of her proposal that they live together had hurt her far more than he had imagined. Somehow or other he didn’t think she could be so serious about the matter, especially upon such short notice. But Emma Lou had been so certain that he would be as excited over the suggestion as she had been that she hadn’t considered meeting a definite refusal. Then the finding of a room had been irritating to contemplate. She couldn’t have called it irritating of accomplishment because Alva had done that for her. She had told him on Sunday morning that she had to move and by Sunday night he had found a place for her. She had to admit that he had found an exceptionally nice place too. It was just two blocks from him, on 138th Street between Eighth Avenue and Edgecombe. It was near the elevated station, near the park, and cost only ten dollars and fifty cents per week for the room, kitchenette and private bath.
On top of his refusal to live with her, Alva had broken two dates with Emma Lou, claiming that he was playing poker. On one of these nights, after leaving work, Emma Lou had decided to walk past his house. Even at a distance she could see that there was a light in his room, and when she finally passed the house, she recognized Geraldine, the girl with whom she had seen Alva dancing at the Renaissance Casino, seated in the window. Angrily, she had gone home, determined to break with Alva on the morrow, and on reaching home had found a letter from her mother which had disturbed her even more. For a long time now her mother had
