“H’m child, wouldn’t you do anything to get away f’um hard work, an’ ugly cloes an’ bills? Some w’ite folks has it most as bad as us poor colored people. Only thing is they has more opporchunities.”
Maggie, visualizing the life which she and her mother endured, thought she probably would. She thought it again after they had reached the tenement in Thirty-fifth Street where the two of them lived. It was the famous “Tenderloin” of those days and Maggie’s spirit revolted with a revulsion of feeling which never ceased to amaze her mother against the sordidness of that place. There were three rooms. The front one looked on the street and so was well lighted, but the other two got light only from the air-shaft. Mrs. Ellersley, a widow who considered herself fortunate to be one, rented the front room out, usually to trainmen (perhaps some of Meriwether’s acquaintances were among them), occasionally to a married couple.
She and Maggie slept and lived in the two wretchedly ventilated rooms, in a perpetual gloom penetrated ever so slightly by a flickering blue flame. A confusion of clothes, obscene old furniture, boxes, stale newspapers was littered about them. For some reason the rooms were everlastingly damp, perhaps because, although rain could get down the air-shaft, the sunlight never could. The rooms gave Maggie a constantly eerie feeling, which in later more fortunate years she was always able to recall by the sight of a gas-flame burning low and blue.
They never, in those days, enjoyed a really bright flame. Saving was Mrs. Ellersley’s insistent because necessary fetish. Maggie’s tea was always weak, and never sweet enough. The bread—baker’s with holes in it, yesterday’s, two loaves for five cents—was always stale; the meat usually salt and sometimes tainted.
Out of it all Maggie bloomed—a strange word but somehow true. She was like a yellow calla lily in the deep cream of her skin, the slim straightness of her body. She had a mass of fine, wiry hair which hung like a cloud, a mist over two gray eyes. Her lips, in spite of her constant malnutrition, persisted unbelievably red. When she met excitement those gray eyes darkened and shone, her cheeks flushed a little, her small hands fluttered. And she was nearly always excited. Something within her frail bosom pulsed in a constant revolt against the spirit of things that kept her in these conditions.
“I will not always live like this, Ma—I’ll get out of it some way.”
And her mother, though always scoffing, believed her with a dreary hopefulness. “If there’s a way to be found out, Maggie’ll find it.”
Maggie found early that one avenue of escape lay through men. They were stronger than women, they made money. They did not give the impression of shrinking from spending the last penny lest when that cent was gone there should be no more. All the trainmen liked her. She could not get much order in that abominable home, but she could and did keep herself clean and neat. She washed her few garments over night; she wound a stray ribbon, from a box of cigars or a box of candy, through her hair. Some of the men, young students, “on the road” during their summer vacations, used to flirt with her.
“Hurry and grow up, Mag. When I get through school I’ll come back and marry you. How’d you like to live in a little house—not like this!—in Washington?” Or Wilmington or Savannah as the case might be. “I’d give you pretty dresses.”
Poor Maggie. Her calla-lily charm visibly lessened in those days when she opened her pretty mouth. She disclosed herself then for what she was, a true daughter of the Tenderloin.
“Aw quit your kiddin!”
But she came slowly to realize that here was a way out. If she could only grow up—if she were—say—seventeen.
She was persistently frail, else her mother might have put her to work. As it was she was sent to school very regularly—to save fuel and gas. Evenings she went to the houses where her mother worked and got her dinner.
On the night after she had listened to Mis’ Sparrow’s comments about young Mrs. Proctor, she sat thoughtful a long time. She had sense enough to know that very often these trainmen stayed poor. They made pretty good money—they did, too, in those days—but not enough to save their wives from labor. Maggie did not want to wash and iron, to go through the dreary existence which had been her mother’s when her father was living; he had run on the road.
Suppose, just suppose, there were some colored men who were fortunate, successful, who had enough to eat, who could give their wives help. Her mother knew of ministers like that. There were colored doctors and lawyers somewhere. Their very titles connoted prosperity.
“Ma,” she spoke out of her brown study, “are there any very rich colored men?”
“Not any very rich ones, I don’t think,” Mrs. Ellersley replied thoughtfully, “but lots very well off, comfortable, with servants to wait on ’em.” She sighed.
“I’m going to meet one,” said Maggie solemnly, and henceforth she thought, she dreamed of nothing else.
When she was fourteen young John Howe, who was occupying the front room, came down with a spell of typhoid fever. He begged Mrs. Ellersley not to send him to the hospital, and it was impossible to get him to his home in Oklahoma. He had enough money to see him through, and he put his fortunes and his case into her withered hands. All the trainmen knew of Mrs. Ellersley’s absolute honesty. She did what she could for him, sat up long nights, gave him his medicine faithfully, “counted out his money.”
But it was Maggie who gave real service. She stayed out of school to attend him. The doctor gave her a list of directions which she followed with meticulous care. In that shabby house down in that terrible district John Howe met with an attention, a devotion from the humble woman and her delicate
