Tonight they were hard at it again with a new phase which Angela, who usually sat only half attentive in their midst, did not remember ever having heard touched before. Seymour Porter had started the ball by forcing their attention to one of his poems. It was not a bad poem; as modern verse goes it possessed a touch distinctly above the mediocre.
“Why don’t you stop that stuff and get down to brass tacks, Porter?” Matthew snarled. “You’ll be of much more service to your race as a good dentist than as a half-baked poet.” Henson happened to know that the amount of study which the young poet did at the University kept him just barely registered in the dental college.
Porter ran his hand over his beautifully groomed hair. He had worn a stocking cap in his room all the early part of the day to enable him to perform this gesture without disaster. “There you go, Henson—service to the race and all the rest of it. Doesn’t it ever occur to you that the race is made up of individuals and you can’t conserve the good of the whole unless you establish that of each part? Is it better for me to be a first rate dentist and be a cabined and confined personality or a half-baked poet, as you’d call it, and be myself?”
Henson reasoned that a coloured American must take into account that he is usually living in a hostile community. “If you’re only a half-baked poet they’ll think that you’re a representative of your race and that we’re all equally no account. But if you’re a fine dentist, they won’t think, it’s true, that we’re all as skilled as you, but they will respect you and concede that probably there’re a few more like you. Inconsistent, but that’s the way they argue.”
Arthur Sawyer objected to this constant yielding to an invisible censorship. “If you’re coloured you’ve just got to straddle a bit; you’ve got to consider both racial and individual integrity. I’ve got to be sure of a living right now. So in order not to bring the charge of vagrancy against my family I’m going to teach until I’ve saved enough money to study engineering in comfort.”
“And when you get through?” Matthew asked politely.
“When I get through, if this city has come to its senses, I’ll get a big job with Baldwin. If not I’ll go to South America and take out naturalization papers.”
“But you can’t do that,” cried Jinny, “we’d need you more than ever if you had all that training. You know what I think? We’ve all of us got to make up our minds to the sacrifice of something. I mean something more than just the ordinary sacrifices in life, not so much for the sake of the next generation as for the sake of some principle, for the sake of some immaterial quality like pride or intense self-respect or even a saving complacency; a spiritual tonic which the race needs perhaps just as much as the body might need iron or whatever it does need to give the proper kind of resistance. There are some things which an individual might want, but which he’d just have to give up forever for the sake of the more important whole.”
“It beats me,” said Sawyer indulgently, “how a little thing like you can catch hold of such a big thought. I don’t know about a man’s giving up his heart’s desire forever, though, just because he’s coloured. That seems to me a pretty large order.”
“Large order or not,” Henson caught him up, “she comes mighty near being right. What do you think, Angela?”
“Just the same as I’ve always thought. I don’t see any sense in living unless you’re going to be happy.”
Angela took the sketch of Hetty Daniels to school. “What an interesting type!” said Gertrude Quale, the girl next to her. “Such cosmic and tragic unhappiness in that face. What is she, not an American?”
“Oh yes she is. She’s an old coloured woman who’s worked in our family for years and she was born right here in Philadelphia.”
“Oh coloured! Well, of course I suppose you would call her an American though I never think of darkies as Americans. Coloured—yes that would account for that unhappiness in her face. I suppose they all mind it awfully.”
It was the afternoon for the life class. The model came in, a short, rather slender young woman with a faintly pretty, shrewish face full of a certain dark, mean character. Angela glanced at her thoughtfully, full of pleasant anticipation. She liked to work for character, preferred it even to beauty. The model caught her eye; looked away and again turned her full gaze upon her with an insistent, slightly incredulous stare. It was Esther Bayliss who had once been in the High School with Angela. She had left not long after Mary Hastings’ return to her boarding school.
Angela saw no reason why she should speak to her and presently, engrossed in the portrayal of the round, yet pointed little face, forgot the girl’s identity. But Esther kept her eyes fixed on her former schoolmate with a sort of intense, angry brooding so absorbing that
