“I don’t want you to keep me on.” She spoke with an amazing vindictiveness. “I haven’t got to the point yet where I’m going to lower myself to pose for a coloured girl.”
He looked around the room in amazement; no, Miss Henderson wasn’t there, she never came to this class he remembered. “Well after that we couldn’t keep you anyway. We’re not taking orders from our models. But there’s no coloured girl here.”
“Oh yes there is, unless she’s changed her name.” She laughed spitefully. “Isn’t that Angela Murray over there next to that Jew girl?” In spite of himself, Shields nodded. “Well, she’s coloured though she wouldn’t let you know. But I know. I went to school with her in North Philadelphia. And I tell you I wouldn’t stay to pose for her not if you were to pay me ten times what I’m getting. Sitting there drawing from me just as though she were as good as a white girl!”
Astonished and disconcerted, he told his wife about it. “But I can’t think she’s really coloured, Mabel. Why she looks and acts just like a white girl. She dresses in better taste than anybody in the room. But that little wretch of a model insisted that she was coloured.”
“Well she just can’t be. Do you suppose I don’t know a coloured woman when I see one? I can tell ’em a mile off.”
It seemed to him a vital and yet such a disgraceful matter. “If she is coloured she should have told me. I’d certainly like to know, but hang it all, I can’t ask her, for suppose she should be white in spite of what that little beast of a model said?” He found her address in the registry and overcome one afternoon with shamed curiosity drove up to Opal Street and slowly past her house. Jinny was coming in from school and Hetty Daniels on her way to market greeted her on the lower step. Then Virginia put the key in the lock and passed inside. “She is coloured,” he told his wife, “for no white girl in her senses would be rooming with coloured people.”
“I should say not! Coloured, is she? Well, she shan’t come here again, Henry.”
Angela approached him after class on Saturday. “How is Mrs. Shields? I can’t get out to see her this week but I’ll be sure to run in next.”
He blurted out miserably, “But, Miss Murray, you never told me that you were coloured.”
She felt as though she were rehearsing a well-known part in a play. “Coloured! Of course I never told you that I was coloured. Why should I?”
But apparently there was some reason why she should tell it; she sat in her room in utter dejection trying to reason it out. Just as in the old days she had not discussed the matter with Jinny, for what could the latter do? She wondered if her mother had ever met with any such experiences. Was there something inherently wrong in “passing”?
Her mother had never seemed to consider it as anything but a lark. And on the one occasion, that terrible day in the hospital when passing or not passing might have meant the difference between good will and unpleasantness, her mother had deliberately given the whole show away. But her mother, she had long since begun to realize, had not considered this business of colour or the lack of it as pertaining intimately to her personal happiness. She was perfectly satisfied, absolutely content whether she was part of that white world with Angela or up on little Opal Street with her dark family and friends. Whereas it seemed to Angela that all the things which she most wanted were wrapped up with white people. All the good things were theirs. Not, some coldly reasoning instinct within was saying, because they were white. But because for the present they had power and the badge of that power was whiteness, very like the colours on the escutcheon of a powerful house. She possessed the badge, and unless there was someone to tell she could possess the power for which it stood.
Hetty Daniels shrilled up: “Mr. Henson’s down here to see you.”
Tiresome though his presence was, she almost welcomed him tonight, and even accepted his eager invitation to go to see a picture. “It’s in a little gem of a theatre, Angela. You’ll like the surroundings almost as much as the picture, and that’s very good. Sawyer and I saw it about two weeks ago. I thought then that I’d like to take you.”
She knew that this was his indirect method of telling her that they would meet with no difficulty in the matter of admission; a comforting assurance, for Philadelphia theatres, as Angela knew, could be very unpleasant to would-be coloured patrons. Henson offered to telephone for a taxi while she was getting on her street clothes, and she permitted the unnecessary extravagance, for she hated the conjectures on the faces of passengers in the streetcars; conjectures, she felt in her sensitiveness, which she could only set right by being unusually kind and friendly in her manner to Henson. And this produced undesirable effects on him. She had gone out with him more often in the Ford, which permitted a modicum of privacy. But Jinny was off in the little car tonight.
At Broad and Ridge Avenue the taxi was held up; it was twenty-five minutes after eight when they reached the theatre. Matthew gave Angela a bill. “Do you mind getting the tickets while I settle for the cab?” he asked nervously. He did not want her to miss even the advertisements. This, he almost prayed, would be a perfect night.
Cramming the change into his pocket, he rushed into the lobby and
