A sort of secondary interest in living was creeping into to her perspective. The high lights, the high peaks had faded from her sight. She would never, she suspected, know such spontaneity of feeling and attitude again as she had felt toward both Roger and Anthony. Nor would she again approach the experiences of existence with the same naive expectation, the same desire to see how things would turn out. Young as she was she felt like a battle-scarred veteran who, worn out from his own strenuous activities, was quite content to sit on the sidelines gazing at all phases of warfare with an equal eye.
Although she no longer intended to cast in her lot with Virginia, she made no further effort to set up barriers between herself and coloured people. Let the world take her as it would. If she were in Harlem, in company with Virginia and Sara Penton she went out to dinner, to the noisy, crowded, friendly “Y” dining-room, to “Gert’s” tearoom, to the clean, inviting drugstore for rich sundaes. Often, too, she went shopping with her sister and to the theatre; she had her meet Ashley and Martha. But she was careful in this company to avoid contact with people whose attitude on the race question was unknown, or definitely antagonistic.
Harlem intrigued her; it was a wonderful city; it represented, she felt, the last word in racial pride, integrity and even self-sacrifice. Here were people of a very high intellectual type, exponents of the realest and most essential refinement living cheek by jowl with coarse or ill-bred or even criminal, certainly indifferent, members of their race. Of course some of this propinquity was due to outer pressure, but there was present, too, a hidden consciousness of race-duty, a something which if translated said: “Perhaps you do pull me down a little from the height to which I have climbed. But on the other hand, perhaps, I’m helping you to rise.”
There was a hairdresser’s establishment on 136th Street where Virginia used to have her beautiful hair treated; where Sara Penton, whose locks were of the same variety as Matthew’s, used to repair to have their unruliness “pressed.” Here on Saturdays Angela would accompany the girls and sit through the long process just to overhear the conversations, grave and gallant and gay, of these people whose blood she shared but whose disabilities by a lucky fluke she had been able to avoid. For, while she had been willing for the sake of Anthony to re-enlist in the struggles of this life, she had never closed her eyes to its disadvantages; to its limitedness! What a wealth of courage it took for these people to live! What high degree of humour, determination, steadfastness, undauntedness were not needed—and poured forth! Maude, the proprietress of the business, for whom the establishment was laconically called “Maude’s,” was a slight, sweet-faced woman with a velvety seal-brown skin, a charming voice and an air of real refinement. She was from Texas, but had come to New York to seek her fortune, had travelled as ladies’ maid in London and Paris, and was as thoroughly conversant with the arts of her calling as any hairdresser in the vicinity of the Rue de la Paix or on Fifth Avenue. A rare quality of hospitality emanated from her presence; her little shop was always full not only of patrons but of callers, visitors from “down home,” actresses from the current coloured “show,” flitting in like radiant birds of paradise with their rich brown skins, their exotic eyes and the gaily coloured clothing which an unconscious style had evolved just for them.
In this atmosphere, while there was no coarseness, there was no restriction; life in busy Harlem stopped here and yawned for a delicious moment before going on with its pressure and problems. A girl from Texas, visiting “the big town” for a few weeks took one last glance at her shapely, marvellously “treated” head, poised for a second before the glass and said simply, “Well, goodbye, Maude; I’m off for the backwoods, but I’ll never forget Harlem.” She passed out with the sinuous elegant carriage acquired in her few weeks’ sojourn on Seventh Avenue.
A dark girl, immaculate in white from head to foot, asked: “What’s she going back South for? Ain’t she had enough of Texas yet?”
Maude replied that she had gone back there because of her property. “Her daddy owns most of the little town where they live.”
“Child, ain’t you learned that you don’t never own no property in Texas as long as those white folks are down there too? Just let those Ku Kluxers get it into their heads that you’ve got something they want. She might just as well leave there first as last; she’s bound to have to some day. I know it’s more’n a notion to pull up stakes and start all over again in a strange town and a strange climate, but it’s the difference between life and death. I know I done it and I don’t expect ever to go back.”
She was a frail woman, daintily dressed and shod. Her voice was soft and drawling. But Angela saw her sharply as the epitome of the iron and blood in a race which did not know how to let go of life.
Market Is Done
I
The eternal routine of life went on—meals, slumber, talk, work—and all of it meaning nothing; a void starting nowhere and leading nowhither; a “getting through” with the days. Gradually however two points fixed themselves in her horizon, and about these her life revolved. One was her work—her art. Every week found her spending three or four of its nights at her easel.
