“It’s because you are a fool that I am crying,” said Jinny sobbing and sniffling, her fingers in her eyes. “You’re a fool and the darlingest girl that ever lived, and my own precious, lovely, wonderful sister back again. Oh, Angela, I’m so happy. Tell them to send you your passage money back; say you don’t want anything from them that they don’t want to give; let them go, let them all go except the ones who like you for yourself. And dearest, if you don’t mind having to skimp a bit for a year or two and not spreading yourself as you planned, we’ll get you off to Europe after all. You know I’ve got all my money from the house. I’ve never touched it. You can have as much of that as you want and pay me back later or not at all.”
Laughing and crying, Angela told her that she couldn’t think of it. “Keep your money for your marriage, Jinny. It’ll be some time before—Anthony will make any real money, I imagine. But I will take your advice and go to Europe after all. All this stuff will be in the paper tomorrow, I suppose, so I’ll write the American Committee people tonight. As for the prize money, if they want that back they can have it. But I don’t think they will; nothing was said about Miss Powell’s. That’s a thousand dollars. I’ll take that and go to Paris and live as long as I can. If I can’t have the thousand I’ll use the few hundreds that I have left and go anyway. And when I come back I’ll go back to my old job or—go into the schools. But all that’s a long way off and we don’t know what might turn up.”
There were one or two matters for immediate consideration. The encounter with the reporters had left Angela a little more shaken than was at first apparent. “I don’t want to run into them again,” she said ruefully. Her lease on the little apartment in Jayne Street had still a month to run. She would go down this very evening, get together her things, and return to Jinny, with whom she would live quietly until it was time for her to sail. Her mail she could leave with the janitor to be called for. Fortunately the furniture was not hers; there were only a few pictures to be removed. After all, she had very few friends to consider—just the Sandburgs, Martha Burden, Mrs. Denver, Ralph Ashley and Rachel Salting.
“And I don’t know what to do about them,” she said, pondering. “After all, you can’t write to people and say: ‘Dear friend:—You’ve always thought I was white. But I’m not really. I’m coloured and I’m going back to my own folks to live.’ Now can you? Oh, Jinny, Jinny, isn’t it a great old world?”
In the end, after the story appeared, as it assuredly did, in the next morning’s paper, she cut out and sent to each of her former friends copies of Miss Tilden’s story whose headlines read: “Socially Ambitious Negress Confesses to Long Hoax.”
With the exception of Banky’s all the accounts took the unkindest attitude possible. The young Hungarian played up the element of self-sacrifice and the theory that blood after all was thicker than water. Angela guessed rightly that if he could have he would have preferred omitting it, and that he had only written it up to offset as far as possible the other accounts. Of the three other meanly insinuating stories Miss Tilden’s was the silliest and most dangerous. She spoke of mixed blood as the curse of the country, a curse whose “insidiously concealed influence constantly threatens the wells of national race purity. Such incidents as these make one halt before he condemns the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan and its unceasing fight for 100 percent Americanism.”
The immediate effect of this publicity was one which neither of the sisters had foreseen. When Angela reported for work on the following Monday morning she found a note on her desk asking her immediate appearance in the office. The president returning her good morning with scant courtesy, showed her a clipping and asked if she were the Miss Mory of the story. Upon her assurance that she was none other, he handed her a month’s salary in lieu of notice and asked her to consider her connection with the firm at an end.
“We have no place for deceit in an institution such as this,” he said augustly.
The incident shook both girls to a degree. Virginia, particularly was rendered breathless by its cruel immediacy. Never before had she come so close to the special variation of prejudice manifested to people in Angela’s position. That the president of the concern should attribute the girl’s reticence on this subject to deceit seemed to her the last ounce of injustice. Angela herself was far less perturbed.
“I’ve seen too much of this sort of thing to feel it as you do, Virginia. Of course, as you see, there are all kinds of absurdities involved. In your case, showing colour as you do, you’d have been refused the job at the very outset. Perhaps they would have said that they had found coloured people incompetent or that other girls had a strong natural aversion toward working beside one of us. Now here I land the position, hold it long enough to prove ability and the girls work beside me and remain untainted. So evidently there’s no blind inherent disgust to be overcome. Looking just the same as I’ve ever looked I let the fact of my Negro ancestry be known. Mind, I haven’t changed the least bit, but immediately there’s all this holding up of hands and the
