Sometimes Susy managed to lay hold of a yellow one for some time. Something all a piece of dirty rags and stench picked up in the street. Cleansed, clothed, and booted it. But so soon as he got his curly hair straightened by the process of Harlem’s Ambrozine Palace of Beauty, and started in strutting the pavement of Lenox Avenue, feeling smart as a moving-picture dandy, he would leave Susy.
Apart from Susy’s repellent person, no youthful sweetman attempting to love her could hold out under the ridicule of his pals. Over their games of pool and craps the boys had their cracks at Susy.
“What about Gin-head Susy tonight?”
“Sure, let’s go and look the crazy old broad over.”
“I’ll go anywheres foh swilling of good booze.”
“She’s sho one ugly spade, but she’s right there with her Gordon Dry.”
“She ain’t got ’em from creeps to crown and her trotters is B flat, but her gin is regal.”
But now, after all the years of gin sociables and unsatisfactory lemons, Susy was changing just a little. She was changing under the influence of her newly-acquired friend, Lavinia Curdy, the only woman whom she tolerated at her parties. That was not so difficult, as Miss Curdy was less attractive than Susy. Miss Curdy was a putty-skinned mulattress with purple streaks on her face. Two of her upper front teeth had been knocked out and her lower lip slanted pathetically leftward. She was skinny and when she laughed she resembled an old braying jenny.
When Susy came to know Miss Curdy, she unloaded a quantity of the stuff of her breast upon her. Her drab childhood in a South Carolina town. Her early marriage. No girlhood. Her husband leaving her. And all the yellow men that had beaten her, stolen from her, and pawned her things.
Miss Curdy had been very emphatic to Susy about “yaller men.” “I know them from long experience. They never want to work. They’re a lazy and shiftless lot. Want to be kept like women. I found that out a long, long time ago. And that’s why when I wanted a man foh keeps I took me a black plug-ugly one, mah dear.”
It wouldn’t have supported the plausibility of Miss Curdy’s advice if she had mentioned that more than one black plug-ugly had ruthlessly cut loose from her. As the black woman had had her entanglements in yellow, so had the mulattress hers of black. But, perhaps, Miss Curdy did not realize that she could not help desiring black. In her salad days as a business girl her purse was controlled by many a black man. Now, however, her old problems did not arise in exactly the same way—her purse was old and worn and flat and attracted no attention.
“A black man is as good to me as a yaller when I finds a real one.” Susy lied a little to Miss Curdy from a feeling that she ought to show some pride in her own complexion.
“But all these sociables—and you spend so much coin on gin,” Miss Curdy had said.
“Well, that’s the trute, but we all of us drinks it. And I loves to have company in mah house, plenty of company.”
But when Susy came home from work one evening and found that her latest “yaller” sweetie had stolen her suitcase and best dresses and pawned even her gas range, she resolved never to keep another of his kind as a “steady.” At least she made that resolve to Miss Curdy. But the sociables went on and the same types came to drink the Saturday evenings away, leaving the two women at the finish to their empty bottles and glasses. Once Susy did make a show of a black lover. He was the house man at the boardinghouse where she cooked. But the arrangement did not hold any time, for Susy demanded of the chocolate extremely more than she ever got from her yellows.
“Well, boh, we’s Brooklyn bound tonight,” said Zeddy to Jake.
“You got to show me that Brooklyn’s got any life to it,” replied Jake.
“Theah’s life anywheres theah’s booze and jazz, and theah’s cases o’ gin and a gramophone whar we’s going.”
“Has we got to pay foh it, buddy?”
“No, boh, eve’ything is F.O.C. ef the lady likes you.”
“Blimey!” A cockney phrase stole Jake’s tongue. “Don’t bull me.”
“I ain’t. Honest-to-Gawd Gordon Dry, and moh—ef you’re the goods, all F.O.C.”
“Well, I’ll be browned!” exclaimed Jake.
Zeddy also took along Strawberry Lips, a new pal, burnt-cork black, who was thus nicknamed from the peculiar stage-red color of his mouth. Strawberry Lips was typically the stage Negro. He was proof that a generalization has some foundation in truth. … You might live your life in many black belts and arrive at the conclusion that there is no such thing as a typical Negro—no minstrel coon off the stage, no Thomas Nelson Page’s nigger, no Octavus Roy Cohen’s porter, no lineal descendant of Uncle Tom. Then one day your theory may be upset through meeting with a type by far more perfect than any created counterpart.
“Myrtle Avenue used to be a be-be itching of a place,” said Strawberry Lips, “when Doc Giles had his gambling house on there and Elijah Bowers was running his cabaret. H’m. But Bowers was some big guy. He knew swell white folks in politics, and had a grand automobile and a high-yaller wife that hadn’t no need of painting to pass. His cabaret was running neck and neck with Marshall’s in Fifty-third Street. Then one night he killed a man in his cabaret, and that finished him. The lawyers got him off. But they cleaned him out dry. Done broke him, that case did. And today he’s plumb down and out.”
Jake, Zeddy, and Strawberry Lips had left the subway train at Borough Hall and were walking
