The boys had given Ma Lawton notice to quit. They said they couldn’t sleep there comfortably together on account of the goings-on in Rosalind’s room. The fellows were members of the Colored Y.M.C.A. and were queerly quiet and pious. One of them was studying to be a preacher. They were the sort of fellows that thought going to cabarets a sin, and that parlor socials were leading Harlem straight down to hell. They only went to church affairs themselves. They had been rooming with Ma Lawton for over a year. She called them her gentlemen lodgers.
Ma Lawton said to me: “Have you heard anything phony outa the next room, dear?”
“Why, no, Ma,” I said, “nothing more unusual than you can hear all over Harlem. Besides, I work so late, I am dead tired when I turn in to bed, so I sleep heavy.”
“Well, it’s the truth I do like that there Jerco an’ Rosaline,” said Ma Lawton. “They did seem quiet as lambs, although they was always havin’ company. But Ise got to speak to them, ’cause I doana wanta lose ma young mens. … But theyse a real nice-acting couple. Jerco him treats me like him was mah son. It’s true that they doan work like all poah niggers, but they pays that rent down good and prompt ehvery week.”
Jerco was always bringing in ice-cream and cake or something for Ma Lawton. He had a way about him, and everybody liked him. He was a sympathetic type. He helped Ma Lawton move beds and commodes and he fixed her clothes lines. I had heard somebody talking about Jerco in the saloon, however, saying that he could swing a mean fist when he got his dander up, and that he had been mixed up in more than one razor cut-up. He did have a nasty long razor scar on the back of his right hand.
The elevator fellows had never liked Rosalind and Jerco. The one who was studying to preach Jesus said he felt pretty sure that they were an ungodly-living couple. He said that late one night he had pointed out their room to a woman that looked white. He said the woman looked suspicious. She was perfumed and all powdered up and it appeared as if she didn’t belong among colored people.
“There’s no sure telling white from high-yaller these days,” I said. “There are so many swell-looking quadroons and octoroons of the race.”
But the other elevator fellow said that one day in the tenderloin section he had run up against Rosalind and Jerco together with a petty officer of marines. And that just put the lid on anything favorable that could be said about them.
But Ma Lawton said: “Well, Ise got to run mah flat right an’ try mah utmost to please youall, but I ain’t wanta dip mah nose too deep in a lodger’s affairs.”
Late that night, toward one o’clock, Jerco dropped in at the saloon and told me that Rosalind was feeling badly. She hadn’t eaten a bite all day and he had come to get a pail of beer, because she had asked specially for draught beer. Jerco was worried, too.
“I hopes she don’t get bad,” he said. “For we ain’t got a cent o’ money. Wese just in on a streak o’ bad luck.”
“I guess she’ll soon be all right,” I said.
The next day after lunch I stole a little time and went up to see Rosalind. Ma Lawton was just going to attend to her when I let myself in, and she said to me: “Now the poor woman is sick, poor chile, ahm so glad mah conscience is free and that I hadn’t a said nothing evil t’ her.”
Rosalind was pretty sick. Ma Lawton said it was the grippe. She gave Rosalind hot whisky drinks and hot milk, and she kept her feet warm with a hot-water bottle. Rosalind’s legs were lead-heavy. She had a pain that pinched her side like a pair of pincers. And she cried out for thirst and begged for draught beer.
Ma Lawton said Rosalind ought to have a doctor. “You’d better go an’ scares up a white one,” she said to Jerco. “Ise nevah had no faith in these heah nigger doctors.”
“I don’t know how we’ll make out without money,” Jerco whined. He was sitting in the old Morris chair with his head heavy on his left hand.
“You kain pawn my coat,” said Rosalind. “Old man Greenbaum will give you two hundred down without looking at it.”
“I won’t put a handk’chief o’ yourn in the hock shop,” said Jerco. “You’ll need you’ stuff soon as you get better. Specially you’ coat. You kain’t go anywheres without it.”
“S’posin’ I don’t get up again,” Rosalind smiled. But her countenance changed suddenly as she held her side and moaned. Ma Lawton bent over and adjusted the pillows.
Jerco pawned his watch chain and his own overcoat, and called in a Jewish doctor from the upper Eighth Avenue fringe of the Belt. But Rosalind did not improve under medical treatment. She lay there with a sad, tired look, as if she didn’t really care what happened to her. Her lower limbs were apparently paralyzed. Jerco told the doctor that she had been sick unto death like that before. The doctor shot a lot of stuff into her system. But Rosalind lay there heavy and fading like a felled tree.
The elevator operators looked in on her. The student one gave her a Bible with a little red ribbon marking the chapter in St. John’s Gospel about the woman taken in adultery.
He also wanted to pray for her recovery. Jerco wanted the prayer, but Rosalind said no. Her refusal shocked
