“Who is this heah Ray?”
Jake told her. She smoothed out the counterpane on the bed, making a mental note that it was just right for two. She admired the geraniums in the window that looked on the large court.
“These heah new homes foh niggers am sure nice,” she commented.
She looked behind the curtain where his clothes were hanging and remarked his old English suit. Then she regarded archly his new nigger-brown rig-out.
“You was moh illegant in that other, but I likes you in this all the same.”
Jake laughed. “Everything’s gotta wear out some day.”
Felice hung round his neck, twiddling her pretty legs.
He held her as you might hold a child and she ruffled his thick mat of hair and buried her face in it. She wriggled down with a little scream:
“Oh, I gotta go get mah bag!”
“I’ll come along with you,” said Jake.
“No, lemme go alone. I kain manage better by mahself.”
“But suppose that nigger is waiting theah foh you? You better lemme come along.”
“No, honey, I done figure he’s waiting still in Sheba Palace, or boozing. Him and some friends was all drinking befoh and he was kinder fulL Ise sure he ain’t gone home. Anyway, I kain manage by mahself all right, but ef you comes along and we runs into him—No, honey, you stays right here. I don’t want messing up in no blood-baff. Theah’s too much a that in Harlem.”
They compromised, Felice agreeing that Jake should accompany her to the corner of Seventh Avenue and 135th Street and wait for her there. She had not the faintest twinge of conscience herself. She had met the male that she preferred and gone with him, leaving the one that she was merely makeshifting with. It was a very simple and natural thing to her. There was nothing mean about it. She was too nice to be mean. However, she was aware that in her world women scratched and bit into each other’s flesh and men razored and gunned at each other over such things. …
Felice recalled one memorable afternoon when two West Indian women went for each other in the back yard of a house in 132nd Street. One was a laundress, a whopping brown woman who had come to New York from Colon, and the other was a country girl, a buxom Negress from Jamaica. They were quarreling over a vain black bantam, one of the breed that delight in women’s scratching over them. The laundress had sent for him to come over from the Canal Zone to New York. They had lived together there and she had kept him, making money in all the ways that a gay and easy woman can on the Canal Zone. But now the laundress bemoaned the fact that “sence mah man come to New Yawk, him jest gone back on me in the queerest way you can imagine.”
Her man, in turn, blamed the situation upon her, said she was too aggressive and mannish and had harried the energy out of him. But the other girl seemed to endow him again with virility. … After keeping him in Panama and bringing him to New York, the laundress hesitated about turning her male loose in Harlem, although he was apparently of no more value to her. But his rejuvenating experience with the younger girl had infuriated the laundress. A sister worker from Alabama, to whom she had confided her secret tragedy, had hinted: “Lawdy! sistah, that sure sounds phony-like. Mebbe you’ man is jest playing possum with you.” And the laundress was crazy with suspicion and jealousy and a feeling for revenge. She challenged her rival to fight the affair out. They were all living in the same house. …
Felice also lived in that house. And one afternoon she was startled by another girl from an adjoining room pounding on her door and shrieking: “Open foh the love of Jesus! … Theah’s sweet hell playing in the back yard.”
The girls rushed to the window and saw the two black women squaring off at each other down in the back yard. They were stark naked.
After the challenge, the women had decided to fight with their clothes off. An old custom, perhaps a survival of African tribalism, had been imported from some remote West Indian hillside into a New York back yard. Perhaps, the laundress had thought, that with her heavy and powerful limbs she could easily get her rival down and sit on her, mauling her properly. But the black girl was as nimble as a wild goat. She dodged away from the laundress who was trying to get ahold of her big bush of hair, and suddenly sailing fullfront into her, she seized the laundress, shoulder and neck, and butted her twice on the forehead as only a rough West Indian country girl can butt. The laundress staggered backward, groggy, into a bundle of old carpets. But she rallied and came back at the grinning Negress again. The laundress had never learned the brutal art of butting. The girl bounded up at her forehead with another well-aimed butt and sent her reeling flop on her back among the carpets. The girl planted her knees upon the laundress’s high chest and wrung her hair.
“You don’t know me, but I’ll make you remember me foreber. I’ll beat you’ mug ugly. There!” Bam! Bam! She slapped the laundress’s face.
“Git off mah stomach, nigger gal, and leave me in peace,” the laundress panted. The entire lodging-house was in a sweet fever over the event. Those lodgers whose windows gave on the street had crowded into their neighbors’ rear rooms and some had descended into the basement for a closeup view. Apprised of the naked exhibition, the landlord hurried in from the corner saloon and threatened the combatants with the police. But there was nothing to do. The affair was settled and the women had already put their shifts on.
The women lodgers cackled gayly over the novel staging of the fight.
“It sure is better to disrobe
