“Marvelous!” duoed the Dunns.
“Wonderful!” said J. Pennington Potter.
“M‑m—” grunted the Hon. Buckram Byle.
“Don’t you think, Penny,” said Noel Dunn, “that your organization would be more specifically defined if it were named The General Negro Improvement Association?”
“Why, yes. Yes indeed. That is, perhaps. As a matter of fact we originally conceived the name as the General Negro Improvement Association. But it was I myself who contended, and without successful contradiction, that any improvement of the American Negro would inevitably improve all other Americans as well. There was therefore—ah—no point, you see, in including the word ‘Negro,’ and I succeeded in having it deleted.”
Mr. Dunn smiled, noting that the trap-drummer was at the moment very amusing.
Meanwhile Miss Agatha Cramp sat quite overwhelmed at the strangeness of her situation. This was her introduction to the people she planned to uplift. True to her word she had personally investigated the G.I.A. and been welcomed with open arms. Certain members of the executive board knew her and her past works—one or two had been associated with her in other projects—and her experience, resources, and devotion to service were unanimously acclaimed assets. And nobody minded her excessively corrective attitude—all new board members started out revising things. Furthermore, the Costume Ball was at hand and that would be enough to upset anybody’s ideas of revision.
Never had Miss Cramp seen so many Negroes in one place at one time. Moreover, never had she dreamed that so many of her own people would for any reason imaginable have descended to mingle with these Negroes. She had prided herself on her own liberality in joining this company tonight. And so it shocked and outraged her to see that most of these fair-skinned visitors were unmistakably enjoying themselves, instead of maintaining the aloof, kindly dignity proper to those who must sacrifice to serve. And of course little did she suspect how many of the fair-skinned ones were not visitors at all but natives.
When she met Nora Byle, for instance, she was first struck with the beauty of her “Latin type.” To save her soul she could not help a momentary stiffening when Buckram Byle, who was a jaundice-brown, was presented as Nora’s husband: Intermarriage! She recovered. No. The girl was one of those mulattoes, of course; a conclusion that brought but temporary relief, for the next moment the debonair Tony Nayle had gone off with the “mulatto,” both of them flirting disgracefully.
It was all in all a situation which robbed Miss Cramp of words; but she smiled bravely through her distress and found no little relief in sitting beside Fred Merrit, whose perfect manner, cherubic smile and fair skin were highly comforting. She had not yet noticed the significant texture of his hair.
“Well, what do you think of it?” Merrit eventually asked.
“I don’t know what to think, really. What do you think?”
“It? Why—it’s all too familiar now for me to have thoughts about. I take it for granted.”
“Oh—you have worked among Negroes a great deal, then?”
Merrit grinned. “All my life.”
“How do you find them?”
That Merrit did not resist temptation and admit his complete identity at this point is easier to explain than to excuse. There was first his admitted joy in discomfiting members of the dominant race. Further, however, there was a special complex of reasons closer at hand.
Merrit was far more outraged by the flirtation between Nora Byle and Tony Nayle than had been even Miss Cramp herself, and with greater cause. His own race prejudice was a bitterer, more deep-seated emotion than was hers, and out of it came an attitude that caused him to look with great suspicion and distrust upon all visitors who came to Harlem “socially.” He insisted that the least blameworthy motive that brought them was curiosity, and held that he, for one, was not on exhibition. As for the men who came oftener than once, he felt that they all had but one motive, the pursuit of Harlem women; that their cultivation of Harlem men was a blind and an instrument in achieving this end, and that the end itself was always illicit and therefore reprehensible.
It was with him a terribly serious matter, of which he could see but one side. When Langdon once hinted gently that maybe it was a two-way reaction, he snorted the suggestion away as nonsense. That he should allow it to disturb him so profoundly meant that it went profoundly back into his own life, as it did into the lives of most people of heredity so diverse as his. The everyday difficulty of his own adjustment engendered in him an unforgiving hatred of those past generations responsible for it. Hence every suggestion that history might repeat itself in this particular occasioned revolt. If there could be no fair exchange, said he, let there be no exchange at all.
He knew that no two ardent individuals would ever be concerned with any such formulas, but the very ineffectuality of what seemed to him so just a principle rendered its violation the more irritating. And in the particular case of Tony and Nora—well, he rather liked Nora himself.
And so beneath his pleasant manner, there was a disordered spirit which at this moment almost gleefully accepted the chance to vent itself on Miss Agatha Cramp’s ignorance. To admit his identity would have wholly lost him this chance. And as for the fact that she was a woman, that only made the compensation all the more complete, gave it a quality of actual retaliation, of parallel all the more satisfying.
“How do I find
