Finally a decision had been made, the only possible way out, and she wept many bitter tears before she would let herself even consider this solution. Always, however, she had come back to it—the suggestion of Aunt Sophie—the one stable thing in a sea of uncertainties. She would put Jean in a children’s home, work as hard as mortal could toil, save her money until she had accumulated enough to assure herself and him freedom from their more immediate wants, and then get him again when she had gained her objective.
And here she was confronted with another problem. She was unwilling to put him in a Negro orphanage, for their all too-slender resources made it problematical if he would receive the care and attention he needed. She would rather struggle along in her present hopeless way than have him neglected. Nor would she want to place him in a white orphanage as a Negro child—she knew the insults and slights he would be forced to suffer. The only recourse left to her and the one she decided upon was to place him in a Catholic orphanage and say nothing about his Negro blood. This had been done, she knew, even with children not nearly so fair as Jean. His French name would be an additional safeguard to him and further assurance he would be given all the advantages available.
She had had some qualms of conscience about this procedure. She had wondered if she were doing the right thing, if she were not placing Jean at such a disadvantage in the event his coloured blood were discovered that it would be greater than if his race were told of at the beginning. But she soon dismissed these fears from her mind. In the first place, it would be only for a short time, and in the second, he had so little coloured blood there was really little question that could be raised. Overshadowing both of these was the mood of desperation in which her ill fortune had forced her. Just as in the hours of that night when Jean was lying at the hospital she had been willing to go to any length to save him, so now she was willing to take any step, legal or illegal, to secure for him as much security and comfort as was possible. It was the relentless, the ruthless, the uncompromising logic of a mother fighting for its own, and obstacles of whatever size were bowled over in eagerness to gain that end. …
She had decided on a home in Baltimore, for she felt that there where so many Catholics lived there would be greater advantages for the unfortunate children of that faith. The bleak November day when she carried Jean there was no more cold and dreary than Mimi’s heart. Petit Jean seemed to feel the impending separation. He clung to Mimi, showering little affections upon her that tore her heart with pain. Her eyes filled with tears, she rushed from the place as though it were plague-stricken to take the train to New York. She had written her Aunt Sophie telling her plans and she had received a letter, short, but warm and sincere. Her aunt had approved her plans and urged her to come to New York and live with her while she was working out a solution to her problems. Mimi had accepted gratefully, glad of the haven to which she could go.
XV
Just as she had had the feeling on leaving Atlanta that she had closed the pages of a volume in the story of her life, so now did Mimi sense intuitively that the second book was being shut, never to be opened again. Through the fading light of a dreary, cold day the train sped across the desolate Jersey meadows. Just dipping below the horizon, a frigid sun gave a sickly brilliance but no warmth. Mimi shivered. The dreariness of the landscape was relieved only by the lank chimneys of factories belching turgescent billows of smoke. From these dingy buildings poured streams of men as dingy as the factories from which they were emerging. Dinner pails in hand, they plodded wearily across the waste places in knots of twos and threes, home to slatternly, waspish wives.
Into the murky darkness of Newark the train rumbled, paused momentarily, and then went its way into the gathering darkness. Lights began to twinkle in the dusty windows of the factories and the nondescript homes along the tracks. Into Manhattan Transfer and out again, past a fertilizer factory that filled the car with the fetid odours of offal, and the train plunged into the roaring, alarming bowels of the earth beneath the Hudson River. Mimi knew of the tunnel and was prepared for it but the shock coming so suddenly following the dismal screeching of the whistle blowing for the tunnel frightened her. Midway where there is an opening going up from the tunnel to the air above she felt relieved that the ordeal was over but again the train rushed on into darkness after the flash of grey. Her ears pounded. She pressed the heels of her hands against them to relieve the roaring in them. She was glad when at last the electric engine pulled its way into the maze of winding tracks on the New York side. …
Bewildered by the hugeness of the Pennsylvania Station, made timid by the rushing throngs all seemingly with some definite destination the reaching of which in the shortest possible time was apparently of vast importance, Mimi with protest yielded her shabby bag to the porter and followed him up the narrow stairs. She peered
