by Marlowe Benn
Eva stared at her, puzzled. A tentative smile spread across her face, as if she had decided to regard this strange invective as yet another compliment.
“She’s drunk,” Julia whispered. “Ignore her.”
Eva nodded faintly and began to turn away, but Billie stepped closer and laid the back of her hand beside Eva’s jaw.
“What do you know?” Billie’s coarse voice rose. “Look here, everybody, I’m darker than the darky. So why the hell is Arthur paying good greenbacks for a colored novel from a cow who’s no more colored than I am?”
The room quieted. What was wrong with the woman? Did she think she was amusing?
Duveen squirmed. “Cut it out, Billie. Eva is what they call a high yaller, a light mulatto. It’s top drawer, the very best kind of colored.”
“You don’t say. I find it hard to believe this buttercup can dish out hash black enough for your inky tastes, Pepino.” Her squint sharpened. She brought her index finger to her mouth and sucked on it noisily. “Maybe under all this powder and shit—” She dragged her fingertip down the length of Eva’s left cheek, leaving a slick trail of whiskeyed saliva.
Eva flinched but did not recoil. Julia’s breath congealed in her throat.
“Christ, Billie,” Duveen stammered. To Eva he said, grimacing, “She’s soused. No offense meant, I’m sure.”
She meant nothing but! Julia fumbled for her handkerchief, but before she could wipe the smear from Eva’s cheek, Billie reared back. Bellowing a profanity, she knocked away Duveen’s hand.
“And that’s for the hot little colored ass Pablo wants us to dream about!” she shouted, dashing the remains of her whiskey against the back and side of Eva’s frock.
The moment swelled like an airless bubble in Julia’s ears, squeezing all noise from the room. Goldsmith’s upper lip curled and his nostrils flared. Duveen glowed with vast pink chagrin. Billie snorted when he whispered something, still clutching at her swerving sleeve.
“Fuck manners, you obsequious piglet,” she roared, “and get me a drink. I need a fucking drink.”
CHAPTER 5
Two bar towels draped over her forearm, Julia followed Eva into the ladies’ toilet while Austen held open the door and groped for the light switch. He had acted quickly, grabbing the towels and motioning with his head as he led them through the gauntlet of wide-eyed stares, out of the room and down the hallway.
The lavatory was a large space, lit by a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Against one wall was an old toilet, surrounded by a short wooden stall. Idle hands had picked away large patches of its chipping white paint. A basket rested on the floor beside the toilet, filled with magazines whose torn covers suggested they’d been old before they’d been put there, and that had been some time ago. On the opposite wall hung a large basin, its porcelain stained by years of drips, beneath a mirror and a narrow shelf covered with an untidy array of combs, face powders, hand creams, tooth powders, and mugs. Julia couldn’t imagine conducting one’s daily toilette in such communal circumstances. But apparently the ladies of the publishing firm of Boni & Liveright did just that.
Under a soot-caked window sagged a massive sofa. Its once-scarlet upholstery had faded to a patchwork of brown nap and threadbare weave. Long ago discarded by its owner, it now offered comfort for the faint, squeamish, or sleepy.
Eva peered down at her dress. Its beautiful chiffon was plastered against her waist and hip below her left elbow. She lifted her arm and fumbled at the fasteners that lay beneath a placket in the side seam. “Can you help with these?”
Julia bent to open the tiny hooks and eyes. There was nothing she could say to erase Billie Fischer’s ugly words, but she might be able to fix the damage she’d inflicted. She reached to remove Eva’s cloche before lifting the fine fabric over its sharp beads, but Eva veered away.
“Leave it on, please,” she said. She raised her arms, bent over, and wiggled as Julia drew the dress over her head, fingers spread wide to avoid catching the fabric. Eva sat on the old sofa and daubed one of the towels against the wet silk of her chemise while Julia bore the dress to the basin, its airy panels fluttering like scraps of a burst balloon.
They both jumped at a sharp knock on the door. Julia braced it with her foot and peeked out. Eyes averted, Austen handed her two glasses and a nearly full bottle of champagne. “Thought you could use strengthening.”
“Good man.” Julia thanked him. She filled both glasses and left the bottle on the floor beside Eva.
Bent over the basin, she applied a moistened corner of the remaining towel to the whiskey-soaked frock. In the mirror she watched Eva settle at the far end of the sofa. Wearing only her cloche, pearls, stockings, and a pale-gold film of lingerie, she stretched her legs across the cushions like a modern odalisque.
“I’m hardly a lucky charm tonight,” Julia said.
“You might be,” Eva said, after a pause. “She could have thrown worse.”
“Whiskey was reprehensible enough.”
Something about the remark cheered Eva. She smiled. “Reprehensible. Ella, my sister, liked that word. She did love her syllables.” She clicked her tongue. “Ella was like my smarter, sassier half, the brave one. You remind me some of her. Oh, not to look at, but she talked like you. She loved words like reprehensible.” Eva played with the word, repeating it in staccato and operatic variants. “She was the real writer in the family. My book is partly for her.
“Funny, isn’t it?” she said, speaking to Julia’s reflection in the mirror. “I get as much trouble for not being colored as for not being white. White people think I’m sneaky, putting on airs, and Negroes can be even worse. I sometimes think it would be simpler just to pass.”
Pass. The word hung in the quiet room. Such a short syllable for something so complicated. Julia first knew the term from Christophine’s occasional muttered disapproval. She would frown and call it foolish, bound to end badly. Julia always supposed she meant the risks of discovery were too great. Some white people considered it a kind of brazen fraud, like traveling first-class with a third-class ticket. Others viewed passing as a spectator sport, cheering on the rule breakers like schoolchildren urging twins to torment their teachers by answering to each other’s names. Pablo’s mixed soirees were exactly that, a smug poke in the eye of social norms. And he’d certainly enjoy a good snigger later tonight at the Plaza’s expense. Worse, and unfortunately more common, were those whites who feared some kind of contamination, as if Negroes might infect their air or soil their furniture.
For herself, Julia considered passing one of those harmless deceptions everyone, to some degree, practiced. Surely most people hid what they didn’t want known about themselves and fabricated or embellished what suited them. Julia had sworn Christophine to secrecy about her reading spectacles. Christophine called her alterations “mending.” And good Lord, Philip had not one drop of Kydd blood, and still the name opened every door in town to him. Diverting as those deceptions might be, in the end Julia had always considered them inconsequential and so not worthy of looking at too closely.
“I must admit,” Julia said, head down, watching Eva obliquely, “I had no idea you were colored when we met. That is what you mean? That you can pass for a white person?”
Eva’s earrings swung as she dipped her chin to one shoulder. The corners of her mouth rippled at some bitter joke. “Oh yes. My mother was light, and my father’s a white gentleman. Back in Louisville. Theodore Stillwater Byron Love the Third, if you can believe such a dicty name. We called him the professor.”
“You knew him?” Julia asked. “If it’s not impertinent to ask,” she added, realizing too late what she had presumed. Miscegenation, especially in the South, rarely involved families.
“Yes, I knew him. He cared for my mother for years.” She refilled her glass. “I don’t mind your asking. I don’t get much call to talk about him. We had a little house on the back of his property. His wife was an invalid, and Mama was her nurse. I must say he was
good to us, made sure we had nice clothes and things. He even arranged for tutors after he saw what we got in the colored schools. And oh my, the books he gave us. Armloads of books, every year. He even helped me write a little newspaper, the Deaver Road Occasional, I called it.” She rolled her eyes. “I wanted to be an author even then, I suppose. A little Jo March I was.”
Her gaze roamed around the room. She lifted her elbow, patted the towel against her damp hip, and took a long swallow. “When I was fourteen, we had to leave. The professor’s wife died, you see, and he remarried. I saw him a few times after that, but he pretended not to recognize me. He had to, really, to please his new family.”
Julia knew the sting of a father’s rejection. Her own had died when she was six, before she was old enough to garner his interest. But Eva’s story was worse. To be loved for years and then spurned in public? Unthinkable.
“I don’t understand,” Julia said slowly. “You look utterly white. Why don’t you just call yourself white? No one would know.”
Eva’s beautiful mouth curved in a wry smile. “It’s not that simple. I can pass, but Ella was too dark. It happens. Even just a touch of the tarbrush can sometimes show. I know a man who threw his wife out into the street after their third baby turned out colored.” Her long fingers stroked the back of her neck. “She let him think she had a Negro lover rather than tell him the truth. To save her other children, you see. She was crazy, having those babies. It’s kin that counts, not skin.”
One sister dark and another light? Julia was taken aback. Then she remembered that of course skin color could be as unpredictable as that of eyes or hair. One sibling among several might sport Grandfather’s freckles or Grandmother’s olive complexion. As Billie Fischer had so crassly demonstrated, white people came in many shades too. Julia wondered vaguely who decided who was “white.”
“Yet it must be tempting,” she said, “to go anywhere, to just . . .” The sentence trailed off. She meant simply to live unencumbered, in the ways that had always seemed ordinary—for her.
She knew of course about race segregation and the great disparity between what was accessible to white Americans and what to coloreds. “Separate but equal” was anything but. The inequality was no secret; in fact, it was the point. Yet many white people, including Julia and likely everyone else at the party, lived peaceably under the system not because they endorsed it but because they never thought about it. Race separation made Negroes invisible to many whites. They literally never saw colored people except as maids, cooks, groundskeepers, bellhops, porters, and the like, roles that seemed to fuse race with subservience. The system was pervasive, which made it seem inevitable: as natural a feature of American life as celebrating Thanksgiving or motoring on the right-hand side of the road. If asked, many whites might rue its unfairness, but mostly they just forgot. They didn’t see it. Julia saw their blindness but wondered now about her own.
Maids, cooks. The words snagged like a thorn in Julia’s mind, with their guilty afterthought: Christophine. They were both grown women now, bound less by an employment contract than a mutual devotion. But however much they shared an unwavering sense of home, they were neither family nor, in the social sense, friends. Beyond the walls of their apartment, each went her own way.
Julia had always supposed this stemmed from their differing tastes. Christophine would rather chew nails than compose a colophon in ten-point type, just as Julia would slump in clumsy confusion at one of Christophine’s daylong quilting parties. Christophine relished Sundays with her West Indian church friends, while Julia preferred to play at the typecases with drop caps and letterspacing and new combinations of fleurons. These differences seemed straightforward, as natural and benign as those between Methodists and Anglicans or cat fanciers and dog owners. She and Christophine simply chose their separate pleasures. Or so Julia had always thought.
Eva watched as Julia explored her naivete with growing chagrin. “It is tempting to pass, and terribly convenient,” she said, with a note of weary patience. Julia wondered how often she’d tried to explain these things to other oblivious Nordics. “But it’s lonely too. You have to leave your colored friends behind, yet you don’t dare cross over until you’ve thought up a new past and family for yourself. That’s risky and exhausting. I’m not clever or careful enough for it. When I pass, it’s only to fool a waiter or clerk, just to buy a pair of stockings and use a clean toilet. My fay friends”—she hesitated before continuing quietly—“like you, all know what I am.”
Friends. There was the rub. Friends. By every measure of taste and style, she and Eva Pruitt were naturally suited to be good friends. She had no doubt they would enjoy talking for hours over lunch at Sherry’s, visiting the salons, or strolling the shops along Fifth Avenue. Julia would relish Eva’s company at a gala evening at the Met or poetry recital in the back rooms of the Swetnam Galleries.
But none of that was possible unless Eva passed. Negroes were not welcome at any of those places. Most of Julia’s public life (How did she not think of this every day?) transpired in places and events where the only Negroes were usually silent, deferential employees. No matter how knowledgeable, talented, cultured, or wealthy Eva was, race limited her movements.
As a woman Julia knew something of such bitter exclusion, barred as she was from attending Harvard or Yale, from lunching weekdays at the Plaza, and from a myriad of other activities. Worst of all, she could never hope to join the Grolier Club. To its members and other serious bibliophiles she dared to consider her peers, she was a lady fine printer, a female book collector—and as such barred by definition from their inner sanctum. These policies were justified as self-evident: women lacked the capacity to appreciate, much less achieve, the loftiest reaches of culture and commerce, and their presence would disrupt the established order of things. The same reasons—and worse—were used to bar Negroes. But Julia’s frustrations were, yet again, nothing compared to all that was closed to Eva on double the grounds.
If Eva noticed the turmoil beneath the blue georgette frock bent over the basin, she gave no sign of it. She savored a mouthful of champagne. “I can pass, easily,” she reflected, “but I’d rather not. I always feel a bit disloyal to the race.”
“What do you mean?” Julia said, grateful to refocus. “Other Negroes are offended?”
“Mmmm,” Eva murmured into her glass. “It’s more than that. I’m not ashamed of my family or my friends. Just because I can walk away from them doesn’t mean I ever would.” Her tone shifted. “Never. Especially now. It’s Jerome I think about now.”
Julia glanced in the mirror. Eva had leaned a shoulder into the cushion and was studying the bubbles in her glass as she spun it.
“I’m sorry he was rude last night,” she said. “He wasn’t comfortable. People think he’s snooty, but he deserves to be proud. He doesn’t like Pablo’s parties. He doesn’t like it when Negroes are paraded about. That’s what he calls it.”
Julia looked down at her stilled hands, pressed into a meager froth of soap. Had it been a parade? Was her pleasure last evening merely the thrill of a spectacle? Was the party no more than some kind of human zoo, where if you ventured close enough, the bars seemed to disappear but of course remained? The idea shamed her. She stared at the dress in her hands. What on earth was she doing? She’d never laundered a garment in her life. She knew nothing of the chemistry of fabric and water and soap. Perhaps this was futile or, worse, destructive.
“How did you come to New York, Eva?” It was the first benign thing she could think of. She might not know how to clean Eva’s frock, but she could try to get it dry again. She refolded the towel to a dry patch.
Eva’s swirling slowed. A clamor of horns and shouting drivers over on Broadway drifted into the room while she drew in her cheeks, pensive, silent. The interval grew so long that Julia was startled at her abrupt words: “Mother and Ella died after the war, from the influenza. This seemed as good a place to go as any.”
She stifled a cough
with a long swallow. “I’d done well in school. I thought I could work in a library or an office, someplace clean, respectable. Naturally I knew no colored girl, no matter how light she is, can work with white girls unless she’s passing. But colored bosses wouldn’t hire me either—the darker girls would call me hincty, think I’d get special favors, that sort of thing. Finally someone told me about a job for light girls like me—in one of the new nightclubs. I was desperate. I couldn’t afford to be proud, so I went to see about it.”
She coughed again. “And that’s how I started. I couldn’t hoof worth a lick, and my singing wasn’t much better. I could carry a tune well enough back at Ninth Street Baptist, but believe me, I was nothing special. You know what it was, Julia? I matched. All the girls had to be tall and light. Big smile, good skin and teeth, no habit. If you could shake your tail like you meant it and more or less keep your dogs in step—twenty-six dollars a week, plus a place to live, if you needed it.” She sighed. “Thought I’d gone to heaven.”
A minute or more passed, filled with only the pulsing din of traffic and the light swish as Julia blotted and rubbed Eva’s dress between two layers of toweling. Her mind pulsed as well, recalling her own recent struggle to imagine how she might earn her way in the world. She too was only generally educated, with few marketable skills. It had been dispiriting, yes, but how far more dire Eva’s situation had been. Though bred to similar sensibilities, she’d been barred even from Julia’s humble options, and ironically on both sides of the race barrier.
“The boss put me in front,” Eva abruptly resumed, “and customers liked me. They didn’t care I’m no Florence Mills, as long as there’s something nice to look at, you know. Then, oh, a few years ago, I had a little trouble, and they moved me up to Carlotta’s.” Another cough. “My, now that was prosperity. By then I knew exactly what to do, and I might as well get paid all I could for it. I don’t even think about the nonsense anymore. It’s like I’m not even there. It’s not really me onstage, just what I do for my job. Don’t believe it for one minute.”