Plum Bun

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  Angela giggled, then raised an imaginary lorgnette. “Er,—really I think you have the advantage of me. Well, I was thinking how fortunate you were to get your appointment right off the bat and how you’ll hate it now that you have got it.”

  She herself, appointed two years previously, had had no such luck. Strictly speaking there are no coloured schools as such in Philadelphia. Yet, by an unwritten law, although coloured children may be taught by white teachers, white children must never receive knowledge at the hands of coloured instructors. As the number of coloured Normal School graduates is steadily increasing, the city gets around this difficulty by manning a school in a district thickly populated by Negroes, with a coloured principal and a coloured teaching force. Coloured children living in that district must thereupon attend that school. But no attention is paid to the white children who leave this same district for the next nearest white or “mixed” school.

  Angela had been sixth on the list of coloured graduates. Five had been appointed, but there was no vacancy for her, and for several months she was idle with here and there a day, perhaps a week of substituting. She could not be appointed in any but a coloured school, and she was not supposed to substitute in any but this kind of classroom. Then her father discovered that a young white woman was teaching in a coloured school. He made some searching inquiries and was met with the complacent rejoinder that as soon as a vacancy occurred in a white school, Miss McSweeney would be transferred there and his daughter could have her place.

  Just as she had anticipated, Angela did not want the job after she received it. She had expected to loathe teaching little children and her expectation, it turned out, was perfectly well grounded. Perhaps she might like to teach drawing to grown-ups; she would certainly like to have a try at it. Meanwhile it was nice to be independent, to be holding a lady-like, respectable position so different from her mother’s early days, to be able to have pretty clothes and to help with the house, in brief to be drawing an appreciably adequate and steady salary. For one thing it made it possible for her to take up work at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts at Broad and Cherry.

  Jinny was in excellent spirits at dinner. “Now, Mummy darling, you really shall walk in silk attire and siller hae to spare.” Angela’s appointment had done away with the drudgery of washday. “We’ll get Hettie Daniels to come in Saturdays and clean up. I won’t have to scrub the front steps any more and everything will be feasting and fun.” Pushing aside her plate she rushed over to her father, climbed on his knee and flung her lovely bronze arms around his neck. She still adored him, still thought him the finest man in the world; she still wanted her husband to be just exactly like him; he would not be so tall nor would he be quite as dark. Matthew Henson was of only medium height and was a sort of reddish yellow and he distinctly was not as handsome as her father. Indeed Virginia thought, with a pang of shame at her disloyalty, that it would have been a fine thing if he could exchange his lighter skin for her father’s colour if in so doing it he might have gained her father’s thick, coarsely grained but beautifully curling, open black hair. Matthew had inherited his father’s thick, tight, “bad” hair. Only, thank heaven, it was darker.

  Junius tucked his slender daughter back in the hollow of his arm.

  “Well, baby, you want something off my plate?” As a child Virginia had been a notorious beggar.

  “Darling! I was thinking that now you could buy Mr. Hallowell’s car. He’s got his eye on a Cadillac, Kate says, and he’d be willing to let Henry Ford go for a song.”

  Junius was pleased, but he thought he ought to protest. “Do I look as old as all that? I might be able to buy the actual car, now that my girls are getting so monied, but the upkeep, I understand, is pretty steep.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Mattie. “Go on and get it, June. Think how nice it will be riding out North Broad Street in the evenings.”

  And Angela added kindly: “I think you owe it to yourself to get it, Dad. Jinny and I’ll carry the house till you get it paid for.”

  “Well, there’s no reason of course why I——” he corrected himself, “why we shouldn’t have a car if we want it.” He saw himself spending happy moments digging in the little car’s inmost mysteries. He would buy new parts, change the engine perhaps, paint it and overhaul her generally. And he might just as well indulge himself. The little house was long since paid for; he was well insured, and his two daughters were grown up and taking care of themselves. He slid Jinny off his knee.

  “I believe I’ll run over to the Hallowells now and see what Tom’ll take for that car. Catch him before he goes down town in it.”

  Virginia called after him. “Just think! Maybe this time next week you’ll be going down town in it.”

  She was very happy. Life was turning out just right. She was young, she was twenty, she was about to earn her own living,—“to be about to live”—she said, happily quoting a Latin construction which had always intrigued her. Her mother would never have to work again; her father would have a Henry Ford; she herself would get a new, good music teacher and would also take up the study of methods at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Angela could hear her downstairs talking to Matthew Henson whose ring she had just answered. “Only think, Matt, I’ve been appointed.”

  “Great!” said Matthew. “Is Angela in? Do you think she’d like to go to the movies with me to-night? She was too tired last time. Run up and ask her, there’s a good girl.”

  Angela sighed. She didn’t want to go out with Matthew; he wearied her so. And besides people always looked at her so strangely. She wished he would take it into his head to come and see Jinny.

  Sunday was still a happy day. Already an air of prosperity, of having arrived beyond the striving point, had settled over the family. Mr. Murray’s negotiations with Tom Hallowell had been most successful. The Ford, a little four-seater coupé, compact and sturdy, had changed hands. Its former owner came around on Sunday to give Junius a lesson. The entire household piled in, for both girls were possessed of the modern slenderness. They rode out Jefferson Street and far, far out Ridge Avenue to the Wissahickon and on to Chestnut Hill. From time to time, when the traffic was thin, Junius took the wheel, anticipating Tom’s instructions with the readiness of the born mechanic. They came back laughing and happy and pardonably proud. The dense, tender glow of the late afternoon September sun flooded the little parlour, the dining-room was dusky and the kitchen was redolent of scents of ginger bread and spiced preserves. After supper there were no lessons to get. “It’ll be years before I forget all that stuff I learned in practice school,” said Jinny gaily.

  Later on some boys came in; Matthew Henson inevitably, peering dissatisfied through the autumn gloom for Angela and immediately content when he saw her; Arthur Sawyer, who had just entered the School of Pedagogy and was a little ashamed of it, for he considered teaching work fit only for women. “But I’ve got to make a living somehow, ain’t I? And I won’t go into that post-office!”

  “What’s the matter with the post-office?” Henson asked indignantly. He had just been appointed. In reality he did not fancy the work himself, but he did not want it decried before Angela.

  “Tell me what better or surer job is there for a coloured man in Philadelphia?”

  “Nothing,” said Sawyer promptly, “not a thing in the world except school teaching. But that’s just what I object to. I’m sick of planning my life with regard to being coloured. I’m not a bit ashamed of my race. I don’t mind in the least that once we were slaves. Every race in the world has at some time occupied a servile position. But I do mind having to take it into consideration every time I want to eat outside of my home, every time I enter a theatre, every time I think of a profession.”

  “But you do have to take it into consideration,” said Jinny softly. “At present it’s one of the facts of our living, just as lameness or near-sightedness might be for a white man.”

  The inevitable race discussion was on.

&nb
sp; “Ah, but there you’re all off, Miss Virginia.” A tall, lanky, rather supercilious youth spoke up from the corner. He had been known to them all their lives as Franky Porter, but he had taken lately to publishing poems in the Philadelphia Tribunal which he signed F. Seymour Porter. “Really you’re all off, for you speak as though colour itself were a deformity. Whereas, as Miss Angela being an artist knows, colour may really be a very beautiful thing, mayn’t it?”

  “Oh don’t drag me into your old discussion,” Angela answered crossly. “I’m sick of this whole race business if you ask me. And don’t call me Miss Angela. Call me Angela as you’ve all done all our lives or else call me Miss Murray. No, I don’t think being coloured in America is a beautiful thing. I think it’s nothing short of a curse.”

  “Well,” said Porter slowly, “I think its being or not being a curse rests with you. You’ve got to decide whether or not you’re going to let it interfere with personal development and to that extent it may be harmful or it may be an incentive. I take it that Sawyer here, who even when we were all kids always wanted to be an engineer, will transmute his colour either into a bane or a blessing according to whether he lets it make him hide his natural tendencies under the bushel of school-teaching or become an inspiration toward making him the very best kind of engineer that there ever was so that people will just have to take him for what he is and overlook the fact of colour.”

  “That’s it,” said Jinny. “You know, being coloured often does spur you on.”

  “And that’s what I object to,” Angela answered perversely. “I’m sick of this business of always being below or above a certain norm. Doesn’t anyone think that we have a right to be happy simply, naturally?”

  Gradually they drifted into music. Virginia played a few popular songs and presently the old beautiful airs of all time, “Drink to me only with thine eyes” and “Sweet and Low”. Arthur Sawyer had a soft, melting tenor and Angela a rather good alto; Virginia and the other boys carried the air while Junius boomed his deep, unyielding bass. The lovely melodies and the peace of the happy, tranquil household crept over them, and presently they exchanged farewells and the young men passed wearied and contented out into the dark confines of Opal Street. Angela and Mattie went upstairs, but Viginia and her father stayed below and sang very softly so as not to disturb the sleeping street; a few hymns and finally the majestic strains of “The Dying Christian” floated up. Mrs. Murray had complained of feeling tired. “I think I’ll just lie a moment on your bed, Angela, until your father comes up.” But her daughter noticed that she had not relaxed, instead she was straining forward a little and Angela realized that she was trying to catch every note of her husband’s virile, hearty voice.

  She said, “You heard what we were all talking about before the boys left. You and father don’t ever bother to discuss such matters, do you?”

  Her mother seemed to strain past the sound of her voice. “Not any more; oh, of course we used to talk about such things, but you get so taken up with the problem of living, just life itself you know, that by and by being coloured or not is just one thing more or less that you have to contend with. But of course there have been times when colour was the starting point of our discussions. I remember how when you and Jinny were little things and she was always running to the piano and you were scribbling all over the walls,—many’s the time I’ve slapped your little fingers for that, Angela,—we used to spend half the night talking about you, your father and I. I wanted you to be great artists but Junius said: ‘No, we’ll give them a good, plain education and set them in the way of earning a sure and honest living; then if they’ve got it in them to travel over all the rocks that’ll be in their way as coloured girls, they’ll manage, never you fear.’ And he was right.” The music downstairs ceased and she lay back, relaxed and drowsy. “Your father’s always right.”

  Much of this was news to Angela, and she would have liked to learn more about those early nocturnal discussions. But she only said, smiling, “You’re still crazy about father, aren’t you, darling?”

  Her mother was wide awake in an instant. “Crazy! I’d give my life for him!”

  The Saturday excursions were long since a thing of the past; Henry Ford had changed that. Also the extra work which the girls had taken upon themselves in addition to their teaching,—Angela at the Academy, Virginia at the University,—made Saturday afternoon a too sorely needed period of relaxation to be spent in the old familiar fashion. Still there were times when Angela in search of a new frock or intent on the exploration of a picture gallery asked her mother to accompany her. And at such times the two indulged in their former custom of having tea and a comfortable hour’s chat in the luxurious comfort of some exclusive tearoom or hotel. Mattie, older and not quite so lightly stepping in these days of comparative ease as in those other times when a week’s arduous duties lay behind her, still responded joyously to the call of fashion and grooming, the air of “good living” which pervaded these places. Moreover she herself was able to contribute to this atmosphere. Her daughters insisted on presenting her with the graceful and dainty clothes which she loved, and they were equally insistent on her wearing them. “No use hanging them in a closet,” said Jinny blithely. All her prophecies had come true—her mother had the services of a maid whenever she needed them, she went clad for the most part “in silk attire”, and she had “siller to spare” and to spend.

  She was down town spending it now. The Ladies’ Auxiliary of her church was to give a reception after Lent, and Mattie meant to hold her own with the best of them. “We’re getting to be old ladies,” she said a bit wistfully, “but we’ll make you young ones look at us once or twice just the same.” Angela replied that she was sure of that. “And I know one or two little secrets for the complexion that will make it impossible for you to call yourself old.”

  But those her mother knew already. However she expressed a willingness to accept Angela’s offer. She loved to be fussed over, and of late Angela had shown a tendency to rival even Jinny in this particular. The older girl was beginning to lose some of her restlessness. Life was pretty hum-drum, but it was comfortable and pleasant; her family life was ideal and her time at the art school delightful. The instructor was interested in her progress, and one or two of the girls had shown a desire for real intimacy. These intimations she had not followed up very closely, but she was seeing enough of a larger, freer world to make her chafe less at the restrictions which somehow seemed to bind in her own group. As a result of even this slight satisfaction of her cravings, she was indulging less and less in brooding and introspection, although at no time was she able to adapt herself to living with the complete spontaneity so characteristic of Jinny.

  But she was young, and life would somehow twist and shape itself to her subsconscious yearnings, just as it had done for her mother, she thought, following Mattie in and out of shops, delivering opinions and lending herself to all the exigencies which shopping imposed. It was not an occupation which she particularly enjoyed, but, like her mother, she adored the atmosphere and its accompaniment of well-dressed and luxuriously stationed women. No one could tell, no one would have thought for a moment that she and her mother had come from tiny Opal Street; no one could have dreamed of their racial connections. “And if Jinny were here,” she thought, slowly selecting another cake, “she really would be just as capable of fitting into all this as mother and I; but they wouldn’t let her light.” And again she let herself dwell on the fallaciousness of a social system which stretched appearance so far beyond being.

  From the tea-room they emerged into the damp greyness of the March afternoon. The streets were slushy and slimy; the sky above sodden and dull. Mattie shivered and thought of the Morris chair in the minute but cosy dining-room of her home. She wanted to go to the “Y” on Catherine Street and there were two calls to make far down Fifteenth. But at last all this was accomplished. “Now we’ll get the next car and before you know it you’ll be home.”

  “You lo
ok tired, Mother,” said Angela.

  “I am tired,” she acknowledged, and, suddenly sagging against her daughter, lost consciousness. About them a small crowd formed, and a man passing in an automobile kindly drove the two women to a hospital in Broad Street two blocks away. It was a hospital to which no coloured woman would ever have been admitted except to char, but there was no such question to be raised in the case of this patient. “She’ll be all right presently,” the interne announced, “just a little fainting spell brought on by over-exertion. Was that your car you came in? It would be nice if you could have one to get her home in.”

  “Oh, but I can,” and in a moment Angela had rushed to the telephone forgetting everything except that her father was in his shop to-day and therefore almost within reach and so was the car.

  Not long after he came striding into the hospital, tall and black and rather shabby in his working clothes. He was greeted by the clerk with a rather hostile, “Yes, and what do you want?”

  Angela, hastening across the lobby to him, halted at the intonation.

  Junius was equal to the moment’s demands. “I’m Mrs. Murray’s chauffeur,” he announced, hating the deception, but he would not have his wife bundled out too soon. “Is she very badly off, Miss Angela?”