Plum Bun

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  His daughter hastened to reassure him. “No, she’ll be down in a few minutes now.”

  “And meanwhile you can wait outside,” said the attendant icily. She did not believe that black people were exactly human; there was no place for them in the scheme of life so far as she could see.

  Junius withdrew, and in a half hour’s time the young interne and the nurse came out supporting his wan wife. He sprang to the pavement: “Lean on me, Mrs. Murray.”

  But sobbing, she threw her arms about his neck. “Oh Junius, Junius!”

  He lifted her then, drew back for Angela and mounting himself, drove away. The interne stepped back into the hospital raging about these damn white women and their nigger servants. Such women ought to be placed in a psycho-pathic ward and the niggers burned.

  *

  The girls got Mrs. Murray into the Morris chair and ran upstairs for pillows and wraps. When they returned Junius was in the chair and Mrs. Murray in his arms. “Oh, June, dear June, such a service of love.”

  “Do you suppose she’s going to die?” whispered Jinny, stricken. What, she wondered, would become of her father.

  But in a few days Mattie was fully recovered and more happy than ever in the reflorescence of love and tenderness which had sprung up between herself and Junius. Only Junius was not so well. He had had a slight touch of grippe during the winter and the half hour’s loitering in the treacherous March weather, before the hospital, had not served to improve it. He was hoarse and feverish, though this he did not immediately admit. But a tearing pain in his chest compelled him one morning to suggest the doctor. In a panic Mattie sent for him. Junius really ill! She had never seen him in anything but the pink of condition. The doctor reluctantly admitted pneumonia—“a severe case but I think we can pull him through.”

  He suffered terribly—Mattie suffered with him, never leaving his bedside. On the fifth day he was delirious. His wife thought, “Surely God isn’t going to let him die without speaking to me again.”

  Toward evening he opened his eyes and saw her tender, stricken face. He smiled. “Dear Mattie,” and then, “Jinny, I’d like to hear some music, ‘Vital spark’——”

  So his daughter went down to the little parlour and played and sang “The Dying Christian”.

  Angela thought, “Oh, isn’t this terrible! Oh how can she?” Presently she called softly, “Jinny, Jinny come up.”

  Junius’ hand was groping for Mattie’s. She placed it in his. “Dear Mattie,” he said, “ Heaven opens on my eyes,——”

  The house was still with the awful stillness that follows a funeral. All the bustle and hurry were over; the end, the fulfilment toward which the family had been striving for the last three days was accomplished. The baked funeral meats had been removed; Virginia had seen to that. Angela was up in her room, staring dry-eyed before her; she loved her father, but not even for him could she endure this aching, formless pain of bereavement. She kept saying to herself fiercely: “I must get over this, I can’t stand this. I’ll go away.”

  Mrs. Murray sat in the old Morris chair in the dining-room. She stroked its arms with her plump, worn fingers; she laid her face again and again on its shabby back. One knew that she was remembering a dark, loved cheek. Jinny said, “Come upstairs and let me put you to bed, darling. You’re going to sleep with me, you know. You’re going to comfort your little girl, aren’t you, Mummy?” Then as there was no response, “Darling, you’ll make yourself ill.”

  Her mother sat up suddenly. “Yes, that’s what I want to do. Oh, Jinny, do you think I can make myself ill enough to follow him soon? My daughter, try to forgive me, but I must go to him. I can’t live without him. I don’t deserve a daughter like you, but,—don’t let them hold me back. I want to die, I must die. Say you forgive me,——”

  “Darling,” and it was as though her husband rather than her daughter spoke, “whatever you want is what I want.” By a supreme effort she held back her tears, but it was years before she forgot the picture of her mother sitting back in the old Morris chair, composing herself for death.

  Chapter VI

  AT the Academy matters progressed smoothly without the flawing of a ripple. Angela looked forward to the hours which she spent there and honestly regretted their passage. Her fellow students and the instructors were more than cordial, there was an actual sense of camaraderie among them. She had not mentioned the fact of her Negro strain, indeed she had no occasion to, but she did not believe that this fact if known would cause any change in attitude. Artists were noted for their broad-mindedness. They were the first persons in the world to judge a person for his worth rather than by any hall-mark. It is true that Miss Henderson, a young lady of undeniable colour, was not received with the same cordiality and attention which Angela was receiving, and this, too, despite the fact that the former’s work showed undeniable talent, even originality. Angela thought that something in the young lady’s personality precluded an approach to friendship; she seemed to be wary, almost offensively stand-offish. Certainly she never spoke unless spoken to; she had been known to spend a whole session without even glancing at a fellow student.

  Angela herself had not arrived at any genuine intimacies. Two of the girls had asked her to their homes but she had always refused; such invitations would have to be returned with similar ones and the presence of Jinny would entail explanations. The invitation of Mr. Shields, the instructor, to have tea at his wife’s at home was another matter and of this she gladly availed herself. She could not tell to just what end she was striving. She did not like teaching and longed to give it up. On the other hand she must make her living. Mr. Shields had suggested that she might be able to increase both her earning capacity and her enjoyments through a more practical application of her art. There were directorships of drawing in the public schools, positions in art schools and colleges, or, since Angela frankly acknowledged her unwillingness to instruct, there was such a thing as being buyer for the art section of a department store.

  “And anyway,” said Mrs. Shields, “you never know what may be in store for you if you just have preparation.” She and her husband were both attracted to the pleasant-spoken, talented girl. Angela possessed an undeniable air, and she dressed well, even superlatively. Her parents’ death had meant the possession of half the house and half of three thousand dollars’ worth of insurance. Her salary was adequate, her expenses light. Indeed even her present mode of living gave her little cause for complaint except that her racial affiliations narrowed her confines. But she was restlessly conscious of a desire for broader horizons. She confided something like this to her new friends.

  “Perfectly natural,” they agreed. “There’s no telling where your tastes and talents will lead you,—to Europe perhaps and surely to the formation of new and interesting friendships. You’ll find artistic folk the broadest, most liberal people in the world.”

  “There are possibilities of scholarships, too,” Mr. Shields concluded more practically. The Academy offered a few in competition. But there were others more liberally endowed and practically without restriction.

  Sundays on Opal Street bore still their aspect of something different and special. Jinny sometimes went to church, sometimes packed the car with a group of laughing girls of her age and played at her father’s old game of exploring. Angela preferred to stay in the house. She liked to sleep late, get up for a leisurely bath and a meticulous toilet. Afterwards she would turn over her wardrobe, sorting and discarding; read the week’s forecast of theatres, concerts and exhibits. And finally she would begin sketching, usually ending up with a new view of Hetty Daniels’ head.

  Hetty, who lived with them now in the triple capacity, as she saw it, of housekeeper, companion, and chaperone, loved to pose. It satisfied some unquenchable vanity in her unloved, empty existence. She could not conceive of being sketched because she was, in the artistic jargon, “interesting”, “paintable”, or “difficult”. Models, as she understood it, were chosen for their beauty. Square and u
pright she sat, regaling Angela with tales of the romantic adventures of some remote period which was her youth. She could not be very old, the young girl thought; indeed, from some of her dates she must have been at least twelve years younger than her mother. Yet Mrs. Murray had carried with her to the end some irrefragable quality of girlishness which would keep her memory forever young.

  Miss Daniels’ great fetish was sex morality. “Them young fellers was always ’round me thick ez bees; wasn’t any night they wasn’t more fellows in my kitchen then you an’ Jinny ever has in yore parlour. But I never listened to none of the’ talk, jist held out agin ’em and kept my pearl of great price untarnished. I aimed then and I’m continual to aim to be a verjous woman.”

  Her unslaked yearnings gleamed suddenly out of her eyes, transforming her usually rather expressionless face into something wild and avid. The dark brown immobile mask of her skin made an excellent foil for the vividness of an emotion which was so apparent, so palpable that it seemed like something superimposed upon the background of her countenance.

  “If I could just get that look for Mr. Shields,” Angela said half aloud to herself, “I bet I could get any of their old scholarships. . . . So you had lots more beaux than we have, Hetty? Well you wouldn’t have to go far to outdo us there.”

  The same half dozen young men still visited the Murray household on Sundays. None of them except Matthew Henson came as a suitor; the others looked in partly from habit, partly, Jinny used to say, for the sake of Hetty Daniels’ good ginger bread, but more than for any other reason for the sake of having a comfortable place in which to argue and someone with whom to conduct the argument.

  “They certainly do argue,” Angela grumbled a little, but she didn’t care. Matthew was usually the leader in their illimitable discussions, but she much preferred him at this than at his clumsy and distasteful love-making. Of course she could go out, but there was no place for her to visit and no companions for her to visit with. If she made calls there would be merely a replica of what she was finding in her own household. It was true that in the ultra-modern set Sunday dancing was being taken up. But she and Virginia did not fit in here any too well. Her fancy envisaged a comfortable drawing-room (there were folks who used that term), peopled with distinguished men and women who did things, wrote and painted and acted,—people with a broad, cultural background behind them, or, lacking that, with the originality of thought and speech which comes from failing, deliberately failing, to conform to the pattern. Somewhere, she supposed, there must be coloured people like that. But she didn’t know any of them. She knew there were people right in Philadelphia who had left far, far behind them the economic class to which her father and mother had belonged. But their thoughts, their actions were still cramped and confined; they were sitting in their new, even luxurious quarters, still mental parvenus, still discussing the eternal race question even as these boys here.

  To-night they were hard at it again with a new phase which Angela, who usually sat only half attentive in their midst, did not remember ever having heard touched before. Seymour Porter had started the ball by forcing their attention to one of his poems. It was not a bad poem; as modern verse goes it possessed a touch distinctly above the mediocre.

  “Why don’t you stop that stuff and get down to brass tacks, Porter?” Matthew snarled. “You’ll be of much more service to your race as a good dentist than as a half-baked poet.” Henson happened to know that the amount of study which the young poet did at the University kept him just barely registered in the dental college.

  Porter ran his hand over his beautifully groomed hair. He had worn a stocking cap in his room all the early part of the day to enable him to perform this gesture without disaster. “There you go, Henson,—service to the race and all the rest of it. Doesn’t it ever occur to you that the race is made up of individuals and you can’t conserve the good of the whole unless you establish that of each part? Is it better for me to be a first rate dentist and be a cabined and confined personality or a half-baked poet, as you’d call it, and be myself?”

  Henson reasoned that a coloured American must take into account that he is usually living in a hostile community. “If you’re only a half-baked poet they’ll think that you’re a representative of your race and that we’re all equally no account. But if you’re a fine dentist, they won’t think, it’s true, that we’re all as skilled as you, but they will respect you and concede that probably there’re a few more like you. Inconsistent, but that’s the way they argue.”

  Arthur Sawyer objected to this constant yielding to an invisible censorship. “If you’re coloured you’ve just got to straddle a bit; you’ve got to consider both racial and individual integrity. I’ve got to be sure of a living right now. So in order not to bring the charge of vagrancy against my family I’m going to teach until I’ve saved enough money to study engineering in comfort.”

  “And when you get through?” Matthew asked politely.

  “When I get through, if this city has come to its senses, I’ll get a big job with Baldwin. If not I’ll go to South America and take out naturalization papers.”

  “But you can’t do that,” cried Jinny, “we’d need you more than ever if you had all that training. You know what I think? We’ve all of us got to make up our minds to the sacrifice of something. I mean something more than just the ordinary sacrifices in life, not so much for the sake of the next generation as for the sake of some principle, for the sake of some immaterial quality like pride or intense self-respect or even a saving complacency; a spiritual tonic which the race needs perhaps just as much as the body might need iron or whatever it does need to give the proper kind of resistance. There are some things which an individual might want, but which he’d just have to give up forever for the sake of the more important whole.”

  “It beats me,” said Sawyer indulgently, “how a little thing like you can catch hold of such a big thought. I don’t know about a man’s giving up his heart’s desire forever, though, just because he’s coloured. That seems to me a pretty large order.”

  “Large order or not,” Henson caught him up, “she comes mighty near being right. What do you think, Angela?”

  “Just the same as I’ve always thought. I don’t see any sense in living unless you’re going to be happy.”

  Angela took the sketch of Hetty Daniels to school. “What an interesting type!” said Gertrude Quale, the girl next to her. “Such cosmic and tragic unhappiness in that face. What is she, not an American?”

  “Oh yes she is. She’s an old coloured woman who’s worked in our family for years and she was born right here in Philadelphia.”

  “Oh coloured! Well, of course I suppose you would call her an American though I never think of darkies as Americans. Coloured,—yes that would account for that unhappiness in her face. I suppose they all mind it awfully.”

  It was the afternoon for the life class. The model came in, a short, rather slender young woman with a faintly pretty, shrewish face full of a certain dark, mean character. Angela glanced at her thoughtfully, full of pleasant anticipation. She liked to work for character, preferred it even to beauty. The model caught her eye; looked away and again turned her full gaze upon her with an insistent, slightly incredulous stare. It was Esther Bayliss who had once been in the High School with Angela. She had left not long after Mary Hastings’ return to her boarding school.

  Angela saw no reason why she should speak to her and presently, engrossed in the portrayal of the round, yet pointed little face, forgot the girl’s identity. But Esther kept her eyes fixed on her former school-mate with a sort of intense, angry brooding so absorbing that she forgot her pose and Mr. Shield spoke to her two or three times. On the third occasion he said not unkindly, “You’ll have to hold your pose better than this, Miss Bayliss, or we won’t be able to keep you on.”

  “I don’t want you to keep me on.” She spoke with an amazing vindictiveness. “I haven’t got to the point yet where I’m going to lower myself to po
se for a coloured girl.”

  He looked around the room in amazement; no, Miss Henderson wasn’t there, she never came to this class he remembered. “Well after that we couldn’t keep you anyway. We’re not taking orders from our models. But there’s no coloured girl here.”

  “Oh yes there is, unless she’s changed her name.” She laughed spitefully. “Isn’t that Angela Murray over there next to that Jew girl?” In spite of himself, Shields nodded. “Well, she’s coloured though she wouldn’t let you know. But I know. I went to school with her in North Philadelphia. And I tell you I wouldn’t stay to pose for her not if you were to pay me ten times what I’m getting. Sitting there drawing from me just as though she were as good as a white girl!”

  Astonished and disconcerted, he told his wife about it. “But I can’t think she’s really coloured, Mabel. Why she looks and acts just like a white girl. She dresses in better taste than anybody in the room. But that little wretch of a model insisted that she was coloured.”

  “Well she just can’t be. Do you suppose I don’t know a coloured woman when I see one? I can tell ’em a mile off.”

  It seemed to him a vital and yet such a disgraceful matter. “If she is coloured she should have told me. I’d certainly like to know, but hang it all, I can’t ask her, for suppose she should be white in spite of what that little beast of a model said?” He found her address in the registry and overcome one afternoon with shamed curiosity drove up to Opal Street and slowly past her house. Jinny was coming in from school and Hetty Daniels on her way to market greeted her on the lower step. Then Virginia put the key in the lock and passed inside. “She is coloured,” he told his wife, “for no white girl in her senses would be rooming with coloured people.”

  “I should say not! Coloured, is she? Well, she shan’t come here again, Henry.”

  Angela approached him after class on Saturday. “How is Mrs. Shields? I can’t get out to see her this week but I’ll be sure to run in next.”