Plum Bun

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  A sort of shocked silence fell upon the room. It was an impossible situation. How, thought Angela desperately, knowing the two sides, could she ever explain to these smug, complacent people Miss Powell’s ambition, her chilly pride, the remoteness with which she had treated her fellow-students, her only too obvious endeavour to share their training and not their friendship? Hastily, almost crudely, she tried to get something of this over, ashamed for herself, ashamed for Miss Powell whose anguished gaze begged for her silence.

  At last the coloured girl spoke. “It’s wonderful of you to take my part in this way, Miss Mory. I had no idea you understood so perfectly. But don’t you see there’s no use in trying to explain it? It’s a thing which one either does see or doesn’t see.” She left her soft, full, dark gaze rest for a second on her auditors. “I’m afraid it is not in the power of these persons to grasp what you mean.”

  The stocky young man grew a little redder. “I think we do understand, Miss Powell. All that Miss Mory says simply confirms my first idea. For otherwise, understanding and sympathizing with you as she does, why has she, for instance, never made any very noticeable attempt to become your friend? Why shouldn’t she have asked you to be her side-partner on this trip which I understand you’re taking together? There would have been an unanswerable refutation for the committee’s arguments. But no, she does nothing even though it means the thwarting for you of a life-time’s ambition. Mind, I’m not blaming you, Miss Mory. You are acting in accordance with a natural law. I’m just trying to show Miss Powell here how inevitable the workings of such a law are.”

  It was foolish reasoning and fallacious, yet containing enough truth to make it sting. Some icy crust which had formed over Angela’s heart shifted, wavered, broke and melted. Suddenly it seemed as though nothing in the world were so important as to allay the poignancy of Miss Powell’s situation; for this, she determined quixotically, no price would be too dear. She said icily in tones which she had never heard herself use before: “It’s true I’ve never taken any stand hitherto for Miss Powell for I never thought she needed it. But now that the question has come up I want to say that I’d be perfectly willing to share my stateroom with her and to give her as much of my company as she could stand. However, that’s all out of the question now because Miss Powell isn’t going to France on the American Committee Fund and I’m not going either.” She stopped a second and added quietly: “And for the same reason.”

  Someone said in bewilderment: “What do you mean when you say you’re not going? And for the same reason?”

  “I mean that if Miss Powell isn’t wanted, I’m not wanted either. You imply that she’s not wanted because she’s coloured. Well, I’m coloured too.”

  One of the men said under his breath, “God, what a scoop!” and reached for his hat. But Banky, his face set and white, held him back.

  “I don’t believe you know what you’re saying, Miss Mory. But anyway, whether it’s true or untrue, for God’s sake take it back!”

  His tone of horror added the last touch. Angela laughed in his face. “Take it back!” She could hardly contain herself. “Do you really think that being coloured is as awful as all that? Can’t you see that to my way of thinking it’s a great deal better to be coloured and to miss—oh—scholarships and honours and preferments, than to be the contemptible things which you’ve all shown yourselves to be this morning? Coming here baiting this poor girl and her mother, thrusting your self-assurance down their throats, branding yourselves literally dogs in the manger?” She turned to the coloured girl’s mother. “Mrs. Powell, you surely don’t want these people here any longer. Have I your permission to show them out?” Crossing the room superbly she opened the door. “This way, please, and don’t come back any more. You can rest assured we’ll find a way to keep you out.”

  Silently the little line filed out. Only Miss Tilden, laying her hand on Angela’s arm paused to say avidly: “You’ll let me come to see you, surely? I can give you some fine publicity, only I must have more data. How about an exclusive interview?”

  Angela said stonily: “Mrs. Powell will show you the front door.” Then she and her former class-mate stood regarding each other. The dark girl crossed the room and caught her hands and kissed them. “Oh,” she said, “it was magnificent—I never guessed it,—but you shouldn’t have done it. It’s all so unjust, so—silly—and so tiresome. You, of course, only get it when you bring it upon yourself. But I’m black and I’ve had it all my life. You don’t know the prizes within my grasp that have been snatched away from me again because of colour.” She turned as her mother entered the room. “Mother, wasn’t she magnificent?”

  “She was a fool,” Mrs. Powell replied shortly.

  Her words brought the exalted Angela back to earth. “Yes,” she said, smiling whimsically, “I am just that, a fool. I don’t know what possessed me. I’m poor, I was in distress; I wanted a new deal. Now I don’t know which way to turn for it. That story will be all over New York by to-morrow morning.” She burst out laughing. “Think of my choosing four reporters before whom to make my great confession!” Her hand sought Miss Powell’s. “Good-bye, both of you. Don’t worry about me. I never dreamed that anything like this could happen, but the mere fact that it has shows that the truth was likely to come out any day. So don’t blame yourselves for it. Goodbye.”

  Banky was waiting for her in the vestibule downstairs. “I’m so sorry about the whole damned business, Miss Mory,” he said decently. “It’s a damned shame. If there’s anything I can do——”

  Rather shortly she said there was nothing. “And you don’t need to worry. As I told you upstairs, being coloured isn’t as awful as all that. I’ll get along.” Ignoring his hand she passed by him into the street. It was Saturday afternoon so there was a chance of her finding Jinny at home.

  “And if she isn’t there I can wait,” she told herself; and thanked God in her heart for the stability implied in sisterhood.

  Jinny was home, mulling happily over the small affairs which kept her a little girl. Her sister, looking at the serene loveliness of her face, said irrelevantly: “You make me feel like an old woman.”

  “Well,” replied Jinny, “you certainly have the art of concealing time’s ravages, for you not only look young but you have the manner of someone who’s just found a million dollars. Come in and tell me about it.”

  “Found a million dollars! H’m, lost it I should say!” But a sudden wave of relief and contentment broke over her. “Oh, Jinny, tell me, have I been an utter fool! I’ve thrown away every chance I’ve ever had in the world,—just for a whim.” Suddenly close in the full tide of sisterliness, they sat facing each other on the comfortable couch while Angela told her story. “I hadn’t the faintest idea in the world of telling it. I was thinking only the other day how lucky I was compared to Miss Powell, and the first thing I knew there it all came tripping off my tongue. But I had to do it. If you could just have seen those pigs of reporters and Miss Powell’s face under their relentless probing. And old Mrs. Powell, helpless and grunting and sweating and thinking me a fool; she told me so, you know. . . . Why, Jinny, darling, you’re not ever crying! Darling, there’s nothing to cry about; what’s the matter, Honey!”

  “It’s because you are a fool that I am crying,” said Jinny sobbing and sniffling, her fingers in her eyes. “You’re a fool and the darlingest girl that ever lived, and my own precious, lovely, wonderful sister back again. Oh, Angela, I’m so happy. Tell them to send you your passage money back; say you don’t want anything from them that they don’t want to give; let them go, let them all go except the ones who like you for yourself. And dearest, if you don’t mind having to skimp a bit for a year or two and not spreading yourself as you planned, we’ll get you off to Europe after all. You know I’ve got all my money from the house. I’ve never touched it. You can have as much of that as you want and pay me back later or not at all.”

  Laughing and crying, Angela told her that she couldn’t think of
it. “Keep your money for your marriage, Jinny. It’ll be some time before—Anthony will make any real money, I imagine. But I will take your advice and go to Europe after all. All this stuff will be in the paper to-morrow, I suppose, so I’ll write the American Committee people to-night. As for the prize money, if they want that back they can have it. But I don’t think they will; nothing was said about Miss Powell’s. That’s a thousand dollars. I’ll take that and go to Paris and live as long as I can. If I can’t have the thousand I’ll use the few hundreds that I have left and go anyway. And when I come back I’ll go back to my old job or—go into the schools. But all that’s a long way off and we don’t know what might turn up.”

  There were one or two matters for immediate consideration. The encounter with the reporters had left Angela a little more shaken than was at first apparent. “I don’t want to run into them again,” she said ruefully. Her lease on the little apartment in Jayne Street had still a month to run. She would go down this very evening, get together her things, and return to Jinny, with whom she would live quietly until it was time for her to sail. Her mail she could leave with the janitor to be called for. Fortunately the furniture was not hers; there were only a few pictures to be removed. After all, she had very few friends to consider,—just the Sandburgs, Martha Burden, Mrs. Denver, Ralph Ashley and Rachel Salting.

  “And I don’t know what to do about them,” she said, pondering. “After all, you can’t write to people and say: ‘Dear friend:—You’ve always thought I was white. But I’m not really. I’m coloured and I’m going back to my own folks to live.’ Now can you? Oh, Jinny, Jinny, isn’t it a great old world?”

  In the end, after the story appeared, as it assuredly did, in the next morning’s paper, she cut out and sent to each of her former friends copies of Miss Tilden’s story whose headlines read: “Socially Ambitious Negress Confesses to Long Hoax.”

  With the exception of Banky’s all the accounts took the unkindest attitude possible. The young Hungarian played up the element of self-sacrifice and the theory that blood after all was thicker than water. Angela guessed rightly that if he could have he would have preferred omitting it, and that he had only written it up to offset as far as possible the other accounts. Of the three other meanly insinuating stories Miss Tilden’s was the silliest and most dangerous. She spoke of mixed blood as the curse of the country, a curse whose “insidiously concealed influence constantly threatens the wells of national race purity. Such incidents as these make one halt before he condemns the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan and its unceasing fight for 100 per cent. Americanism.”

  The immediate effect of this publicity was one which neither of the sisters had foreseen. When Angela reported for work on the following Monday morning she found a note on her desk asking her immediate appearance in the office. The president returning her good-morning with scant courtesy, showed her a clipping and asked if she were the Miss Mory of the story. Upon her assurance that she was none other, he handed her a month’s salary in lieu of notice and asked her to consider her connection with the firm at an end.

  “We have no place for deceit in an institution such as this,” he said augustly.

  The incident shook both girls to a degree. Virginia, particularly was rendered breathless by its cruel immediacy. Never before had she come so close to the special variation of prejudice manifested to people in Angela’s position. That the president of the concern should attribute the girl’s reticence on this subject to deceit seemed to her the last ounce of injustice. Angela herself was far less perturbed.

  “I’ve seen too much of this sort of thing to feel it as you do, Virginia. Of course, as you see, there are all kinds of absurdities involved. In your case, showing colour as you do, you’d have been refused the job at the very outset. Perhaps they would have said that they had found coloured people incompetent or that other girls had a strong natural aversion toward working beside one of us. Now here I land the position, hold it long enough to prove ability and the girls work beside me and remain untainted. So evidently there’s no blind inherent disgust to be overcome. Looking just the same as I’ve ever looked I let the fact of my Negro ancestry be known. Mind, I haven’t changed the least bit, but immediately there’s all this holding up of hands and the cry of deceit is raised. Some logic, that! It really would be awfully funny, you see, Jinny, if it couldn’t be fraught with such disastrous consequences for people like, say, Miss Powell.”

  “Don’t mention her,” said Jinny vehemently. “If it hadn’t been for her you wouldn’t have been in all this trouble.”

  Angela smiled. “If it hadn’t been for her, you and I probably never would have really found each other again. But you mustn’t blame her. Sooner or later I’d have been admitting,—‘confessing’, as the papers say,—my black blood. Not that I myself think it of such tremendous importance; in spite of my efforts to break away I really don’t, Virginia. But because this country of ours makes it so important, against my own conviction I was beginning to feel as though I were laden down with a great secret. Yet when I begin to delve into it, the matter of blood seems nothing compared with individuality, character, living. The truth of the matter is, the whole business was just making me fagged to death.”

  She sat lost intently in thought. “All of the complications of these last few years,—and you can’t guess what complications there have been, darling child,—have been based on this business of ‘passing’. I understand why Miss Powell gave up the uneven fight about her passage. Of course, in a way it would have been a fine thing if she could have held on, but she was perfectly justified in letting go so she could avoid still greater bitterness and disappointment and so she could have something left in her to devote to her art. You can’t fight and create at the same time. And I understand, too, why your Anthony bestirs himself every little while and makes his confession; simply so he won’t have to be bothered with the trappings of pretence and watchfulness. I suppose he told you about that night down at Martha Burden’s?”

  “Yes,” said Jinny, sighing, “he has terrible ideals. There’s something awfully lofty about Anthony. I wish he were more like Matthew, comfortable and homey. Matt’s got some ideals, too, but he doesn’t work them overtime. Anthony’s a darling, two darlings, but he’s awfully, awfully what-do-you-call-it, ascetic. I shouldn’t be at all surprised but what he had a secret canker eating at his heart.”

  Angela said rather sternly, “Look here, Jinny, I don’t believe you love him after all, do you?”

  “Well now, when I get right down to it sometimes I think I do. Sometimes I think I don’t. Of course the truth of the matter is, I’d hardly have thought about Anthony or marriage either just now, if I hadn’t been so darn lonely. You know I’m not like you, Angela. When we were children I was the one who was going to have a career, and you were always going to have a good time. Actually it’s the other way round; you’re the one who’s bound to have a career. You just gravitate to adventure. There’s something so forceful and so strong about you that you can’t keep out of the battle. But, Angela, I want a home,—with you if you could just stand still long enough, or failing that, a home with husband and children and all that goes with it. Of course I don’t mind admitting that at any time I’d have given up even you for Matthew. But next to being his wife I’d rather live with you, and next to that I’d like to marry Anthony. I don’t like to be alone; for though I can fend for myself I don’t want to.”

  Angela felt herself paling with the necessity of hiding her emotion. “So poor Anthony’s only third in your life?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid he is . . . Darling, what do you say to scallops for dinner? I feel like cooking to-day. Guess I’ll hie me to market.”

  She left the room, and her sister turned to the large photograph of Cross which Virginia kept on the mantel. She put her fingers on the slight youthful hollows of his pictured cheeks, touched his pictured brow. “Oh Anthony, Anthony, is Life cheating you again? You’ll always be first in my life, dearest.”
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  Perhaps Virginia’s diagnosis of her character was correct. At any rate she welcomed the present combination of difficulties through which she was now passing. Otherwise this last confession of Jinny’s would have plunged her into fresh unhappiness. But she had many adjustments to make and to face. First of all there was her new status in the tiny circle in which she had moved. When at the end of two weeks she went down to her old apartment in Jayne Street to ask for her mail, she was, in spite of herself amazed and hurt to discover a chilled bewilderment, an aloofness, in the manner of Mrs. Denver, with whom she had a brief encounter. On the other hand there were a note and a calling card from Martha Burden, and some half dozen letters from Elizabeth and Walter Sandburg.

  Martha’s note ran: “Undoubtedly you and Mr. Cross are very fine people. But I don’t believe I could stand another such shock very soon. Of course it was magnificent of you to act as you did. But oh, my dear, how quixotic. And after all à quoi bon? Will you come to see me as soon you get this, or send me word how I may see you? And Angèle, if you let all this nonsense interfere with your going to Europe I’ll never forgive you. Ladislas and I have several thousand dollars stored away just begging to be put out at interest.”

  Elizabeth Sandburg said nothing about the matter, but Angela was able to read her knowledge between the lines. The kind-hearted couple could not sufficiently urge upon her their unchanging regard and friendship. “Why on earth don’t you come and see us?” Elizabeth queried in her immense, wandering chirography, five words to a page. “You can’t imagine how we miss you. Walter’s actually getting off his feed. Do take a moment from whatever masterpiece you’re composing and give us a week-end.”