The Living is Easy

by Dorothy West

  The matter was settled at once and Cleo handed over the money. Mr. Van Ryper found a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil in his pockets, and paused in the writing of the receipt to make an inquiry. Did Mrs. Judson want it in ink? Cleo answered hastily and heartily that pencil was fine.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHEN THE DOOR CLOSED BEHIND HER, Cleo drew a long contented breath. Then she walked briskly to the trolley stop, with Judy bobbing alongside again.

  “Are we going home now?” asked Judy, who had been hurried through a scant breakfast and was hopeful of an early lunch.

  “We’re going to your father’s store,” said Cleo abstractedly. “Now don’t ask any more questions. Try saying your table of twos. Bet you can’t finish before the trolley comes.”

  Judy opened her mouth with alacrity, because it was rare that her mother took time to admire her accomplishments. But Cleo said briskly, “Try saying them silently. I’m thinking.”

  Her mind was revolving around her sisters, plotting the most direct route between the two points of wish and fulfillment. All of her sisters were as blind as bats when it came to their husbands. They loved them. What could they find in them to love? Not a man among them was a decent provider. Serena and Charity worked in service whenever times were harder than usual. Lily would have gone to work, too, if she could have taken her child on her job as her sisters did in the South.

  What kind of way was that for her sisters to live, from hand to mouth, from payday to payday, from what she could scrape up to send them? Yet they still believed they belonged to their husbands, for richer or poorer, in sickness and health. If they demanded no more of life than a man in the house, it was time someone else demanded more for their children.

  Serena and Charity were still down home. But Lily had left the South when Pa in his lonesomeness married Miss Hattie. Lily was scared of mild Miss Hattie, who had never raised her voice in her life. But Lily was scared of everything, including her shadow. When she was little, she had to be put to bed before the lamps were lighted. If she saw her shadow, she screamed like a banshee, and ran like something was after her.

  The old folks said Mama had birthmarked Lily the time old Spot went mad in the yard and came near chewing a hunk out of three-year-old Cleo, who had been teasing the poor old dog to play all the long hot day. Mama had never held a gun in her life. But she ran and grabbed Pa’s hunting piece and aimed true, though she was shaking with fright. She was white as death when she fired. Her color didn’t dreen back for two days, and Lily was born before it did. Lily came into the world so white she wouldn’t have browned in an oven, and she was always the scariest thing on two feet. The old folks said she was marked.

  Cleo’s letters home, after Pa’s second marriage, didn’t include one kind word about Miss Hattie. She couldn’t bear the thought of the woman who had taken Mama’s place, and she tried to turn her sisters against her. She succeeded in turning Lily, who had always believed anything Cleo told her. Lily let herself believe that Miss Hattie didn’t want Mama’s children anywhere near her, reminding her, whenever she looked at them, of Pa’s greater love for another woman. She grew so nervous around Miss Hattie that Pa decided to send her up North to her married sister.

  She got as far as New York. But she might as well be at the North Pole. For Cleo had never been able to visit her. She had talked too freely to Mr. Judson about her fears for her timid sister in such a wicked city. He had acquired the same fears for her and refused to let her set foot in Sodom.

  Lily had never been to Boston. When she got off the train in New York, she promised God she would never get on another one as long as she lived. It was weeks before she recovered from the animality of Jim Crow, and the additional horrors of sweating through hot waves of nausea, of swooshing through tunnels of terrible blackness, of riding high above swirling water, of fighting off sleep to watch her belongings, of feeling her eyes and her unrelaxed limbs ache with weariness each morning.

  In Washington, Victor Bates, a Pullman porter, had taken her under his wing. All the way to New York he ran back and forth between his duties and her coach. She was eighteen, and her youth and helplessness made him accept her as his charge. She clung to the comfort and masculine strength his kind brown face and big broad frame personified to her grateful heart.

  When they reached New York, she refused to be put on the Boston train. She said she would die if she rode another mile. In one of her rare seizures of stubbornness, when fear gave her the courage to hold fast, she stood firm as a rock in the middle of the station, with muttering people pushing past her.

  Victor took her to a married friend’s house. He thought if she rested a day, she would feel differently in the morning. But after an evening in her company, with her liquid eyes never leaving his face, he knew he did not want her to go to Boston either.

  Victor Bates was no worse than the average second-rate husband, Cleo conceded. But he was a road man. Lily spent half of her nights alone, with only a sleeping child to look to for protection. Victoria was going on seven. It wasn’t doing her any good to have a jack rabbit for a mother. She and Lily would be better off in Boston, where Cleo could look after them both, than in New York with one little man who spent most of his time bowing and scraping to white folks.

  Yet all of this was rationalization. Though Cleo did not know the word, and would not have admitted that its meaning was applicable, her yearning for her sisters was greater than her concern for them. All of her backward looks were toward the spellbinding South. The rich remembering threw a veil of lovely illusion over her childhood. Her sisters, with their look of Mama, would help her keep that illusion alive. She could no longer live without them. They were the veins and sinews of her heart.

  “Here comes the trolley car,” said Judy, who had finished her table of twos and was patiently reviewing her table of threes because she knew Cleo’s shut-away face and the uselessness of intruding her image on the broad bright canvas that Cleo called “long before you were ever thought of.”

  The trolley halted and they boarded it. There were several vacant seats at this hour of the day. Cleo herded Judy into one that was farthest away from the other passengers, who were, as usual, mildly diverted by the pair. Judy stared slightly open-mouthed while Cleo opened her purse, extracted the rent receipt, and wondered exasperatedly why children seemed to have nothing to do but mind the business of grown-ups. She rummaged around in the bottom of her bag, finally gave up her useless search, and surreptitiously surveyed the passengers. She settled on a lone man and pointed him out to Judy.

  “You see that man? Go ask him nicely to lend your mother a pencil. Tell him I want to write an address before I forget it.”

  Judy rose eagerly, feeling important, and started down the aisle.

  “Judy!” Cleo called softly.

  She turned and gaped at her mother.

  “A pencil with an eraser.”

  Judy came back and hung over Cleo. Cleo held the pencil poised and looked at her coldly. Then her face cleared. “Now,” she said sweetly, “go ask the conductor if this trolley goes to Scollay Square. My, but you’re a big girl!”

  Judy danced away, dizzy with happiness.

  Carefully Cleo erased the figure that Mr. Van Ryper had written in and substituted forty-five. With that bit of deception she had twenty dollars in her possession that Mr. Judson didn’t know she had. If she stayed on her toes, she would have twenty dollars every month until Mr. Judson caught up with her.

  Cleo sighed. Some day she would run out of ways to skin the cat. Then her head went up and her chin looked stubborn. But she’d give Mr. Judson a run for his money until she did.

  Judy came back tripping over her tongue as she imparted her information. Looking at the eager innocent face, Cleo remembered the many times Mr. Judson had said to her, “We should pull in harness for the child’s sake, Cleo. When you work against me, you work against her.” Her sluggish conscience stirred. She said quickly, almost appealingly, “Judy, don’t you ever
get lonesome all by yourself? I had three sisters to play with when I was growing up. Wouldn’t you like two little girls and a little boy to keep you company when we move into that big house?”

  “Oh, I would, I would,” said Judy ecstatically.

  “I thought so,” said Cleo contentedly, and her conscience bogged down again.

  CHAPTER 6

  BART JUDSON stared over the shimmering sea, his eyes screwed up against the sun and his sixth sense straining for some inner awareness of the merchant ship Lucy Evelyn sailing up from Jamaica under the English flag. Incoming craft bent their bows toward the busy harbor, their whistles blasting holes in the morning. Sea gulls dipped and screamed and soared. In their upward flight toward the sun, their breasts had the beauty of alabaster. Sparows twittered in the eaves of the wharves, and pigeons searched the gutters. Greek stevedores, with curls and classic faces, descended like dirty gods into the holds of ships at anchor. Jobbers darted about, shouting directions to shore workers. Over all was the ceaseless rumble of wagon wheels on the cobbled streets of the Boston Market.

  Bart stood alone, responding absently to the hurried genial greetings of the market men, whose places of business, along with his, formed the sprawling city of warehouses, wholesale stores, and retail stalls that made up the old historic market, which was the terminal point for the produce that came by sea and rail to feed the city and her neighbors north to Canada.

  All of Bart’s living had led to this place, and even this hour when he watched for a sea-scarred ship from Jamaica, bringing a cargo of bananas, of which his consignment was more than a thousand bunches. The fancy gold lettering over his store read: Bartholomew Judson, Foreign and Domestic Choice Fruits and Vegetables, Bananas a Specialty. There was no other man in the market who knew better than Bart how to ripen the delicate and perishable banana. From the great hooks in his ripening rooms hung the heavy fruit winter and summer. Always there was the ripening smell. Always it hung about Bart. His weekly bath could not wash away the odor of tropic fruit.

  He had seen his first banana when he was ten, somewhere along the middle seventies, and nine years after Mary, his mother, had snatched him from his crib, and tossed him in the air, and laughed, and cried, and told him he was free.

  He took his first step out of bondage that night, and walked without faltering straight to the shining object his mother held out to him. It was a piece of silver money that she had found the year before. She closed his tiny fist over it, and counseled him to treasure it, for money was the measure of independence.

  His year-old mind had not grasped that, but his mother dinned it into him over the period of his formative years until it was part of everything he thought. Mary knew what she wanted for herself and for him. She had no recollection of her own parents, and her man had been sold away from her. She was determined that she and her son would be the forerunners of a solid family.

  She packed her few belongings in a bandana, put her heavy baby on her hip, and walked off the ruined plantation into Richmond. She knew where she wanted to go and what she wanted to do. She went to the Widow Mears, who had sometimes hired slaves from the Judson plantation and who was known to be a just mistress. Widow Mears kept a rooming house for drummers and farmers in town for a brief stay. Mary had been a field hand all her life, but she talked herself up as the finest cook on the Judson plantation, and Widow Mears was persuaded to advertise meals.

  Mary fixed up the back shed and moved into it. Then she got a cigar box and cut a slit in it. She ripped the stitches in Bart’s pinafore pocket, where she had sewed the silver piece for safety. She placed it in his hand again and urged him to drop it down the hole. He yelled and resisted. She tugged at his tightened fist and pried it open. The coin fell through with a plunking sound that caught Bart’s ear. He picked up the box, shook it carefully, heard the roll and rattle of his savings, swallowed his sobs, and grinned.

  Every penny Mary made went into that box. As soon as her son was five years old and smart and strong enough to do a few chores, Mary got Widow Mears to put him to work shining shoes, filling pitchers, emptying slops. Each morning he followed her to the open market with a basket on his arm for rush things. Watching the dealers polish and praise, and Widow Mears pick and choose and warily watch the scales, Bart learned the elementary lessons of trade.

  As he grew older, there formed in his mind his dream of buying and selling. He began to live close, denying himself the peppermint sticks and candy apples that his sweet tooth hankered for, in order to swell the cigar box. When he was grown enough, he was going into business, and he would need capital.

  When he was eight, he put himself in school, not because he had any interest in formal education, but because he wanted to learn how to figure, and to write with a flourish, so that men would see he had schooling and would know in advance that he wasn’t a poor ignorant darky who would take a dime for a dollar.

  When he was ten, he knew exactly the line his life should follow. He borrowed a word from the Bible — beget. He liked the sound of the saying, money begets money. He and Mary counted their savings and rented an eating house in the center of town. Bart did the buying, and doubled as barker, shouting the specials of the day through the business section and taking orders drawled at doorways and windows. At the noon hour he trotted up and down office stairs in a long, immaculate apron that missed tripping him by a miracle.

  He saw his first banana on a cluttered desk in Lawyer Smith’s seedy office. He set down his tray and bugged his eyes. Lawyer Smith and his visitor, a sea captain, watched him indulgently. The captain’s ship had touched the Bay Islands, off Honduras, and he had come away with two magnificent stems of the strange, exotic fruit as souvenirs for his friends. Half of them had ripened and rotted on the long sail to New Orleans. The rest the captain had separated into hands, and one now lay on the desk of his old friend Smith, a dozen luminous yellow fingers, faintly tinged with green and slowly beginning to speckle.

  “Excuse me, Massa Smith, Cap’n, suh, what all is that?” Bart asked, bowing and scraping, and feeling no shame at abasing himself, since the quest was knowledge of what might be a marketable edible.

  “Bananas, boy,” said the captain expansively. His own acquaintance with the fruit being recent, he had the initiate’s irrepressible desire to pass on information lately come by as if it were old knowledge.

  “You eats it, Cap’n, suh?” Bart asked ingenuously. “I never see such on any stall.”

  “You know where Honduras is, boy?” asked the captain, casting an amused look at Lawyer Smith.

  “Nawsuh, Cap’n, suh.”

  “It’s a heap of miles and a heap of ocean away. Bananas grow there on trees. And the trees grow in the jungles. And nigger natives climb them trees like monkeys.”

  “You reckon,” Lawyer Smith interposed, his palate still relishing the rich fruit, “there’s money in bananas?”

  “Hear tell of a Cap’n Baker, Boston way,” said the captain sententiously, “is starting to bring ’em in regular from Jamaica. Began about six or seven years ago. He was master of a schooner then, eighty-five tons or so. Used to fish winters, carry freight summers. Started making port at Jamaica and bringing bananas back to Boston.

  “Wasn’t much steady demand for ’em. Trip took sixteen, seventeen days. Most of his cargo rotted on the way, and not many folks got to sample ’em. But this here Baker sees a future in bananas. Built himself a bigger ship more cargo space, more speed.

  “Latest thing is he’s got some kind of setup in Jamaica and is loading other vessels along with his own to bring bananas back to Boston. Commission house sells ’em through a man name of Preston. Him and Baker are talking about forming some kind of consolidation to make bananas a year-round trade, ’stead of splitting it up with fish in winter.”

  “They’d better stick to fishing,” said Lawyer Smith judiciously. “Everybody eats fish, and I don’t know another soul in this town but me a minute ago who ever put his teeth in a banana.”

/>   Bart let his eyes roll around in his head. His tongue darted out and made a persuasive circle of his lips. “Please, Massa Smith, and Cap’n, suh, I sure would like to be the onliest black boy in this town to taste one.”

  “Well, here you are,” said Lawyer Smith largely, stripping a finger from the cupped hand and tossing it across his desk.

  Bart caught it deftly. “Thank you kindly, Massa.”

  “Now be off with you,” said Lawyer Smith, removing the snowy napkin and beginning to uncover the savory dishes.

  “Yes, suh!” said Bart, and scooted out, his humility falling away from him as he clattered down the stairs.

  He saved his banana all day. When the last late diner had been fed, he walked two miles to the one-room cabin of Mr. Alonzo White, a black man of good education, who had been schooled with his delicate young master to satisfy the white lad’s whim. The lesson was geography at Bart’s request that he might trace the course from Boston to Jamaica and from Richmond to Boston. The lesson concluded, Bart paid the twenty-five cents that was Mr. White’s fee for an hour’s education, and walked slowly home, his mind afire with dreams.

  He looked up at the stars. He believed that he had been born under one of the lucky ones, and that everything he touched would turn to money. In the darkness he walked with his head held back and feet slapping proudly on the dirt road. Some day he was going North to Boston. It was a long way from the South. White folks there weren’t apt to know too much about how black folks were used to being treated. Folks up North fought to make the South free. Stood to reason then that they wouldn’t want to treat any man anywhere as if he were a humble dog. In the North they respected money, whether it was white or black. You could look a man level in the eye and keep your hat on your head if you had as much cash on the line as he did.