by Dorothy West
“I can’t stop, Cleo. I got to wind up at the store. I just took a minute to bring you this money.”
He took an envelope out of his pocket and passed it to her. It felt like more than forty dollars. It felt like a fortune. She opened the flap. There were fives and tens and even twenties. There must be nearly three hundred dollars. The downpour had turned into a deluge.
She said joyously, “Is all this mine?”
He answered soberly, “You’re the boss now.”
The rush of joy drained from her. She put the envelope on the table. She did not want the money. Her mouth was dry. “What you mean?”
“I lost my store. I’m leaving Boston. Stretch that money until I can send some more.”
“But Mr. Bancroft,” she said wildly. “He was your friend. You said so yourself,” she accused him.
“That’s why he came. He wanted to be the one to tell me. The Dexter Packing Company bought the whole block.”
She picked up the envelope and said eagerly, “Take this and rent another place.”
“Wouldn’t be no use. My credit’s gone. You can’t run a business without it.”
She drew the money out of her dress. “Here’s more. Lily’s husband came and gave it to me for being so good to her and Vicky. There was more besides, and I sent Lily up to pay the rent. All this is clear. I want you to have it. It’ll help with your bills. You won’t have to leave Boston.”
His smile was gentle. “That’s a drop in the bucket. You hold on to it. I’m finished here. Last night I saw a star fall from heaven. I know now that was a sign from God. But there are other stars in the sky. I’ll shine among them again.”
She let the money fall from her hands. It scattered over the mounds of meat, and she looked at everything with revulsion.
“Where will you go, what will you do?” she said deeply.
“I’ll start at the bottom and work to the top. That’s how I started in Springfield. That’s how I started in Boston. I can do it again in New York.”
“New York?” It seemed a world away, the rest of her life away. “You’re getting old. You need a wife to look out for you. Let me go with you.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t want the child knocking around. And I wouldn’t let you leave her. Boston’s the best place to bring her up. Just look out for her. That’s all I ask.”
She went to him and put her arms around him. The smell of fruit and earth and sweat was sharp in her nostrils, but she did not turn her head away. She lifted her face to his, scanning his eyes for some response, her own eyes luminous with tenderness.
He took her arms away. His voice was immeasurably sad. “Take care of the child. That’s all I ask. I’ve grown too old to ask anything else.”
He moved away. “It’s getting on four. I don’t want to take the time to pack. Send my few rags when I send an address. I want to get out before Judy comes. I know you, Cleo. You’d use her to keep me. And I couldn’t stand shutting the door on her tears.”
She held back her own tears. “Don’t wait till you get some money to write. Write as soon as you get there. Let me know you’re all right.”
He did not answer. He would never write her a letter unless he had something to put in it. He thought she would tear it up without reading it.
He felt in his pocket for his doorkey. “No need for me to take this with me.” He laid it on the table. For a moment he looked lost. He had lived with her a long time in fair and foul weather. She was his wife. He wanted to die with her beside him. He did not know now if he would.
“Well, I guess I’ll be going. Don’t come to the door. Let me say good-bye inside the house.” He brushed her cheek with his lips. He knew that she did not like to be kissed on the mouth.
He was gone. The front door shut softly on her man-lessness.
She could not just stand there gripping the table. “Who is there now to love me best? Who?” cried her frightened heart.
Blindly she gathered up the money, tucked it between her breasts, but her heart was not comforted.
Listlessly she unwrapped the meat, and her heart had no relish for it.
“But who will love me best? Who?” The lonely cry re-echoed.
Judy and Vicky and Penny were sufficient to each other. Serena and Lily and Charity cherished their fears and sorrows.
“Then who will put me first? Who?” the piteous heart pleaded.
Tim —? He might learn to love her best. He would be lonesome sleeping alone. Judy was big enough to have a room of her own. She could change with Tim. Girls were always their father’s children, but boys always seemed to cling to women.
The heart began to beat strongly. “Make Tim love me best of all the world. Of all the world,” it commanded.
Tim, who tried so hard to be like Bart. Tim, who would try to be the man of the house.
THE END
AFTERWORD
Adelaide M. Cromwell
I first met Dorothy West over thirty-five years ago as we were picking blueberries on Martha’s Vineyard. I had read her recently published novel, The Living Is Easy, in connection with my research on the black upper class in Boston, and I was eager to talk with her. This was the beginning of our friendship—a friendship strengthened by our common love of Martha’s Vineyard (now Dorothy’s permanent home) and our common interest in Boston as it was for blacks from the turn of the century until just after World War I.
It seemed incredible to me at the time that so lively, attractive, and talented a woman could have, in a sense, retreated to the Vineyard and remained relatively unknown to younger writers. I wondered then and I still wonder why this seems to have been the fate of so many black women writers—certainly those who wrote their major work before the 1960s—Ann Petry, Nella Larsen, Pauli Murray, Jessie Fausett, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West.1 Their talent earns them places beside Lorraine Hansberry and such younger writers as Paule Marshall and Toni Morrison.
Over the summers our friendship grew. In the early 1970s, having started a graduate program in Afro-American Studies at Boston University, I invited Dorothy to give a lecture to our students. Although at first she was uncertain, she came, and the effect was electrifying. These college students had never seen anyone who had been part of the Harlem Renaissance, who knew Langston Hughes (Lang, she called him) or Richmond Barthé (Barthé), Countee Cullen (always Countee), or Wallace Thurman (Wallie, naturally), or Zora Neale Hurston, whose apartment she had once borrowed, or Paul and Eslanda Robeson, in whose London home she had been a guest. And Dorothy took heart in sharing these memories in a way she had not been able to do with contemporaries on the Island, or elsewhere. This was an awakening for her, a prologue to her rediscovery.
Martha’s Vineyard was just the right place for Dorothy’s retreat. It was intimate yet aloof—complex yet simple. There she has spent more than twenty years away from New York, even from Boston—living, writing, and remembering. Until the late 1960s, she continued, as she had for twenty years, to write two short stories a month for the New York Daily News, and she worked, as she still does, on her next novel, The Wedding, set on the Island.
In October 1965 Dorothy took a job handling subscriptions and billing for the popular and highly respected Vineyard Gazette. Her fellow employees enjoyed hearing her stories so much that when one of the regular reporters went on leave, Dorothy was invited to take over her column. As “The Highlands Water Boy,” she wrote for some time about the bird life she saw from her own window. Later, overcoming her initial reluctance, she began to write a weekly column on people and events in the large black summer colony in Oak Bluffs. She called it “The Cottagers’ Corner,” after a club organized by a group of black women who were summer residents. In 1975, the Gazette asked Dorothy to cover the year-round activities of everyone who lived in Oak Bluffs. “Oak Bluffs,” the new column, has taken its place beside the three other regular columns on Island news in the Gazette. Dorothy West writes in the Gazette with a keen eye for facts, but her columns also
reflect her skill as a story teller, conveying the drama and interest of the most mundane events and giving them the appeal of fiction.
Dorothy West’s association with the Gazette has kept her busy and made her an Island personnage, but it has not supported her adequately. Since 1969, she has supplemented her income with a job from May to October as a restaurant cashier. Dorothy takes pride in holding a position of fiscal accountability, a pride instilled in her in youth by her father. During the winter, she is able to write, although her work on the Gazette has delayed the completion of The Wedding.
Dorothy West was born in 1912, the daughter of Isaac Christopher West, an early twentieth-century black businessman, and his wife, Rachel West. A thoroughly-bred Bostonian, she grew up at 478 Brookline Avenue and studied at Girls’ Latin School. She began to write as a young girl, and joined The Saturday Evening Quill Club, organized in 1925 by twenty Afro-American men and women who aspired to write. The club members, out of their own funds, published what W.E.B. DuBois described as “the most interesting and best of the booklets issued by young Negro writers.”2 Eugene Gordon, the president of the club, convinced the Boston Post, of whose editorial staff he was a member, to publish several of West’s stories. “An Unimportant Man” appeared in 1928 in the first issue of the club Annual, and was later reprinted in the Columbia University Annual of Student Literature. Another story, “Prologue to Life,” appeared in the second issue of the Saturday Evening Quill’s Annual, published in 1929. By the time it appeared, Dorothy West was in New York to receive the prize for yet another story, “The Typewriter.” Only seventeen, she won a national competition sponsored by Opportunity, the literary organ of the National Urban League.
At that time, Dorothy West left Boston, both literally and psychologically, and found herself hailed as the young darling of the black writers and artists who made up the Harlem Renaissance. These young people who had gravitated to Harlem after World War I seemed to many—including themselves—to be a new breed: young, talented, sophisticated, and free. Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes scholar and distinguished professor of philosophy at Howard University, referred to them in a classic work as the New Negro[es].3
Older writers saw Dorothy as a charming, talented child, and her Bostonian accent sounded like a strange tongue. During this period, Countee Cullen was perhaps her closest male friend. In April 1931, he called her “a fascinating and lovable child . . . in spite of [her] terrible yearning towards grownupship and sophistication.” Two years later, in August 1933, he offered her “his humble and ever deepening love.” The following month, he invited her to come from the Vineyard to New York for dancing or the theater. He confessed in the next letter that they belonged together because “she seemed to understand him so thoroughly—more than most people.”4 There was clearly a bond of deep affection between them. And there were other relationships. Langston Hughes referred to her as “the Kid,” and longed to see her smile once more,5 while Harry T. Burleigh addressed her as “my Prodigal daughter,” though his sentiments seemed to be more than purely paternal.6
Opportunity, restlessness, and curiosity took Dorothy West abroad, first to London for three months in 1929 as an extra in the cast of Porgy, and three years later, in 1932, to Russia as part of a group of writers including Langston Hughes, Henry Lee Moon, and Ted Poston.7 She remembers scarcities and long queues for food, but also the charm and warmth of the White Russians. She would have continued on to China had she not learned of her father’s death.
So Dorothy West returned to Boston, to her mother’s home at 23 Worthington Street. One imagines that her mother planned to keep her only child in Boston, close to her. “Dorothy, you can’t be sick, you are the family strength,” Rachel West often told her. But the pull of New York was too strong. At first, because she needed funds after her father’s death, she worked for two years in the Public Welfare Department (then called Home Relief). But many of the old group had disappeared. Zora had gone to Florida, Wallie to the West Coast. Moreover, she felt that new black writers were not appearing. With the depression, support for the arts, especially among blacks, had disappeared. Harlem was no longer fashionable.
Dorothy West initially decided to start a syndicated column featuring the writers she feared were disappearing from the scene. But a literary journal held a greater appeal, possibly because of her experience in Boston with The Saturday Evening Quill Club. She became the sole editor and apparently only financial backer of Challenge, which was “primarily an organ for the new voices . . . to bring out the prose and poetry of newer Negroes . . . by those who were the new Negroes now challenging them to better our achievements. For we did not altogether live up to our fine promise.”8 She managed to get contributions without payment from James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Frank G. Yerby. She herself wrote under the pseudonym Mary Christopher, which incorporated her father’s middle name.
The “old New Negroes” were generally enthusiastic about the first issue of Challenge. Zora Hurston called her “audacious and rejoiced that she had learned at last the glorious lesson of living dangerously.”9 “Lang,” however, thought the issue was grand but refused to accept the assertion that “all the old timers were dead.” “A brave little girl like you,” he wrote, “ought to stir ’em to gallant aid and assistance.”10
Arna Bontemps, like Langston Hughes, welcomed Dorothy West’s endeavor but spoke more strongly about the vitality of the old New Negroes:
We’re not washed up. Not by a jug full. It’s a pretty pose, this attitude about “old before our time.” I will not have it. . . . If the “younger writers” can take our crowns, here is their chance and here is our challenge.11
Carl Van Vechten, her old friend and patron of most of the writers of the Renaissance, sent a check and ordered several copies of the first issue. He wished her “567 penguin feathers and a blue owl.”12 Dorothy West received criticism, too. Her sharpest detractor was Wallace Thurman, who wrote from the New York hospital where he lay dying after too much Bohemian living, “Despite your belated knowledge of life you [are] as naive as ever. . . . Challenge lacks significance or personality—it is too pink tea and la de da . . . too high schoolish.”13 The idea was timely, he thought, but not in this form.
Nevertheless, Dorothy West published five issues of Challenge during that year. The poor quality of the material she received led her to transform the journal into a quarterly rather than a monthly. Louis Martin, Eslanda Robeson, and Arna Bontemps joined the first group of contributors. In January 1936, Harold Jackman, a public school teacher, became business manager; by June 1936, the price had increased from 15 cents to 25 cents an issue; and by Spring 1937 Jackman had become associate editor while Jimmie Daniels, a popular entertainer with a wide circle of influential white friends, replaced him as business manager. By the Fall 1937 issue the old Challenge had disappeared and a New Challenge had been born. Its structure was more complicated—Dorothy West and her friend Marian Minus were editors and Richard Wright, associate editor. Eugene Holmes, Margaret Walker (her first time in print), Alain Locke, Frank Marshall Davis, Sterling Brown, and Ralph Ellison were listed as contributing editors.
With this distinguished group of editors, the New Challenge voiced a different editoral policy:
We want to see New Challenge as an organ of regional groups composed of writers opposed to fascism, war and general reactionary policies. . . . While our emphasis is upon Negro writers and particular difficulties they must meet, we are not limiting our contributions to Negroes alone. . . . We hope that through our pages we may be able to point social directives and provide a basis for the clear recognition of and solution to the problems which face the contemporary writers.14
A storm was brewing. Dorothy West, like so many black writers and intellectuals of her day, was wooed by the Communists. Many of these blacks were seen at meetings addressed by Earl Browder and other Communists. West, herself, had a small meeting at her apartment involving Party memb
ers. Claude McKay, who missed the meeting but was friendly with several non-Communist liberals, inquired whether “the Daily Worker and that gang were behind her.”15
This was a period of some tension between Communists and blacks. One of the most distinguished black Communists of the day, Richard Wright, had left Chicago for New York because of conflicts over Party policy and discipline. The Party sought vehicles for influencing black people; it may be that it saw New Challenge as an easy means for extending that influence.
But childlike as she may have seemed to her black mentors, Dorothy West had her own outlook and vision. She did not adopt the fellow-traveling posture sometimes found among writers of that day, whether or not they had traveled to the Soviet Union. Her trip may have been interpreted as a sign of her political inclination, thus accounting for the moves of the Left (which she called “the Chicago group”) to control and redirect Challenge. But Dorothy West’s views were securely rooted in the environment of her capitalist family. Isaac West was, after all, a businessman.
She began to resent the pressure exerted by the “Chicago group” to shape New Challenge in response to the Party line. They had not been part of her public, but had, she felt, moved to control the magazine because they saw the potential for influence she and others had established. But as Dorothy West had “borned” the Challenge, she could kill it. And so she did, after the issue which carried the editorial quoted above.
To support herself and continue her literary endeavors, Dorothy West briefly found employment with the Writers Project of the WPA under the direction of Roi Ottley, journalist and author of New World A Coming.16 But funds for the project were cut off. That development, as well as pressures from home (the need to care for her mother and aunt, who were failing) brought her back first to Boston, and then to Martha’s Vineyard. There she wrote The Living Is Easy—vividly reminded of her youth by her new proximity to her aging mother, Rachel—and there she still lives.