“Good evenin’,” he said pleasantly.
“Why, are you the janitor?” stammered Miss Briggs. Flips had already begun to jump up on him with friendly mien.
“Yes’m, I’m the new janitor,” said the Negro in a softly beautiful voice, kids all around him. “Is there something I can help you to do?”
“Well,” said Miss Briggs, “I’d like some bones for my little dog. He’s missed his meat two times now. Can you get him some?”
“Yes’m, sure can,” said the new janitor, “if all the stores ain’t closed.” He was so much taller than Miss Briggs that she had to look up at him.
“I’d appreciate it,” said Miss Briggs, “please.”
As she went back upstairs she heard the new janitor calling in his rich voice, “Lora, you reckon that meat store’s still open?” And a woman’s voice and a lot of children answered him.
It turned out that the store was closed. So Miss Briggs gave the Negro janitor ten cents and told him to have the meat there the next night when she came home.
“Flips, you shan’t starve,” she said to the little white dog, “new janitor or no new janitor.”
“Wruff!” said Flips.
But the next day when she came home there was no meat on the back porch either. Miss Briggs was puzzled, and a little hurt. Had the Negro forgotten?
Scarcely had she left the kitchen, however, when someone knocked on the back door and there stood the colored man with the meat. He was almost as old as Miss Briggs, she was certain of it, looking at him. Not a young man at all, but he was awfully big and brown and kind looking. So sort of sure about life as he handed her the package.
“I thought some other dog might get it if I left it on the porch,” said the colored man. “So I kept it downstairs till you come.”
Miss Briggs was touched. “Well, thank you very much,” she said.
When the man had gone, she remembered that she had not told him how often to get meat for the dog.
The next night he came again with bones, and every night from then on. Miss Briggs did not stop him, or limit him to three nights a week. Just after eight, whenever she got home, up the back porch steps the Negro would come with the dog meat. Sometimes there would be two or three kids with him. Pretty little brown-black rather dirty kids, Miss Briggs thought, who were shy in front of her, but nice.
Once or twice during the spring, the janitor’s wife, instead, brought the dog meat up on Saturday nights. Flips barked rudely at her. Miss Briggs didn’t take to the creature, either. She was fat and yellow, and certainly too old to just keep on having children as she evidently did. The janitor himself was so solid and big and strong! Miss Briggs felt better when he brought her the bones for her dog. She didn’t like his wife.
That June, on warm nights, as soon as she got home, Miss Briggs would open the back door and let the draft blow through. She could hear the janitor better coming up the rear stairs when he brought the bones. And, of course, she never said more than good-evening to him and thank you. Or here’s a dollar for the week. Keep the change.
Flips ate an awful lot of meat that spring. “Your little dog’s a regular meat-hound,” the janitor said one night as he handed her the bones; and Miss Briggs blushed, for no good reason.
“He does eat a lot,” she said. “Goodnight.”
As she spread the bones out on paper for the dog, she felt that her hands were trembling. She left Flips eating and went into the parlor, but found that she could not keep her mind on the book she was reading. She kept looking at the big kind face of the janitor in her mind, perturbed that it was a Negro face, and that it stayed with her so.
The next night, she found herself waiting for the dog meat to arrive with more anxiety than Flips himself. When the colored man handed it to her, she quickly closed the door, before her face got red again.
“Funny old white lady,” thought the janitor as he went back downstairs to his basement full of kids. “Just crazy about that dog,” he added to his wife. “I ought to tell her it ain’t good to feed a dog so much meat.”
“What do you care, long as she wants to?” asked his wife.
The next day in the office Miss Briggs found herself making errors over the books. That night she hurried home to be sure and be there on time when he brought the dog meat up, in case he came early.
“What’s the matter with me,” she said sharply to herself, “rushing this way just to feed Flips? Whatever is the matter with me?” But all the way through the warm dusky streets, she seemed to hear the janitor’s deep voice saying, “Good evenin’,” to her.
Then, when the Negro really knocked on the door with the meat, she was trembling so that she could not go to the kitchen to get it. “Leave it right there by the sink,” she managed to call out. “Thank you, Joe.”
She heard the man going back downstairs sort of humming to himself, a kid or so following him. Miss Briggs felt as if she were going to faint, but Flips kept jumping up on her, barking for his meat.
“Oh, Flips,” she said, “I’m so hungry.” She meant to say, “You’re so hungry.” So she repeated it. “You’re so hungry! Heh, Flipsy, dog?”
And from the way the little dog barked, he must have been hungry. He loved meat.
The next evening, Miss Briggs was standing in the kitchen when the colored man came with the bones.
“Lay them down,” she said, “thank you,” trying not to look at him. But as he went downstairs, she watched through the window his beautifully heavy body finding the rhythm of the steps, his big brown neck moving just a little.
“Get down!” she said sharply to Flips barking for his dinner.
To herself she said earnestly, “I’ve got to move. I can’t be worried being so far from a meat shop, or from where I eat my dinner. I think I’ll move downtown where the shops are open at night. I can’t stand this. Most of my friends live downtown anyway.”
But even as she said it, she wondered what friends she meant. She had a little white dog named Flips, that was all. And she was acquainted with other people who worked at Wilkins and Bryant, but she had nothing to do with them. She was the head bookkeeper. She knew a few women in the Civics Club fairly well. And the Negro waiters at the Rose Bud Shoppe.
And this janitor!
Miss Briggs decided that she could not bear to have this janitor come upstairs with a package of bones for Flips again. She was sure he was happy down there with his portly yellow wife and his house full of children. Let him stay in the basement, then, where he belonged. She never wanted to see him again, never.
The next night, Miss Briggs made herself go to a movie before coming home. And when she got home, she fed Flips dog biscuits. That week she began looking for a new apartment, a small one for two, her and the dog. Fortunately there were plenty to be had, what with people turned out for not being able to pay their rent—which would never happen to her, thank God! She had saved her money. When she found an apartment, she deposited the first month’s rent at once. On her coming Saturday afternoon off, she planned to move.
Friday night, when the janitor came up with the bones, she decided to be just a little pleasant to him. Probably she would never see him again. Perhaps she would give him a dollar for a tip, then. Something to remember her by.
When he came upstairs, she was aware a long time of his feet approaching. Coming up, up, up, bringing bones for her dog. Flips began to bark. Miss Briggs went to the door. She took the package in one hand. With the other she offered the bill.
“Thank you so much for buying bones for my little dog,” she said. “Here, here is a dollar for your trouble. You keep it all.”
“Much obliged, m’am,” said the astonished janitor. He had never seen Miss Briggs so generous before. “Thank you, m’am! He sure do eat a heap o’ bones, your little dog.”
“He almost keeps me broke buying bones,” Miss Briggs said, holding the door.
“True,” said the janitor. “But I reckon you don’t have much other expenses on hand,
do you? No family and all like me?”
“You’re right,” answered Miss Briggs. “But a little dog is so much company, too.”
“Guess they are, m’am,” said the janitor, turning to go. “Well, goodnight, Miss Briggs. I’m much obliged.”
“Goodnight, Joe.”
As his broad shoulders and tall brown body disappeared down the stairs, Miss Briggs slowly turned her back, shut the door, and put the bones on the floor for Flipsy. Then suddenly she began to cry.
The next day she moved away as she had planned to do. The janitor never saw her any more. For a few days, the walkers in the park beside the lake wondered where a rather gaunt middle-aged woman who used to come out at night with a little white dog had gone. But in a very short while the neighborhood had completely forgotten her.
11
——
BERRY
WHEN THE BOY ARRIVED on the four o’clock train, lo and behold, he turned out to be colored! Mrs. Osborn saw him the minute he got out of the station wagon, but certainly there was nothing to be done about it that night—with no trains back to the city before morning—so she set him to washing dishes. Lord knows there were a plenty. The Scandinavian kitchen boy had left right after breakfast, giving no notice, leaving her and the cook to do everything. Her wire to the employment office in Jersey City brought results—but dark ones. The card said his name was Milberry Jones.
Well, where was he to sleep? Heretofore, the kitchen boy and the handy-man gardener-chauffeur shared the same quarters. But Mrs. Osborn had no idea how the handy-man might like Negroes. Help were so touchy, and it was hard keeping good servants in the country. So right after dinner, leaving Milberry with his arms in the dish water, Mrs. Osborn made a bee line across the side lawn for Dr. Renfield’s cottage.
She heard the kids laughing and playing on the big screened-in front porch of the sanatorium. She heard one of the nurses say to a child, “Behave, Billy!” as she went across the yard under the pine and maple trees. Mrs. Osborn hoped Dr. Renfield would be on his porch. She hated to knock at the door and perhaps be faced with his wife. The gossip among the nurses and help at Dr. Renfield’s Summer Home for Crippled Children had it that Mrs. Osborn was in love with Dr. Renfield, that she just worshipped him, that she followed him with her eyes every chance she got—and not only with her eyes.
Of course, there wasn’t a word of truth in it, Mrs. Osborn said to herself, admitting at the same time that that Martha Renfield, his wife, was certainly not good enough for the doctor. Anyway tonight, she was not bound on any frivolous errand toward the Doctor’s cottage. She had to see him about this Negro in their midst. At least, they’d have to keep him there overnight, or until they got somebody else to help in the kitchen. However, he looked like a decent boy.
Dr. Renfield was not at home. His wife came to the door, spoke most coldly, and said that she presumed, as usual, the Doctor would make his rounds of the Home at eight. She hoped Mrs. Osborn could wait until then to see him.
“Good evening!”
Mrs. Osborn went back across the dusk-dark yard. She heard the surf rushing at the beach below, and saw the new young moon rising. She thought maybe the Doctor was walking along the sea in the twilight alone. Ah, Dr. Renfield, Dr. Ren.…
When he made the usual rounds at eight he came, for a moment, by Mrs. Osborn’s little office where the housekeeper held forth over her linens and her accounts. He turned his young but bearded face toward Mrs. Osborn, cast his great dark eyes upon her, and said, “I hear you’ve asked to see me?”
“Yes, indeed, Dr. Renfield,” Mrs. Osborn bubbled and gurgled. “We have a problem on our hands. You know the kitchen man left this morning so I sent a wire to the High Class Help Agency in the city for somebody right away by the four o’clock train—and they sent us a Negro! He seems to be a nice boy, and all that, but I just don’t know how he would fit in our Home. Now what do you think?”
The doctor looked at her with great seriousness. He thought. Then he answered with a question, “Do the other servants mind?”
“Well, I can’t say they do. They got along all right tonight during dinner. But the problem is, where would he sleep?”
“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Renfield, pursing his lips.
“And whether we should plan to keep him all summer, or just till we get someone else?”
“I see,” said Dr. Renfield.
And again he thought. “You say he can do the work?… How about the attic in this building? It’s not in use.… And by the way, how much did we pay the other fellow?”
“Ten dollars a week,” said Mrs. Osborn raising her eyes.
“Well, pay the darkie eight,” said Dr. Renfield, “and keep him.” And for a moment he gazed deep into Mrs. Osborn’s eyes. “Goodnight.” Then turned and left her. Left her. Left her.
So it was that Milberry entered into service at Dr. Renfield’s Summer Home for Crippled Children.
Milberry was a nice black boy, big, good natured and strong—like what Paul Robeson must have been at twenty. Except that he wasn’t educated. He was from Georgia, where they don’t have many schools for Negroes. And he hadn’t been North long. He was glad to have a job, even if it was at a home for Crippled Children way out in the country on a beach five miles from the nearest railroad. Milberry had been hungry for weeks in Newark and Jersey City. He needed work and food.
And even if he wasn’t educated, he had plenty of mother wit and lots of intuition about people and places. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was doing far too much work for the Home’s eight dollars a week, and that everybody was imposing on him in that taken-for-granted way white folks do with Negro help.
Milberry got up at 5:30 in the mornings, made the fire for the cook, set the water to boiling for the head nurse’s coffee, started peeling potatoes, onions, and apples. After breakfast he washed up all the dishes, scoured the pots and pans, scrubbed the floors, and carried in wood for the fireplace in the front room (which really wasn’t his job at all, but the handy-man’s who had put it off on Milberry). The waitresses, too, got in the habit of asking him to polish their silver, and ice their water. And Mrs. Osborn always had something extra that needed to be done (not kitchen-boy work), a cellar to be cleaned out, or the linen in her closet re-shelved, or the dining-room windows washed. Milberry knew they took him for a work horse, a fool—and a nigger. Still he did everything, and didn’t look mad—jobs were too hard to get, and he had been hungry too long in town.
“Besides,” Milberry said to himself, “the ways of white folks, I mean some white folks, is too much for me. I reckon they must be a few good ones, but most of ’em ain’t good—leastwise they don’t treat me good. And Lawd knows, I ain’t never done nothin’ to ’em, nothin’ a-tall.”
But at the Home it wasn’t the work that really troubled him, or the fact that nobody ever said anything about a day off or a little extra pay. No, he’d had many jobs like this one before, where they worked you to death. But what really worried Milberry at this place was that he seemed to sense something wrong—something phoney about the whole house—except the little crippled kids there like himself because they couldn’t help it. Maybe it was the lonesomeness of that part of the Jersey coast with its pines and scrubs and sand. But, more nearly, Milberry thought it was that there doctor with the movie beard and the woman’s eyes at the head of the home. And it was the cranky nurses always complaining about food and the little brats under them. And the constant talk of who was having an affair with Dr. Renfield. And Mrs. Osborn’s grand manner to everybody but the doctor. And all the white help kicking about their pay, and how far it was from town, and how no-good the doctor was, or the head nurse, or the cook, or Mrs. Osborn.
“It’s sho a phoney, this here place,” Milberry said to himself. “Funny how the food ain’t nearly so good ’cept when some ma or pa or some chile is visitin’ here—then when they gone, it drops right back down again. This here hang-out is jest Doc Renfield’s own private gyp game. Po’ lit
tle children.”
The Negro was right. The Summer Home was run for profits from the care of permanently deformed children of middle class parents who couldn’t afford to pay too much, but who still paid well—too well for what their children got in return. Milberry worked in the kitchen and saw the good cans opened for company, and the cheap cans opened for the kids. Somehow he didn’t like such dishonesty. Somehow, he thought he wouldn’t even stay there and work if it wasn’t for the kids.
For the children grew terribly to like Milberry.
One afternoon, during his short period of rest between meals, he had walked down to the beach where those youngsters who could drag themselves about were playing, and others were sitting in their wheel chairs watching. The sky was only a little cloudy, and the sand was grey. But quite all of a sudden it began to rain. The nurses saw Milberry and called him to help them get the young ones quickly back to the house. Some of the children were too heavy for a nurse to lift easily into a wheel chair. Some couldn’t run at all. The handy-man helper wasn’t around. So Milberry picked up child after child, sometimes two at once, and carried them up to the broad screened-in porch of the Home like a big gentle horse. The children loved it, riding on his broad back, or riding in his arms in the soft gentle rain.
“Come and play with us sometimes,” one of them called as Milberry left them all on the safe dry porch with their nurses.
“Sure, come back and play,” another said.
So Milberry, the next day, went down to the beach again in the afternoon and played with the crippled children. At first the nurses, Miss Baxter and Mrs. Hill, didn’t know whether to let him stay or not, but their charges seemed to enjoy it. Then when the time came to go in for rest before dinner, Milberry helped push the wheel chairs, a task which the nurses hated. And he held the hands of those kids with braces and twisted limbs as they hobbled along. He told them stories, and he made up jokes in the sun on the beach. And one rainy afternoon on the porch he sang songs, old southern Negro songs, funny ones that the children loved.
The Ways of White Folks Page 12