Infants of the Spring

by Wallace Thurman

  The boy grinned sheepishly. But he did not seem the least bit abashed. Before Raymond could make any comment, Paul had propelled his charge toward Eustace’s studio. Raymond followed. The room was crowded with people. Black people, white people, and all the in-between shades. Ladies in evening gowns. Ladies in smocks. Ladies in tailored suits. Ladies in ordinary dresses of every description, interspersed and surrounded by all types of men in all types of conventional clothes. And weaving his way among them, green dressing gown swishing, glass tray held tightly in both hands, was Eustace, serving drinks to those who had not yet found the kitchen oasis.

  “Folks,” Paul shouted above the din, “this is Bud. He has the most perfect body in New York. I’m gonna let you see it soon.”

  “Bravo.”

  “Go to it.”

  “Now?”

  Paul and his protegé were surrounded by an avid mob.

  Raymond sauntered back into the kitchen. Stephen was still standing in his isolated corner, a full glass progressing toward his lips. His face was flushed. His eyes half closed. Raymond started toward him.

  “Hi, Ray.” Someone jerked the tail of his coat. It was Bull. Beside him was Lucille.

  “Hen’s fruit.” Bull deposited a sack full of eggs on top of the refrigerator.

  “Eve’s delight.” A bag of apples was thrust into Raymond’s hand by some unknown person.

  “An’ my sweet patootie has the bacon,” Bull continued, jerking an oblong package from beneath Lucille’s arm. Raymond put the apples beside Bull’s eggs.

  “Hello, ’Cile. Thanks, Bull.”

  “Oh, Ray.” It was Barbara. She was followed and surrounded by a group of detached, anemic white men and women, all in evening dress, all carrying packages of various sizes and shapes.

  “This is Ray, folks,” Barbara announced to her companions. They all smiled dutifully and began relieving themselves of their bundles.

  Barbara appropriated Raymond’s hand and placed something in his palm.

  “For Negro art,” she whispered, then, slipping quickly away, corralled her friends and ushered them toward the punch bowl. Raymond opened his palm and gasped at the sight of a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Good God, what a mob.” Lucille was beside him. He pocketed the money Barbara had given him and regarded Lucille coolly.

  “Still hep on your man?”

  “Why, Ray,” she began, then quickly regaining control of herself, riposted merrily, “and how? She then started to move away.

  Raymond forestalled her by firmly clenching her wrist in his hand.

  “How long you gonna play this game?” he asked sternly.

  “What of black game?”

  “You know damn well …”

  “Here’s a drink, baby.” Bull handed Lucille a glass of punch. Raymond released her wrist, glared at the two of them, walked to the table, pushed his way through the crowd, seized a glass, and handed it to Euphoria, now guardian of the punch bowl, to fill.

  After having had several drinks, he threaded his way back into Eustace’s studio. It was more crowded and noisy than before. Someone was playing the piano, and in a small clearing the ex-wife of a noted American playwright was doing the Black Bottom with a famed Negro singer of spirituals.

  “Ain’t I good?” she demanded of her audience. “An’ you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  With which she insinuated her scrawny white body close to that of her stalwart black partner and began performing the torrid abdominal movements of the “mess-a-round.”

  “How d’y’do, Ray.”

  Raymond turned to see who had spoken. On the davenette against the wall was a well known sophisticated author and explorer of the esoteric. He was surrounded by four bewildered-looking, corn-fed individuals. He introduced them to Raymond as relatives and friends from his native middle west. It was their first trip to Harlem, and their first experience of a white-black gathering.

  Raymond sat down beside them, talking at random, and helping himself to the bottles of liquor which the cautious author had recruited from his own private stock.

  Soon there was a commotion at the door. It cleared of all standees, and in it was framed the weird Amazonian figure of Amy Douglas, whose mother had made a fortune devising and marketing hair preparations for kinky-haired blackamoors. Amy, despite her bulk and size—she was almost six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds—affected flimsy frocks and burdened her person with weighty brilliants. A six months stay in Europe had provided her with a series of foreign phrases with which to interlard her southern dialect. Being very black, she went in for skin whiteners which had been more effective in certain spots than in others. As a result, her face was speckled, uncertain of its shade. Amy was also generous in the use of her mother’s hair preparations, and because someone had once told her she resembled a Nubian queen, she wore a diamond tiara, precariously perched on the top of her slickened naps.

  Majestically she strode into the room, attended as usual by an attractive escort of high yaller ladies in waiting, and a chattering group of effeminate courtiers.

  Raymond excused himself from the people with whom he had been sitting and started once more for the kitchen. While trying to pierce through the crowd, he was halted by Dr. Parkes, a professor of literature in a northern Negro college, who, also, as Paul so aptly declared, played mother hen to a brood of chicks, he having appointed himself guardian angel to the current set of younger Negro artists.

  “I’ve been trying to find you for the past hour.”

  ”Sorry, Dr. Parkes … but in this mob …”

  “I know. Perhaps I should await a more propitious moment, but I wanted to ask you about Pelham.”

  “Pelham?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, he’s still in jail. That’s all I know. His trial isn’t far off. I’ve forgotten the exact date.”

  “What effect do you think this will have on you?”

  “On me? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t you think this scandal when publicized will hurt all of you who lived here with Pelham?”

  Raymond laughed.

  “I hadn’t thought of that. This might be Paul’s opportunity to get his name in the paper.”

  “Who’s taking my name in vain?” Paul appeared, still leading his dark shadow by the hand. “Oh, Dr. Parkes,” he continued excitedly, “meet Bud. He’s got …”

  Raymond escaped and worked his way over to the piano. He stopped to chat with Aline and Janet, who had staggered in some time before with a group of conspicuously and self-consciously drunk college boys.

  “Hi, Ray.”

  “What say, keeds?”

  “Where’s Steve?” they asked in unison.

  “Find the gin,” he replied and moved away.

  Meanwhile four Negro actors from a current Broadway dramatic hit harmonized a popular love song. Conversation was temporarily hushed, laughter subsided, and only the intermittent tinkle of ice in an upturned glass could be heard as the plangent voices of the singers filled the room.

  There was a burst of applause as they finished, followed by boisterous calls for an encore. After a moment’s conference, the singers obligingly crooned another mellifluous tune.

  Raymond retraced his steps, greeting people, whispering answer to questions buzzed into his ear. Finally he was once more in the kitchen.

  It was one-thirty. The twenty dollar bill had been given to Eustace, who had sent for another dozen bottles of gin. A deposed Russian countess was perched atop the gas range talking animatedly in broken English to Paul’s Spartan bootblack. The famed American playwright’s ex-wife had developed a crying jag. No one could soothe her but the stalwart singer of Negro spirituals. Near them hovered his wife, jealous, bored, suspicious, irritated rather than flattered by the honeyed, Oxonian witticisms being cooed into her ear by a drunken English actor.

  The noise was deafening. Empty gin bottles on the floor tripped those with unsteady legs. Bull’s bag of eggs had been knoc
ked to the floor. Its contents were broken and oozed stickily over the linoleum. Someone else had dropped a bag of sugar. The linoleum was gritty. Shuffling feet made rasping sounds.

  Two-thirty. Raymond began to feel the effects of the liquor he had consumed. He decided to stop drinking for a while. There was too much to see to risk missing it by getting drunk.

  In the hallway between the kitchen and Eustace’s studio, Euphoria sought to set a group of Negro school teachers at ease. The crowd confused them as it did most of the Harlem intellectuals who had strayed in and who all felt decidedly out of place. Raymond noticed how they all clung together, how timid they were, and how constrained they were in conversation and manner. He sought Stephen. He wanted to share his amusement at their discomfiture and self-consciousness. It gave him pleasure that he should have such a pertinent example of their lack of social savoir, their race conscious awareness. Unable to recover from being so intimately surrounded by whites, they, the school teachers, the college boys, the lawyers, the dentists, the social service workers, despite their strident appeals for social equality when among their own kind, either communed with one another, standing apart, or else made themselves obnoxious striving to make themselves agreeable. Only the bootblack, the actors, the musicians and Raymond’s own group of friends comprised the compatible Negroid elements.

  This suggested a formal train of thought to Raymond’s mind. Ignoring all those who called to him, he sought for Stephen. But Stephen was nowhere to be found, either in the kitchen, or in the studio where some unidentified russet brown girl was doing a cooch dance to a weird piano accompaniment.

  Raymond made a tour of the house, surprised many amorous couples in the darkened rooms upstairs by turning on the light, disturbed the fanciful aggregation of Greenwich Village Uranians Paul had gathered in Raymond’s studio to admire his bootblack’s touted body, and irritated and annoyed two snarling women who had closeted themselves in the bathroom, but still Stephen was not to be found.

  Disconsolately, Raymond discontinued his search and returned to the main scene of the party. All were convivial and excited. Various persons sang and danced. Highballs were quickly disposed of. A jazz pianist starred at the piano. There was a rush to dance. Everyone seemed to be hilariously drunk. Shouts of joy merged into one persistent noisy blare. Couples staggered from the kitchen to the studio and back again. Others leaned despairingly, sillily against the walls, or else sank helplessly into chairs or window sills. Fresh crowds continued to come in. The Donation Party was successful beyond all hopes.

  Raymond felt a tug on his arm. It was Samuel. His face was flushed. His eyes were angry. Raymond tried to elude him.

  “I’ve got to talk to you, Ray.” He held tightly to Raymond’s arm.

  “Wait till tomorrow. Who in the hell can talk with all this noise?”

  “But you don’t know what’s happenedë”

  “And I don’t give a good …”

  “Listen, Ray, for God’s sake,” Samuel interrupted. “Find Steve and get him out of here. He’s terribly drunk and in an awful mess.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He, Aline and Janet just had a scrap.”

  ”Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, Ray. No one can find him. He was standing in the door there … to Eustace’s place. All at once there was a great confusion. I pushed through the crowd just in time to hear Steve shout: ’You goddamn sluts.’ And before I could grab him, he had hit Janet in the face, took a punch at Aline and rushed away.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Which way did he go?”

  “Out the front door.”

  The two of them forged their way through the crowd and went out into the street. Without a word they raced to the end of the block, peeped into the speakeasy, then glanced down the intersecting thoroughfare. Stephen was nowhere in sight.

  “See what you’ve done,” Samuel shouted. “You’ve got a decent boy into a sordid mess. I told him not to live with niggers. I knew what’d happen.”

  But Raymond heard not one word of his tirade, for he had rushed away from Samuel, and run back to the house alone.

  The party had reached new heights. The lights in the basement had been dimmed, and the reveling dancers cast grotesque shadows on the heavily tapestried walls. Color lines had been completely eradicated. Whites and blacks clung passionately together as if trying to effect a permanent merger. Liquor, jazz music, and close physical contact had achieved what decades of propaganda had advocated with little success.

  Here, Raymond thought, as he continued his search for Stephen, is social equality. Tomorrow all of them will have an emotional hangover. They will fear for their sanity, for at last they have had a chance to do openly what they only dared to do clandestinely before. This, he kept repeating to himself, is the Negro renaissance, and this is about all the whole damn thing is going to amount to.

  Stephen was nowhere to be found. Nor were Aline or Janet or anyone else who might tell him what had happened. Raymond felt nauseated. The music, the noise, the indiscriminate love-making, the drunken revelry began to sicken him. The insanity of the party, the insanity of its implications, threatened his own sanity. It is going to be necessary, he thought, to have another emancipation to deliver the emancipated Negro from a new kind of slavery.

  He made his way to the kitchen, rejoined the crowd around the punch bowl, and, for the next hour or more, drank incontinently. He grew drunker by the moment. He had a faint idea that Euphoria was dragging him aside and telling him that the noise must be toned down, and that there must be no more brawls, or bawdy parties in the bedrooms. The next thing he remembered was snatching Lucille away from some unidentified man, and dragging her viciously into the pantry.

  “Y’ want a cave man, eh?” he shouted. All else was vague and jumbled. Five minutes later he passed quietly out on the pantry floor.

  XIX

  Noon the next day found Eustace and Paul, still in pajamas, forgetting their hangovers, and impervious to the littered kitchen, taking inventory of the party’s material gains. There were sacks of rice, potatoes, sugar, carrots, corn meal, flour, fruit, beans, black-eyed peas and string beans. There were cans of corn, peas, tomatoes, pineapple, fruit salad, soup, salmon, crab meat, lobster, caviar, shredded chicken, soups of all flavors, spaghetti, pork and beans, pimentoes. There were wafers, cheese crackers, soda biscuits and graham crackers. And, as a final touch, a half case of champagne, several quarts of burgundy, sauterne, port, chartreuse and dago red.

  “Jesus master, look at this,” Eustace kept shouting as he discovered item after item which would tickle his sensitive palate.

  “Let’s open the champagne,” Paul urged eagerly.

  “Not till Ray gets up and we’ve cleaned up some of this mess. Euphoria’s hoppin’ mad as it is.”

  “ ’Stoo bad Pelham ain’t here. We could sure use him now.”

  “I say, we could.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Go get it, Paul. Maybe it’s somebody come to help clean up.”

  Paul went to the door, and when he returned he carried a special delivery letter for Raymond.

  “It’s from Steve,” he announced. “I recognize the handwriting.” “We’d better wake Ray up then, the drunken louse. Have you ever in your born days seen two people get as high as they did last night? And both of them got fighting drunks on at that. If I hadn’t dragged poor Lucille out of the pantry, I’m sure Ray would’ve raped her. And what Steve did to Janet’s nose.”

  “You wasn’t so sober yourself, if it’s any news to you.”

  “I may not have been sober but my love didn’t come down like yours did.”

  “Passion, my dear Eustace, is much headier and more necessary to the artist than wine.”

  “Sez you. Come on, let’s take this letter to Ray.”

  They went to Raymond’s studio. He lay fully dressed on the top of his daybed, uncovered, sound asleep. They awoke him with difficulty.

  “It’s a
letter from Steve,” Paul explained. Immediately Raymond became fully awake. Snatching the letter from Paul’s hand, he hastily tore open the envelope, and while his two friends stood by mystified, expectant, he read to himself:

  Dear Ray:

  I’m gone. Don’t ask why. I can’t stand it any longer. That party last night finished me. I’ve drunk my fill of Harlem. What that tokens for you and me, I don’t know yet. I’ve wanted to break away for almost two weeks, but I didn’t have the courage. It took Aline and Janet to finish me up for good. I couldn’t seem to talk to you about it. I knew you would understand, but it all seemed so silly that I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it.

  I’m fed up on Harlem and on Negroes. You say there is nothing to this race business. In the past I have agreed. Now I wonder. Dubiety surges through me and tantalizes my mind. I have no prejudices, you know; yet recently my being has been permeated with a vague disquiet. I feel lost among Negroes. Of course, you know my opinion of the usual run of whites who go in for Harlem. I saw in myself a suggestion of that and it sickened me. But that’s minor … the major thing is not my disquiet, but my growing dislike and antipathy. I shudder— and this will astound you—if I have to shake hands with a Negro. I have lived recently in a suddenly precipitated fear that I had become unclean because of my association. So complex and far-reaching has this fear become that I rushed in a panic to a doctor recently to be examined. I feared, unreasonably, and with no definite evidence, that Aline and Janet were unclean and that I had become contaminated, diseased. I never thought positively about venereal diseases before, but even the doctor’s reassuring Wassermann failed to allay my suspicions.

  I’m a damned neurotic. I’ve been lording it over you and, god’s teeth, I, too, am an egregious ass. All of your friends nauseate me. They are extremely pretentious and stupid. To have been surrounded by such a collection of whites would have driven me mad long ago. To have been surrounded by your friends without you would have been equally impossible. The thing, you see, is hopelessly entangled and the explanation, right as it is, is too simple for facile expression.