The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman Page B

time you quit.” Braxton had stripped off his white full-dress shirt, put on his bathrobe, and started out of the room, to go downstairs to the telephone. Alva reached across the bed and pulled up the shade, blinked at the inpouring daylight and lay himself back down, one arm thrown across his forehead. He had slipped off into a state of semi-consciousness again when Braxton returned.
    “The girl said she’d tell the boss. Asked who I was as usual.” He went into the alcove to finish undressing, and put on his pajamas. Alva looked up.
    “You goin’ to bed?”
    “Yes, don’t you think I want some sleep?”
    “Thought you was goin’ to look for a job?”
    “I was, but I hadn’t figured on staying out all night.”
    “Always some damn excuse. Where’d you go?”
    “Down to Flo’s.”
    “Who in the hell is Flo?”
    “That little yaller broad I picked up at the cabaret last night.”
    “I thought she had a nigger with her.”
    “She did, but I jived her along, so she ditched him, and gave me her address. I met her there later.”
    Braxton was now ready to get into the bed. All this time he had been preparing himself in his usual bedtime manner. His face had been cold-creamed, his hair greased and covered by a silken stocking cap. This done, he climbed over Alva and lay on top of the covers. They were silent for a moment, then Braxton laughed softly to himself.
    “Where’d you go last night?”
    “Where’d I go?” Alva seemed surprised. “Why I came home, where’d ya think I went?” Braxton laughed again.
    “Oh, I thought maybe you’d really made a date with that coal scuttle blond you danced with.”
    “Ya musta thought it.”
    “Well, ya seemed pretty sweet on her.”
    “Whaddaya mean, sweet? Just because I danced with her once. I took pity on her, ’cause she looked so lonesome with those ofays. Wonder who they was?”
    “Oh, she probably works for them. It’s good you danced with her. Nobody else would.”
    “I didn’t see nothing wrong with her. She might have been a little dark.”
    “Little dark is right, and you know when they comes blacker’n me, they ain’t got no go.” Braxton was a reddish brown aristocrat, with clear-cut features and curly hair. His paternal grandfather had been an Iroquois Indian.
    * * *
    Emma Lou was very lonesome. She still knew no one save John, two or three of the Negro actors who worked on the stage with Arline, and a West Indian woman who lived in the same apartment with her. Occasionally John met her when she left the theater at night and escorted her to her apartment door. He repeatedly importuned her to be nice to him once more. Her answer only was a sigh or a smile.
    The West Indian woman was employed as a stenographer in the office of a Harlem political sheet. She was shy and retiring, and not much given to making friends with American Negroes. So many of them had snubbed and pained her when she was newly emigrant from her home in Barbados, that she lumped them all together, just as they seemed to do her people. She would not take under consideration that Emma Lou was new to Harlem, and not even aware of the prejudice American-born Harlemites nursed for foreign-born ones. She remembered too vividly how, on ringing the bell of a house where there had been a vacancy sign in the window, a little girl had come to the door, and, in answer to a voice in the back asking, “Who is it, Cora?” had replied, “monkey chaser wants to see the room you got to rent.” Jasmine Griffith was wary of all contact with American Negroes, for that had been only one of the many embittering incidents she had experienced.
    Emma Lou liked Jasmine, but was conscious of the fact that she could never penetrate her stolid reserve. They often talked to one another when they met in the hallway, and sometimes they stopped in one another’s rooms, but there was never any talk of going places together, never any informal revelations or intimacies.
    The Negro actors in “Cabaret