The Ways of White Folks (10 page)

“Is she nice,” asked Mrs. Ellsworth, “your roomer?”

“It’s not a she,” said Oceola. “He’s a man. I hate women roomers.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Ellsworth. “I should think all roomers would be terrible.”

“He’s right nice,” said Oceola. “Name’s Pete Williams.”

“What does he do?” asked Mrs. Ellsworth.

“A Pullman porter,” replied Oceola, “but he’s saving money to go to Med school. He’s a smart fellow.”

But it turned out later that he wasn’t paying Oceola any rent.

That afternoon, when Mrs. Ellsworth announced that she had made her an appointment with one of the best piano teachers in New York, the black girl seemed pleased. She recognized the name. But how, she wondered, would she find time
for study, with her pupils and her choir, and all. When Mrs. Ellsworth said that she would cover her
entire
living expenses, Oceola’s eyes were full of that why-look, as though she didn’t believe it.

“I have faith in your art, dear,” said Mrs. Ellsworth, at parting. But to prove it quickly, she sat down that very evening and sent Oceola the first monthly check so that she would no longer have to take in pupils or drill choirs or play at house parties. And so Oceola would have faith in art, too.

That night Mrs. Ellsworth called up Ormond Hunter and told him what she had done. And she asked if Mr. Hunter’s maid knew Oceola, and if she supposed that that man rooming with her were anything to her. Ormond Hunter said he would inquire.

Before going to bed, Mrs. Ellsworth told her housekeeper to order a book called “Nigger Heaven” on the morrow, and also anything else Brentano’s had about Harlem. She made a mental note that she must go up there sometime, for she had never yet seen that dark section of New York; and now that she had a Negro protegee, she really ought to know something about it. Mrs. Ellsworth couldn’t recall ever having known a single Negro before in her whole life, so she found Oceola fascinating. And just as black as she herself was white.

Mrs. Ellsworth began to think in bed about what gowns would look best on Oceola. Her protegee
would have to be well-dressed. She wondered, too, what sort of a place the girl lived in. And who that man was who lived with her. She began to think that really Oceola ought to have a place to herself. It didn’t seem quite respectable.…

When she woke up in the morning, she called her car and went by her dressmaker’s. She asked the good woman what kind of colors looked well with black; not black fabrics, but a black skin.

“I have a little friend to fit out,” she said.

“A
black
friend?” said the dressmaker.

“A black friend,” said Mrs. Ellsworth.

Some days later Ormond Hunter reported on what his maid knew about Oceola. It seemed that the two belonged to the same church, and although the maid did not know Oceola very well, she knew what everybody said about her in the church. Yes, indeedy! Oceola were a right nice girl, for sure, but it certainly were a shame she were giving all her money to that man what stayed with her and what she was practically putting through college so he could be a doctor.

“Why,” gasped Mrs. Ellsworth, “the poor child is being preyed upon.”

“It seems to me so,” said Ormond Hunter.

“I must get her out of Harlem,” said Mrs. Ellsworth,
“at once. I believe it’s worse than Chinatown.”

“She might be in a more artistic atmosphere,” agreed Ormond Hunter. “And with her career launched, she probably won’t want that man anyhow.”

“She won’t need him,” said Mrs. Ellsworth. “She will have her art.”

But Mrs. Ellsworth decided that in order to increase the rapprochement between art and Oceola, something should be done now, at once. She asked the girl to come down to see her the next day, and when it was time to go home, the white woman said, “I have a half-hour before dinner. I’ll drive you up. You know I’ve never been to Harlem.”

“All right,” said Oceola. “That’s nice of you.”

But she didn’t suggest the white lady’s coming in, when they drew up before a rather sad-looking apartment house in 134th Street. Mrs. Ellsworth had to ask could she come in.

“I live on the fifth floor,” said Oceola, “and there isn’t any elevator.”

“It doesn’t matter, dear,” said the white woman, for she meant to see the inside of this girl’s life, elevator or no elevator.

The apartment was just as she thought it would be. After all, she had read Thomas Burke on Limehouse. And here was just one more of those holes in the wall, even if it was five stories high. The windows
looked down on slums. There were only four rooms, small as maids’ rooms, all of them. An upright piano almost filled the parlor. Oceola slept in the dining-room. The roomer slept in the bedchamber beyond the kitchen.

“Where is he, darling?”

“He runs on the road all summer,” said the girl. “He’s in and out.”

“But how do you breathe in here?” asked Mrs. Ellsworth. “It’s so small. You must have more space for your soul, dear. And for a grand piano. Now, in the Village …”

“I do right well here,” said Oceola.

“But in the Village where so many nice artists live we can get …”

“But I don’t want to move yet. I promised my roomer he could stay till fall.”

“Why till fall?”

“He’s going to Meharry then.”

“To marry?”

“Meharry, yes m’am. That’s a colored Medicine school in Nashville.”

“Colored? Is it good?”

“Well, it’s cheap,” said Oceola. “After he goes, I don’t mind moving.”

“But I wanted to see you settled before I go away for the summer.”

“When you come back is all right. I can do till then.”

“Art is long,” reminded Mrs. Ellsworth, “and time is fleeting, my dear.”

“Yes, m’am,” said Oceola, “but I gets nervous if I start worrying about time.”

So Mrs. Ellsworth went off to Bar Harbor for the season, and left the man with Oceola.

That was some years ago. Eventually art and Mrs. Ellsworth triumphed. Oceola moved out of Harlem. She lived in Gay Street west of Washington Square where she met Genevieve Taggard, and Ernestine Evans, and two or three sculptors, and a cat-painter who was also a protegee of Mrs. Ellsworth. She spent her days practicing, playing for friends of her patron, going to concerts, and reading books about music. She no longer had pupils or rehearsed the choir, but she still loved to play for Harlem house parties—for nothing—now that she no longer needed the money, out of sheer love of jazz. This rather disturbed Mrs. Ellsworth, who still believed in art of the old school, portraits that really and truly looked like people, poems about nature, music that had soul in it, not syncopation. And she felt the dignity of art. Was it in keeping with genius, she wondered, for Oceola to have a studio full of white and colored people every Saturday night (some of them actually drinking gin
from
bottles
) and dancing to the most tomtom—like music she had ever heard coming out of a grand piano? She wished she could lift Oceola up bodily and take her away from all that, for art’s sake.

So in the spring, Mrs. Ellsworth organized weekends in the up-state mountains where she had a little lodge and where Oceola could look from the high places at the stars, and fill her soul with the vastness of the eternal, and forget about jazz. Mrs. Ellsworth really began to hate jazz—especially on a grand piano.

If there were a lot of guests at the lodge, as there sometimes were, Mrs. Ellsworth might share the bed with Oceola. Then she would read aloud Tennyson or Browning before turning out the light, aware all the time of the electric strength of that brown-black body beside her, and of the deep drowsy voice asking what the poems were about. And then Mrs. Ellsworth would feel very motherly toward this dark girl whom she had taken under her wing on the wonderful road of art, to nurture and love until she became a great interpreter of the piano. At such times the elderly white woman was glad her late husband’s money, so well invested, furnished her with a large surplus to devote to the needs of her protegees, especially to Oceola, the blackest—and most interesting of all.

Why the most interesting?

Mrs. Ellsworth didn’t know, unless it was that
Oceola really was talented, terribly alive, and that she looked like nothing Mrs. Ellsworth had ever been near before. Such a rich velvet black, and such a hard young body! The teacher of the piano raved about her strength.

“She can stand a great career,” the teacher said. “She has everything for it.”

“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Ellsworth, thinking, however, of the Pullman porter at Meharry, “but she must learn to sublimate her soul.”

So for two years then, Oceola lived abroad at Mrs. Ellsworth’s expense. She studied with Philippe, had the little apartment on the Left Bank, and learned about Debussy’s African background. She met many black Algerian and French West Indian students, too, and listened to their interminable arguments ranging from Garvey to Picasso to Spengler to Jean Cocteau, and thought they all must be crazy. Why did they or anybody argue so much about life or art? Oceola merely lived—and loved it. Only the Marxian students seemed sound to her for they, at least, wanted people to have enough to eat. That was important, Oceola thought, remembering, as she did, her own sometimes hungry years. But the rest of the controversies, as far as she could fathom, were based on air.

Oceola hated most artists, too, and the word
art
in French or English. If you wanted to play the piano or paint pictures or write books, go ahead!
But why talk so much about it? Montparnasse was worse in that respect than the Village. And as for the cultured Negroes who were always saying art would break down color lines, art could save the race and prevent lynchings! “Bunk!” said Oceola. “My ma and pa were both artists when it came to making music, and the white folks ran them out of town for being dressed up in Alabama. And look at the Jews! Every other artist in the world’s a Jew, and still folks hate them.”

She thought of Mrs. Ellsworth (dear soul in New York), who never made uncomplimentary remarks about Negroes, but frequently did about Jews. Of little Menuhin she would say, for instance, “He’s a
genius
—not a Jew,” hating to admit his ancestry.

In Paris, Oceola especially loved the West Indian ball rooms where the black colonials danced the beguine. And she liked the entertainers at Bricktop’s. Sometimes late at night there, Oceola would take the piano and beat out a blues for Brick and the assembled guests. In her playing of Negro folk music, Oceola never doctored it up, or filled it full of classical runs, or fancy falsities. In the blues she made the bass notes throb like tom-toms, the trebles cry like little flutes, so deep in the earth and so high in the sky that they understood everything. And when the night club crowd would get up and dance to her blues, and Bricktop would yell, “Hey! Hey!” Oceola felt as happy as if she were performing a
Chopin étude for the nicely gloved Oh’s and Ah-ers in a Crillon salon.

Music, to Oceola, demanded movement and expression, dancing and living to go with it. She liked to teach, when she had the choir, the singing of those rhythmical Negro spirituals that possessed the power to pull colored folks out of their seats in the amen corner and make them prance and shout in the aisles for Jesus. She never liked those fashionable colored churches where shouting and movement were discouraged and looked down upon, and where New England hymns instead of spirituals were sung. Oceola’s background was too well-grounded in Mobile, and Billy Kersands’ Minstrels, and the Sanctified churches where religion was a joy, to stare mystically over the top of a grand piano like white folks and imagine that Beethoven had nothing to do with life, or that Schubert’s love songs were only sublimations.

Whenever Mrs. Ellsworth came to Paris, she and Oceola spent hours listening to symphonies and string quartettes and pianists. Oceola enjoyed concerts, but seldom felt, like her patron, that she was floating on clouds of bliss. Mrs. Ellsworth insisted, however, that Oceola’s spirit was too moved for words at such times—therefore she understood why the dear child kept quiet. Mrs. Ellsworth herself was often too moved for words, but never by pieces like Ravel’s
Bolero
(which Oceola played on the
phonograph as a dance record) or any of the compositions of
les Six
.

What Oceola really enjoyed most with Mrs. Ellsworth was not going to concerts, but going for trips on the little river boats in the Seine; or riding out to old chateaux in her patron’s hired Renault; or to Versailles, and listening to the aging white lady talk about the romantic history of France, the wars and uprising, the loves and intrigues of princes and kings and queens, about guillotines and lace handkerchiefs, snuff boxes and daggers. For Mrs. Ellsworth had loved France as a girl, and had made a study of its life and lore. Once she used to sing simple little French songs rather well, too. And she always regretted that her husband never understood the lovely words—or even tried to understand them.

Oceola learned the accompaniments for all the songs Mrs. Ellsworth knew and sometimes they tried them over together. The middle-aged white woman loved to sing when the colored girl played, and she even tried spirituals. Often, when she stayed at the little Paris apartment, Oceola would go into the kitchen and cook something good for late supper, maybe an oyster soup, or fried apples and bacon. And sometimes Oceola had pigs’ feet.

“There’s nothing quite so good as a pig’s foot,” said Oceola, “after playing all day.”

“Then you must have pigs’ feet,” agreed Mrs. Ellsworth.

And all this while Oceola’s development at the piano blossomed into perfection. Her tone became a singing wonder and her interpretations warm and individual. She gave a concert in Paris, one in Brussels, and another in Berlin. She got the press notices all pianists crave. She had her picture in lots of European papers. And she came home to New York a year after the stock market crashed and nobody had any money—except folks like Mrs. Ellsworth who had so much it would be hard to ever lose it all.

Oceola’s one time Pullman porter, now a coming doctor, was graduating from Meharry that spring. Mrs. Ellsworth saw her dark protegee go South to attend his graduation with tears in her eyes. She thought that by now music would be enough, after all those years under the best teachers, but alas, Oceola was not yet sublimated, even by Philippe. She wanted to see Pete.