The Ways of White Folks (3 page)

“He
is
the jungle,” said Anne when she saw him.

“He’s ‘I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,’ ” said Michael.

For Anne thought in terms of pictures: she was a painter. And Michael thought in terms of music: he was a composer for the piano. And they had a most wonderful idea of painting pictures and composing music that went together, and then having a joint “concert-exhibition” as they would call it. Her pictures and his music. The Carraways, a sonata and a picture, a fugue and a picture. It would be lovely, and such a novelty, people would have to like it. And many of their things would be Negro. Anne had painted their maid six times. And Michael had composed several themes based on the spirituals, and on Louis Armstrong’s jazz. Now here was this ebony boy. The essence in the flesh.

They had nearly missed the boy. He had come, when they were out, to gather up the things the cook had left, and take them to her sister in Jersey. It seems that he was the late cook’s nephew. The new colored maid had let him in and given him the two suitcases of poor dear Emma’s belongings, and he was on his way to the Subway. That is, he was in the hall, going out just as the Carraways, Michael and Anne, stepped in. They could hardly see the boy, it being dark in the hall, and he being dark, too.

“Hello,” they said. “Is this Emma’s nephew?”

“Yes’m,” said the maid. “Yes’m.”

“Well, come in,” said Anne, “and let us see you. We loved your aunt so much. She was the best cook we ever had.”

“You don’t know where
I
could get a job, do you?” said the boy. This took Michael and Anne back a bit, but they rallied at once. So charming and naive to ask right away for what he wanted.

Anne burst out, “You know, I think I’d like to paint you.”

Michael said, “Oh, I say now, that would be lovely! He’s so utterly Negro.”

The boy grinned.

Anne said, “Could you come back tomorrow?”

And the boy said, “Yes, indeed. I sure could.”

The upshot of it was that they hired him. They hired him to look after the garden, which was just about as big as Michael’s grand piano—only a little square behind the house. You know those Village gardens. Anne sometimes painted it. And occasionally they set the table there for four on a spring evening. Nothing grew in the garden really, practically nothing. But the boy said he could plant things. And they had to have some excuse to hire him.

The boy’s name was Luther. He had come from the South to his relatives in Jersey, and had had only one job since he got there, shining shoes for a Greek in Elizabeth. But the Greek fired him because
the boy wouldn’t give half his tips over to the proprietor.

“I never heard of a job where I had to pay the boss, instead of the boss paying me,” said Luther. “Not till I got here.”

“And then what did you do?” said Anne.

“Nothing. Been looking for a job for the last four months.”

“Poor boy,” said Michael; “poor, dear boy.”

“Yes,” said Anne. “You must be hungry.” And they called the cook to give him something to eat.

Luther dug around in the garden a little bit that first day, went out and bought some seeds, came back and ate some more. They made a place for him to sleep in the basement by the furnace. And the next day Anne started to paint him, after she’d bought the right colors.

“He’ll be good company for Mattie,” they said. “She claims she’s afraid to stay alone at night when we’re out, so she leaves.” They suspected, though, that Mattie just liked to get up to Harlem. And they thought right. Mattie was not as settled as she looked. Once out, with the Savoy open until three in the morning, why come home? That was the way Mattie felt.

In fact, what happened was that Mattie showed Luther where the best and cheapest hot spots in Harlem were located. Luther hadn’t even set foot in Harlem before, living twenty-eight miles away,
as he did, in Jersey, and being a kind of quiet boy. But the second night he was there Mattie said, “Come on, let’s go. Working for white folks all day, I’m tired. They needn’t think I was made to answer telephones all night.” So out they went.

Anne noticed that most mornings Luther would doze almost as soon as she sat him down to pose, so she eventually decided to paint Luther asleep. “The Sleeping Negro,” she would call it. Dear, natural childlike people, they would sleep anywhere they wanted to. Anyway, asleep, he kept still and held the pose.

And he
was
an adorable Negro. Not tall, but with a splendid body. And a slow and lively smile that lighted up his black, black face, for his teeth were very white, and his eyes, too. Most effective in oil and canvas. Better even than Emma had been. Anne could stare at him at leisure when he was asleep. One day she decided to paint him nude, or at least half nude. A slave picture, that’s what she would do. The market at New Orleans for a background. And call it “The Boy on the Block.”

So one morning when Luther settled down in his sleeping pose, Anne said, “No,” she had finished that picture. She wanted to paint him now representing to the full the soul and sorrow of his people. She wanted to paint him as a slave about to be sold. And since slaves in warm climates had no clothes, would he please take off his shirt.

Luther smiled a sort of embarrassed smile and took off his shirt.

“Your undershirt, too,” said Anne. But it turned out that he had on a union suit, so he had to go out and change altogether. He came back and mounted the box that Anne said would serve just then for a slave block, and she began to sketch. Before luncheon Michael came in, and went into rhapsodies over Luther on the box without a shirt, about to be sold into slavery. He said he must put him into music right now. And he went to the piano and began to play something that sounded like Deep River in the jaws of a dog, but Michael said it was a modern slave plaint, 1850 in terms of 1933. Vieux Carré remembered on 135th Street. Slavery in the Cotton Club.

Anne said, “It’s too marvellous!” And they painted and played till dark, with rest periods in between for Luther. Then they all knocked off for dinner. Anne and Michael went out later to one of Lew Leslie’s new shows. And Luther and Mattie said, “Thank God!” and got dressed up for Harlem.

Funny, they didn’t like the Carraways. They treated them nice and paid them well. “But they’re too strange,” said Mattie, “they makes me nervous.”

“They is mighty funny,” Luther agreed.

They didn’t understand the vagaries of white folks, neither Luther nor Mattie, and they didn’t want to be bothered trying.

“I does my work,” said Mattie. “After that I don’t want to be painted, or asked to sing songs, nor nothing like that.”

The Carraways often asked Luther to sing, and he sang. He knew a lot of southern worksongs and reels, and spirituals and ballads.

The Carraways allowed him to neglect the garden altogether. About all Luther did was pose and sing. And he got tired of that.

Indeed, both Luther and Mattie became a bit difficult to handle as time went on. The Carraways blamed it on Mattie. She had got hold of Luther. She was just simply spoiling a nice simple young boy. She was old enough to know better. Mattie was in love with Luther.

At least, he slept with her. The Carraways discovered this one night about one o’clock when they went to wake Luther up (the first time they’d ever done such a thing) and ask him if he wouldn’t sing his own marvellous version of John Henry for a man who had just come from Saint Louis and was sailing for Paris tomorrow. But Luther wasn’t in his own bed by the furnace. There was a light in Mattie’s room, so Michael knocked softly. Mattie
said, “Who’s that?” And Michael poked his head in, and here were Luther and Mattie in bed together!

Of course, Anne condoned them. “It’s so simple and natural for Negroes to make love.” But Mattie, after all, was forty if she was a day. And Luther was only a kid. Besides Anne thought that Luther had been ever so much nicer when he first came than he was now. But from so many nights at the Savoy, he had become a marvellous dancer, and he was teaching Anne the Lindy Hop to Cab Calloway’s records. Besides, her picture of “The Boy on the Block” wasn’t anywhere near done. And he did take pretty good care of the furnace. So they kept him. At least, Anne kept him, although Michael said he was getting a little bored with the same Negro always in the way.

For Luther had grown a bit familiar lately. He smoked up all their cigarettes, drank their wine, told jokes on them to their friends, and sometimes even came upstairs singing and walking about the house when the Carraways had guests in who didn’t share their enthusiasm for Negroes, natural or otherwise.

Luther and Mattie together were a pair. They quite frankly lived with one another now. Well, let that go. Anne and Michael prided themselves on being different; artists, you know, and liberal-minded people—maybe a little scatter-brained, but then (secretly, they felt) that came from genius.
They were not ordinary people, bothering about the liberties of others. Certainly, the last thing they would do would be to interfere with the delightful simplicity of Negroes.

But Mattie must be giving Luther money and buying him clothes. He was really dressing awfully well. And on her Thursday afternoons off she would come back loaded down with packages. As far as the Carraways could tell, they were all for Luther.

And sometimes there were quarrels drifting up from the basement. And often, all too often, Mattie had moods. Then Luther would have moods. And it was pretty awful having two dark and glowering people around the house. Anne couldn’t paint and Michael couldn’t play.

One day, when she hadn’t seen Luther for three days, Anne called downstairs and asked him if he wouldn’t please come up and take off his shirt and get on the box. The picture was almost done. Luther came dragging his feet upstairs and humming:

And that afternoon he let the furnace go almost out.

That was the state of things when Michael’s mother (whom Anne had never liked) arrived from
Kansas City to pay them a visit. At once neither Mattie nor Luther liked her either. She was a mannish old lady, big and tall, and inclined to be bossy. Mattie, however, did spruce up her service, cooked delicious things, and treated Mrs. Carraway with a great deal more respect than she did Anne.

“I never play with servants,” Mrs. Carraway had said to Michael, and Mattie must have heard her.

But Luther, he was worse than ever. Not that he did anything wrong, Anne thought, but the way he did things! For instance, he didn’t need to sing now all the time, especially since Mrs. Carraway had said she didn’t like singing. And certainly not songs like “You Rascal, You.”

But all things end! With the Carraways and Luther it happened like this: One forenoon, quite without a shirt (for he expected to pose) Luther came sauntering through the library to change the flowers in the vase. He carried red roses. Mrs. Carraway was reading her morning scripture from the Health and Life.

“Oh, good morning,” said Luther. “How long are you gonna stay in this house?”

“I never liked familiar Negroes,” said Mrs. Carraway, over her nose glasses.

“Huh!” said Luther. “That’s too bad! I never liked poor white folks.”

Mrs. Carraway screamed, a short loud, dignified scream. Michael came running in bathrobe and
pyjamas. Mrs. Carraway grew tall. There was a scene. Luther talked. Michael talked. Anne appeared.

“Never, never, never,” said Mrs. Carraway, “have I suffered such impudence from servants—and a nigger servant—in my own son’s house.”

“Mother, Mother, Mother,” said Michael. “Be calm. I’ll discharge him.” He turned on the nonchalant Luther. “Go!” he said, pointing toward the door. “Go, go!”

“Michael,” Anne cried, “I haven’t finished ‘The Slave on the Block.’ ” Her husband looked nonplussed. For a moment he breathed deeply.

“Either he goes or I go,” said Mrs. Carraway, firm as a rock.

“He goes,” said Michael with strength from his mother.

“Oh!” cried Anne. She looked at Luther. His black arms were full of roses he had brought to put in the vases. He had on no shirt. “Oh!” His body was ebony.

“Don’t worry ’bout me!” said Luther. “I’ll go.”

“Yes, we’ll go,” boomed Mattie from the doorway, who had come up from below, fat and belligerent. “We’ve stood enough foolery from you white folks! Yes, we’ll go. Come on, Luther.”

What could she mean, “stood enough”? What had they done to them, Anne and Michael wondered. They had tried to be kind. “Oh!”

“Sneaking around knocking on our door at night,” Mattie went on. “Yes, we’ll go. Pay us! Pay us! Pay us!” So she remembered the time they had come for Luther at night. That was it.

“I’ll pay you,” said Michael. He followed Mattie out.

Anne looked at her black boy.

“Good-bye,” Luther said. “You fix the vases.”

He handed her his armful of roses, glanced impudently at old Mrs. Carraway and grinned—grinned that wide, beautiful, white-toothed grin that made Anne say when she first saw him, “He looks like the jungle.” Grinned, and disappeared in the dark hall, with no shirt on his back.

“Oh,” Anne moaned distressfully, “my ‘Boy on the Block’!”

“Huh!” snorted Mrs. Carraway.

——

W
HEN THE BOY CAME BACK
, there were bright stickers and tags in strange languages the home folks couldn’t read all over his bags, and on his violin case. They were the marks of customs stations at far-away borders, big hotels in European cities, and steamers that crossed the ocean a long way from Hopkinsville. They made the leather-colored bags and black violin case look very gay and circus-like. They made white people on the train wonder about the brown-skinned young man to whom the baggage belonged. And when he got off at a village station in Missouri, the loafers gathered around in a crowd, staring.