XV

Just as she had had the feeling on leaving Atlanta that she had closed the pages of a volume in the story of her life, so now did Mimi sense intuitively that the second book was being shut, never to be opened again. Through the fading light of a dreary, cold day the train sped across the desolate Jersey meadows. Just dipping below the horizon, a frigid sun gave a sickly brilliance but no warmth. Mimi shivered. The dreariness of the landscape was relieved only by the lank chimneys of factories belching turgescent billows of smoke. From these dingy buildings poured streams of men as dingy as the factories from which they were emerging. Dinner pails in hand, they plodded wearily across the waste places in knots of twos and threes, home to slatternly, waspish wives.

Into the murky darkness of Newark the train rumbled, paused momentarily, and then went its way into the gathering darkness. Lights began to twinkle in the dusty windows of the factories and the nondescript homes along the tracks. Into Manhattan Transfer and out again, past a fertilizer factory that filled the car with the fetid odours of offal, and the train plunged into the roaring, alarming bowels of the earth beneath the Hudson River. Mimi knew of the tunnel and was prepared for it but the shock coming so suddenly following the dismal screeching of the whistle blowing for the tunnel frightened her. Midway where there is an opening going up from the tunnel to the air above she felt relieved that the ordeal was over but again the train rushed on into darkness after the flash of grey. Her ears pounded. She pressed the heels of her hands against them to relieve the roaring in them. She was glad when at last the electric engine pulled its way into the maze of winding tracks on the New York side.⁠ ⁠…

Bewildered by the hugeness of the Pennsylvania Station, made timid by the rushing throngs all seemingly with some definite destination the reaching of which in the shortest possible time was apparently of vast importance, Mimi with protest yielded her shabby bag to the porter and followed him up the narrow stairs. She peered upwards at the faces which scanned the incoming passengers through iron fences which made her think of prisoners or animals eager to escape. She was gripped with fear⁠—no Aunt Sophie was to be seen, but that fear was changed to happiness when she was inundated with affectionate greeting by her aunt.

“You poor dear, I ought to be angry with you for not coming to me sooner, but I’m so glad to see you I just can’t be,” her aunt welcomed her.

Threading her way deftly through the crowd, she led Mimi, her eyes distended at the bewildering massiveness of the building, down into the earth again. Ashamed of her greenness, Mimi shrank from the roaring monster that leapt upon them from the yawning blackness of a cavern made blacker by dim lights but faintly discernible in the cavern. With a horrible grinding of brakes the creature came to a stop and Mimi found herself shoved into it. Station after station they passed and once more they came to the street, this time in a setting more familiar to her, yet strange, and her bewilderment was decreased but little.

For here was a new life, teeming, exotic, individual. Hurrying along the streets, coming out of restaurants, standing in doorways and on street corners were groups of Negroes, well dressed, jubilant, cheerful. Here and there hurried coloured men in twos and threes, clad in smartly fitting dinner jackets, snow-white bosoms peeping from heavy overcoats, musical instruments, violins, saxophones, mandolins in cases clutched in their hands. They hastened into the subway kiosk Mimi and her aunt had just quitted and were swallowed up. From nearby there came to them the bewitching odours of frying corn and chicken, of pig’s-feet. They came from a stand where a middle-aged coloured woman was serving her wares to passersby.

“That’s ‘Pig-Foot Mary’⁠—she’s making lots of money at that little stand and she’s saving it, too,” Mrs. Rogers informed Mimi.

She was thrilled by the new scene. Gone was the morbid, morose, worried air of the people she had encountered at the other end of the subway. Here there was spontaneous laughter, shrewd observations which brought loud and free laughter from listeners. There was an exhilarating sense here that these people knew the secret of enjoying life. Black and brown and yellow faces flitted by, some carefree, some careworn. Mimi sensed again the essential rhythm, the oneness of these variegated colours and moods. It was all vivid, colourful, of a pattern distinctive and apart, and she warmed to the friendliness of it all.⁠ ⁠…

Behind them stood two flashily dressed coloured men as they took it all in. The voice of one worried, the other conciliatory.

“Say, Sam, I sent the fifty dollars and my application to Jim Washington like you told me to,” the worried voice complained, “and I ain’t heard nothing a-tall from him or the Idlehour Social Club either.”

“Ain’t you heard you was blackballed?” the other inquired with a markedly incredulous air.

“No, I ain’t. I wonder who could’ve blackballed me,” he speculated, the worry in his tones increasing. “There’s Pudd’n Jones⁠—he’s a friend of mine and he wouldn’t do that to me. And there’s Babe Carter and Spider and Bill Johnson⁠—they’re friends of mine and they wouldn’t blackball me, I know. Say, was there many black balls in that box?” he inquired, hopefully.

“You’ve seen a bowl of Russian caviar, ain’t you?” his friend asked.

“Yeh⁠—but what’s that got to do with them blackballing, me?”

“Well, boy, just this⁠—that box when they voted on your name looked just like a bowl of caviar.”⁠ ⁠…

“Come along, Mimi, we can’t stand here all night⁠—dinner’s ready at home,” urged Mrs. Rogers. Mimi could have stood there for hours. The colourful scenes fascinated her, made her want to stay there and watch the comedies, the tragedies, the shifting panorama of life as it flowed, now swiftly, now slowly, by. Down Lenox Avenue they walked. Harlem, which first had been Dutch “Haarlem,” then Irish, afterwards Jewish and German, was in the flood-tide of transition to a Negro city within a city. From the doorway of a former private dwelling in a side street near bustling Lenox Avenue came a resonant flooding swell of music. High above the rest sounded a heavy baritone, chopping off of the words like little sausages, setting the beat like a metronome for the other singers.

“What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear.”

Verse after verse poured forth, mingling with the clatter and roar of the crowds outside. Mimi and her aunt paused unwittingly outside. The song had ceased. The baritone voice of the preacher was lifted in prayer, his words punctuated by fervent “Amens!” and “Hallelujahs!” and “Praise Gods!”

“We are vile, sinful creatures, O Lord, strayed from the path You tol’ us to follow. (Ain’t it the Gospel!) Reach down from Thy heaven with a sword of flaming fire and wipe from the face of the earth these hellholes of vice that’re sending the souls of our boys and girls to damnation! (Yes, Lord, reach down!⁠—Amen!) Wipe out, Jesus, the dance halls and theatres, the gamblers and the drunkards, the wolves in sheep’s clothes who’re workin’ ’gainst Thy cause.⁠ ⁠… Purify us, Lord! Save us! Save us!⁠ ⁠…”

The preacher’s voice swayed and rumbled, excoriating the sinners, pleading for redemption of their souls, damning to everlasting hellfire those who were unrepentant. The unseen voice was talking to a God who was no mystery to him, a very real and ever present and potent Deity. Down the street his words followed them as they went home.⁠ ⁠…

Mimi looked back on her days of suffering and poverty almost as though it had been a terrible dream. Her aunt deluged her with kindness, delicately drew from her the story of her unsuccessful struggle in Philadelphia against odds that proved too great for her. The one link with that nightmare of pain and worry and anxiety was her aching need of Petit Jean. Night after night she cried herself to sleep. Night after night she awoke when all the rest of the household was asleep, feeling him near her, his warm flesh nestled against her side. She could feel his tiny lips against her own, his hands clutching at her breast, his laugh sounding in her ears. Only the thought that someday soon she would be able to have him with her again comforted her, only the realization that she could not possibly make her way as fast towards that goal if he were with her restrained her from going back to Baltimore and taking him from the home.

Her Aunt Sophie was, she found, gifted with a fund of hard common sense but with it she possessed a warmth of feeling that made Mimi know the older woman understood all her difficulties without the necessity of putting into words her various moods. Mr. Rogers had held for a number of years before his death a responsible position in a bank down town. He had left his widow some money and a few shares of stock in various corporations that brought her a steady, but small, income. By practice of rigid economy Mrs. Rogers could have lived in fairly comfortable circumstances but she was unwilling to do this. She had married young and was of a more progressive nature than her brother, although she understood Jean as well as had Margot. After her husband’s death Mrs. Rogers had taken a course in manicuring, massaging and the treatment of the hair and scalp. She then had opened a small “beauty parlour,” from which she derived a small income after all expenses were paid. Best of all, it kept her busy, and that was of greater importance to her than the money she earned. With a widowed sister of her husband she kept a small flat near Lenox Avenue, and it was to this she welcomed Mimi.⁠ ⁠…

The morning after her arrival Mimi had a long talk with her aunt.

“You’ve had a hard time, Mimi,” the older woman said. “You’ve made what people call a serious mistake⁠—it’s not for me to judge you nor am I going to. If you did, you’ve paid for it⁠—and you’ve done a mighty brave thing, to my way of thinking, in sticking it out as you have. Your problem now as I see it is to forget the past and decide what you’re going to do with your future. You’re young yet⁠—just twenty-one, aren’t you?⁠—you’re much better-looking than the average. The best part of your life’s ahead of you. The question you’ve got to decide is what you’re going to do with it, make it fruitful and full and happy? Or let the past swallow you up?”

She paused while Mimi sat in thought.

“Jean⁠—and his future count much more than mine, Aunt Sophie.”

“Yes, I know how you feel. What I’m going to say may sound mighty hard and unfeeling but you know I don’t feel that way. With Jean you’ll be so handicapped you’ll settle into a rut out of which you’ll probably never emerge. He’s well fed, he’s sheltered, he’s clothed, he’s being trained, educated. He hasn’t your care and training, I know, but working all day, you wouldn’t be able to give him much attention if he were with you.⁠ ⁠… In Philadelphia you by some miracle were able to avoid meddling inquiry about Jean’s parentage. Here you wouldn’t be so successful, I know. There are gossips everywhere⁠—and in every race. So my advice is to let Jean stay there a few years, run down to see him whenever you can afford it, and get to the place where you can have Jean with you again. And⁠—who knows?⁠—perhaps the right man⁠—”

“No, no, Aunt Sophie. That’s all done for now. I’m through with men⁠—”

Mrs. Rogers smiled. “You say that now. But wait awhile. Youth and especially youth like yours can work wonders. Standards are changing⁠—New York isn’t New Orleans or Atlanta⁠—the man who may come may have sense enough to see what’s back of your⁠—well, your so-called misfortune. Men are simple creatures after all though we women make of them in our own minds an insoluble riddle.”

Wise in the ways of the world, tolerant and understanding of human foibles and weaknesses, Mrs. Rogers smiled reminiscently.

“I’ve seen lots of things in my time, Mimi, and I’ve learned a lot of things, too. There are some people whose notion of getting along in the world is to butt their brains out against the walls that come up in front of them. Others go to the other extreme and dodge every obstacle, taking the easiest way out. Maybe they’re both right⁠—but I doubt it. The best way is to hold on to your ideals, yield only when you have to, but keep that thing we call our soul intact, no matter what we go up against.”

She toyed with the handle of her coffee-cup ruminatively.

“Take men, for example. Mr. Rogers and I had our times of disagreement, every married couple does. Much as I loved him, there were times when he irritated me so I could almost cheerfully have choked him. But I learned soon how to handle him⁠—and when all’s said and done, all men are alike⁠—they differ in little ways but, by and large, they’re the same. One of the things I learned was this⁠—never, never argue with a man. On the other hand, don’t fall into agreement too easily with his opinions. If you always insist you’re right⁠—even if you are and you know it⁠—he’ll think you stubborn and mulish and you stir up all sorts of stubbornness in him. And if you always agree with him he’ll think you’re soft and weak and silly. But if you express an opinion different from what you’re sure is right and then⁠—not too easily let him convince you of the error of your reasoning⁠—then, my dear, he’ll be putty in your hands!”

“But suppose he should have the same opinion as your wrong one⁠—what then?” Mimi inquired, interested in spite of herself in the philosophy her aunt was unfolding.

“Then exercise a woman’s right⁠—the privilege of changing her mind. But you won’t have to do that often⁠—man likes to prove his self-assumed masculine superiority too much to realize how you’re handling him.”

“That sounds dangerously like opportunism⁠—er⁠—it might even be called deceit,” Mimi laughed.

“Yes, I suppose it can,” Mrs. Rogers frankly admitted. “But life’s like that⁠—you can go tilting at windmills and getting knocked over for your pains or you can adapt yourself to the things you find around you. After all, the important thing is to work out for one’s own guidance the philosophy in keeping with one’s ideas and ideals and then extract from life all the happiness one can without destroying what’s more important than everything else⁠—one’s inner self. When that’s gone, then you can have every material thing there is⁠—and you’ll know misery such as even you have never experienced or ever will know.⁠ ⁠…”

The new life she was ushered into through Aunt Sophie seemed by comparison with her experiences since she left Atlanta almost idyllic to Mimi. Through her aunt’s influence, she secured work sewing, the only thing she could do by which she could earn money. But for this she had a certain gift. She loved the feel of silks and satins and chiffons; the finer the fabric, the more she liked to handle it and make it into alluring garments. All day she worked and in the evenings she either stayed at home and made dresses and other garments for herself to replace the worn things she had brought to New York, or with her aunt she walked through the streets of Harlem or rode on the bus down Fifth Avenue. Occasionally this schedule was varied by a visit to the theatre, which Mimi loved. A new world was opening to her and in it she found greater happiness than she had believed she would ever know again. These unfolded before her eyes a gloriously fascinating scene and she sometimes felt as though a giant scroll were being unwound for her own amusement and interest. This joy was added to by the modest yet steady progress she was making towards reclaiming Jean. Each week she added to the little sum in the bank. At times she seemed to be making tragically little headway, at times she was delighted at the speed with which the dollars accumulated.

Most interesting to her was the transition she saw going on around her in Harlem. Gradually yet surely there was being builded a Negro city here in northern Manhattan. For hours she would sit silent, listening with a strange eagerness to the stories her aunt told her of her own people in New York. She insisted that Mrs. Rogers take her to the sections where Negroes had lived in years past; they wandered through Broome and Spring Streets, where Negroes had lived before the Civil War, through Sullivan and Bleecker Streets and Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village, now settled thickly with Italians, among them little groups of coloured people who had never lived anywhere else.

But neither of these settlements nor the former habitats in the Twenties and Thirties interested her nearly so much as the section which Negroes had but lately quitted for Harlem. She made her aunt tell her of the Maceo and Marshall’s and other rendezvous of Negro and white musicians and writers and bohemians. She asked many questions about Williams and Walker, about Aida Overton, Jim Europe, Buddy Gilmore who served as model for trap drummers in all the orchestras, Ernest Hogan, Cole and Johnson, and many others of the stars of the stage. Mrs. Rogers had lived near the Marshall and had known everybody who was worth knowing. She told Mimi of the brilliant Sunday nights when they used to dine to the music of a Negro orchestra at Marshall’s, when one was always sure of finding interesting companions and acquaintances. She told of this orchestra, the members of which played and sang and danced and established the vogue out of which sprang the modern cabaret. Mimi wished fervidly she had been a part of this brilliant scene, might have known in the flesh these of whom she had heard so often even in New Orleans.

She was new enough to this growth to enable her to see how it formed itself and gradually spread over a greater territory. It seemed that every month saw the opening up to coloured tenants and buyers of new blocks. A group of white property-owners became alarmed and formed a holding company to buy all property occupied by Negro tenants and eject them. This step was promptly met by a countermove on the part of an intelligent coloured real-estate dealer who formed a Negro realty company to purchase for coloured tenants apartment houses of the best class. Then came panic among the whites, who deserted houses long before there was any invasion of their neighbourhoods by coloured tenants. Prices dropped and Negroes reaped the benefit by buying at these figures. The district spread with increasing rapidity and the new city was definitely in the making.⁠ ⁠…

Mimi kept track of these changes through the interesting circle of friends which frequented her Aunt Sophie’s house. There were types she had not known before⁠—business men who had a broad vision of the city that was to be, men who were eager, of course, to make money but who made personal gain secondary to the deep love of race and pride in the advances of that race toward a more secure foothold than was theirs in most parts of the country. There were the wives of these men, some of them of small minds fixed on nothing but dress and gossip and petty, unimportant social affairs, but others of them intelligent and valuable aids to their husbands. Some of the women were in business for themselves like Mrs. Rogers and they were no less shrewd and farseeing than the men, in a number of cases more so. It was through these and their conversations, to which was added her own deductions and observations, that she saw the thing which interested her develop. This live, pulsating, vigorous movement fascinated her, for it gave her interests which kept her mind alert, and free from too great concentration on her own problems.

So too, in addition to Aunt Sophie’s friends, who soon became her friends as well, she and her aunt found great joy in modest excursions down town to the theatres and greater happiness in music. They purchased the cheapest seats available and climbed the innumerable stairs at the Metropolitan or at Carnegie Hall to hear a favourite opera or singer. To Mimi these were as drugs or liquor to addicts⁠—they swept her up, up above her narrow, difficult existence to a world where cares and sorrows and toils did not exist, where there was an ecstatic abandon to the intoxicating music that thrilled her so. She would have enjoyed the music under any circumstances but it gave her greater happiness because she knew she could not afford even these inexpensive and harmless debauches. It was her aunt who urged her to take them, who frequently paid for the tickets, telling Mimi they had been given to her because of Mimi’s insistence upon bearing an equal share of all costs of their journeys. On this point they often had good-natured quarrels⁠—Mimi had a violent hatred of sponging, of feeling under obligations to any person, even to one so near as her aunt. She knew her aunt had obligations she must meet, rental of her apartment and shop, the current expenses at both places, the care of her sister-in-law, a chronic invalid who seldom left her room and who played as little a part in the household as the decrepit chair in the closet on which old newspapers were piled. She was unwilling to add further to her aunt’s burdens and insisted upon paying for her room and board as though she had been merely a boarder.⁠ ⁠…

Another spring came and went, this time a happier one than Mimi had known for several years, merged imperceptibly into summer, when the only variations she permitted to her regular routine of work were trips to Coney Island with her aunt and some of their friends or rides down town and back of an evening on the Fifth Avenue buses. Mimi had decided that she could never make the progress which was so necessary if she continued only to do plain sewing. She always had a knack for devising new and unusual designs, many of them impractical but all of them touched with a distinctiveness that separated them from other clothes. She began in the fall a course in designing at a trade school, taking the course in the evenings. Despite the uneventfulness of her life and the steadiness of her application to the uninspiring routine, her health improved, colour returned to her cheeks, and her face lost its worried, haggard look. For Mimi was sustained by the goal towards which she was pushing⁠—all else seemed trivial and unimportant beside the reaching of the day when she could bring Petit Jean to her again.