XVII

Again Mimi had the feeling she was closing a book in her life and opening a new one. Just like a novel by Rolland, she thought. Or, better, her life to her was like one of those Harlem apartments of seemingly interminable length, with no hall and with each room opening into the next one. Railroad flats, she had heard them called. She felt she was always opening the door of another room, passing through it, then opening and closing behind her, never to be reopened, the door of the next cubicle. Those years of childhood in New Orleans had been the first one, happy and carefree years when she was more content than ever afterwards. The next had been Atlanta, then Philadelphia, then Harlem. Four separate lives, and here was a new one opening before her. She wondered how many more through which she must pass before the final exit. Sometimes now she wished she could skip all the rest and make that last step, wherever it might lead. In her moments of greatest depression she thought of suicide but these morbid thoughts did not remain with her long. Petit Jean and thoughts of his future would have driven them away even if she had not felt a deep aversion to death by her own hand.

From a newspaper advertisement she was able to secure a small room with a private family, living in the lower Nineties, respectable but commonplace. In the matter of linear feet and rods and miles she was not far distant from Harlem but in other ways she might as well have been halfway round the world from the scenes she had once known. Here the towering apartment houses, most of them five or six stories in height and of cream brick and with terra-cotta or stone trimmings, housed countless numbers of families, belching them forth from seven to nine in the morning as small business men and stenographers and manicurists and clerks dashed madly for the nearest subway or elevated station. At the little newsstands they would snatch, according to tastes, copies of the World or Times, though, more than any other purveyor of the news, they bought issues of “the paper for people who think.” Sleek and well fed, powdered and rouged and lipsticked with expert hand, they were swallowed up by the yawning and insatiable pits and were whirled to downtown jobs by the rushing, roaring subways.

Later in the day swarms of children poured forth from the same apartments, in winter bound schoolward, in summer to the nearest park or the street, chaperoned by quarrelsome mothers or older sisters. Yet later came elaborately coiffured and gowned young women, invariably pretty, who toiled not nor spun. Evening came and the Gargantuan beehives reversed the process and swallowed again the hordes they had spewed forth in the morning hours. Phonographs blared raucously, voices were raised in babels of song or quarrelling or loud laughter. Midnight, and the din died down. Sleep, engulfing and obliterating as a candle-snuffer, brought peace, broken only when a late and noisy party was quieted momentarily by sleepy, irritated voices shouting: “Hey, cut out the noise down there!”

It was in one of these huge rabbit warrens that Mimi found shelter. The house she lived in looked down upon most of the others in the block⁠—it boasted in the entrance hallway rows of dusty but imposing palms, set in tubs painted a bilious green, and between these tropic relics stood uncomfortable-looking chairs of imitation needlepoint. No one seemed aware of the purpose of these chairs, which always reminded Mimi of the photographs she had seen of the electric chair at Sing Sing, for not even the oldest inhabitant of the house, who had been living there now for a year and a half, had ever seen anyone sitting in them. But they added class, tone, éclat. And they likewise added a few dollars to the rent of each apartment in the house so adorned.

She had not wanted to leave Harlem. Mrs. Rogers had argued, pleaded, almost wept. At times Mimi had been on the point of weakening, had almost thought seriously of trying to stick it out. Each time that she had almost convinced herself that this was the wisest and only course, some new evidence of the ordeal would come to her and make her vow anew that she would not attempt to live it down. Years before she had heard a story which Booker Washington had told in which he likened Negroes to a basket of crabs when one of them had with great energy climbed almost to the top of the basket and freedom, the others less progressive than he would reach up with their claws and pull him back to their own level. This had seemed to her then merely an effective story coined for oratorical purposes, but now its applicability was forced upon her with painful truth.

Though she had to a considerable degree recovered from the intense consciousness of race which her experiences in the riot at Atlanta had engendered in her, yet Mimi, despite the shortcomings which she saw in her own people, had a loyalty to and an affection for them that was almost an obsession. She never spoke of this feeling, for she felt that to those who understood, explanations were unnecessary, while to those who needed an explanation, whatever she might say would have been obscure and difficult of understanding. In other words, to her it was as useless for her to attempt the depiction of her loyalty as it would be for a man to maintain loudly and persistently the faithfulness of his wife. She had always felt an instinctive distrust of those Negroes who boasted of their loyalty and devotion to their race. It had seemed to her that if such faithfulness were genuine and unselfish it needed restatement no more than did the affirmation by a woman that she was respectable.

Thus her passing from the race seemed to Mimi persecution greater than any white people had ever visited upon coloured people⁠—the very intolerance of her own people had driven her from them. And in the deception she would have to practise as one ostensibly white, she felt she was doing a mean and dishonourable thing. She would do so, she determined, for there was no other course open to her. But in her new life she missed the spontaneity, the ready laughter, the naturalness of her own. She saw morose, worried faces. Here there was little of that softness of speech to which she was accustomed. Here there was an obsession with material things that crowded out the naturalness that made life for her tolerable. I’ve made my bed now, she reflected, and there’s nothing for me to do except lie in it.⁠ ⁠…

She did not experience the difficulty in securing employment that she had feared. There had been vague rumblings of discord and war in Europe, but all that seemed very far away, too distant ever to affect America. The mad rush that ushered in Easter and spring, the return like homing pigeons of the wealthy from Palm Beach, the momentary pause in New York before taking wing again for Europe or the mountains or the seashore, taxed to the limit the shops of the modistes and milliners, the makers of boots and gowns and habiliments of a thousand kinds for those vaguely classed as “society.”

Deft fingers flew, the needles of sewing-machines flashed in and out like pelting raindrops of silver in a summer shower. Yards and bolts and tons of filmy silks and crêpes de Chine and organdie turned overnight into dainty dresses. A long, nastily cold winter was gasping its last long breath and little wisps of softer breezes fanned the cheeks of the scurrying throngs, telling them spring was near.

The unforeseen demand for new and more clothes brought with it the need of workers. Mimi, having set her face on the new life she had chosen, determined she would start at the smartest places in seeking employment and work gradually downwards until she had gained what she wished. She knew the names and addresses of the most exclusive modistes, the shops where gowns and frocks were purveyed to the smartest-dressed women of New York and Oshkosh and Sioux City. To her surprised delight she was successful at the first place to which she applied⁠—at Francine’s⁠—known wherever the best women’s clothes were known.

Francine’s name was greeted with that tone of respectful homage granted only to the names of Paquin and Lucile and Worth and Bendel and Jean Patou and Frances. At Francine’s one entered into an atmosphere where milady’s attire, the choice of material and model, the selection of millinery, was raised to the plane of a religious ceremony. Soft-voiced priestesses respectfully assisted in the rites, making suggestions in tones which were not too respectful nor yet too haughty. Purchasers of models from Francine, even though they had bought there for many years, were never allowed to forget through subtle yet unmistakable means that they were after a fashion being shown especial favour when they were permitted to enter Francine’s door.

Madame Francine herself was the high priestess of the temple of feminine adornment. Only the most favoured customers saw her or were served by her after their first visit. If that customer were of great distinction either through family connections or wealth, she might be allowed the honour of Madame’s personal service. But if she were of less than the topmost bough of society or if the wealth she represented was expressed in less than seven figures, then she never saw Madame Francine after her initial entrance into the temple.

For Madame Francine knew the value of a stage setting much better than most of the theatrical producers whose lights flashed nightly a few blocks westward. She knew that the place for her temple was then to be only in the upper Thirties or lower Forties, just a step from the Avenue. She knew the supreme importance of keeping from the transaction of bartering every least suggestion of buying and selling. She knew the necessity of proper first impressions upon the purchaser, and of maintaining that impression.

One entered her place after a magnificently apparelled doorman had opened one’s carriage or motorcar door. Inside, one found oneself in what in reality was a salon, free of course from every tiniest suspicion of vulgarity, of trade. The carpet was of black and grey, the woodwork of a grey in which there was the faintest suggestion of tan, the draperies were of grey and mulberry. The shaded lights from the wall sconces and ceiling gave no harsh glare, the illumination furnished being only just enough to combine the needed air of respect for the wonders beyond and above and the light necessary for the rites of conversation in lowered tones. Chairs and couches of delicate build matched or purposely contrasted with the colours in rug and draperies. Soft-voiced, slim and perfectly gowned priestesses glided noiselessly forward to greet one and inquire one’s wants as though being welcomed into the home of the priestess⁠—welcomed, perhaps, not by the mistress of the home, but by a poorer relation of the mistress who lived there. On an onyx table there was perhaps a hat perched upon a stand. Or in a softly lighted built-in case there rested a rarely exquisite and beautiful purse. Or a bottle, richly carved, of perfume. Or a bit of gold or silver filigree, of amber and lapis from a dim little shop on the Ponte Vecchio. Or a miraculously carved comb for milady’s coiffure. In solitary splendour it reposed⁠—its grandeur not a whit less than that accorded a string of matchless pearls in one of the temples devoted to jewels in the Avenue nearby.

And when the visitor had made her wants known she was conducted, if her need was of gowns or tailored suits or hats, up the winding marble stairway to the miniature theatre on the floor above. She was aided in the ascent by the balustrade of metal covered with mull velvet.

Madame Francine’s sense of the appropriate and impressive setting rose to its heights in the room she entered at the top of these stairs. Here the rugs were of grey, the woodwork and walls and draperies blending unobtrusively in the colours of the showroom below. On a marble mantel to the left stood in solemn dignity a marvellously fashioned clock, so beautifully made, one felt it almost a profanation that it should measure unimportant things like minutes and hours. To each side of it there stood a delicately carved candlestick of shiny brass, their brightness matching the framework of the long table with marble top on which rested sketchbooks of designs and models. The tiny stage fitted with footlights and drops, its flooring of squares of black and white marble, glowed with impressive and anticipatory dignity. Daintily clad and perfumed and manicured ladies lolled at ease upon divans or in straight-backed chairs, according to tastes and sizes, while mannequins pirouetted and posed and paraded around and across the stage. Every detail had been minutely scrutinized, every bit of unobtrusive allure had been utilized to induce the dawdling audience to the point of conviction and purchase. Instinctively one lowered one’s voice⁠—the temple must not be profaned. One bought, too, for few were strong enough to resist the feeling that all this had been designed and executed solely for one’s own private delectation, and certainly one could not be guilty of base ingratitude through failure to render homage by ordering one or more of the creations displayed.⁠ ⁠…

But all this magnificence was terra incognita to Mimi for many, many months after she had begun work as a finisher at Francine’s. There were four other floors occupied by workrooms and tailoring-rooms and lunchroom. There was the basement used as an office and stockroom and shipping-room. In the upper stories the finishers and drapers and drapers’ assistants and fitters and clerks and stenographers and tailors moved and had their being. These were never seen by customers, nor were the first two floors ever seen by any employees save the sales persons, except when viewed in hasty peeps after hours. These workers entered through rear or side doors, ascended to their work tables by rear elevators, saw nothing of the pageant enacted daily in the same building.

Timidly Mimi told the imposing and businesslike fitter her qualifications as a wielder of the needle and thimble. In these less dignified purlieus there was no need of lowered voices, and the rush of work in the pre-Easter season had shortened tempers and sharpened tongues. Mimi would have fled madly from the scene had not she so eagerly wanted work, and work at Francine’s. Timidly, yet desperately, she emphasized her ability and experience. She clinched her claim to fitness by her training at the Manhattan Trade School, though the diffidence with which she advanced this argument would have defeated its purpose had not there been need of a finisher at Francine’s and a very pressing need on that particular day when Mimi made her application.

Deftly, quickly, she did the work assigned her. From eight-thirty each weekday morning until five-thirty she plied her needle, head bent low at the table given her in the long workroom on the fourth floor. She seldom spoke to any of the other thirty girls except when addressed directly, but she stole many a furtive glance at them, envying their pert assurance, their complete lack of awe at their surroundings save when the eyes of the fitter or a very rare visit from Francine herself hushed their whispered chatter. “Talking and work don’t go together⁠—one or the other will be neglected and always it will be the work that suffers,” the fitter had told Mimi on her first day. The other girls obeyed this injunction⁠—to have done otherwise would have brought reproof and in time dismissal. But no sooner did the fitter leave the room than they gushed forth a torrent of whispered comments, of subdued snickering. And even when the coldly efficient fitter was with them but her eyes not upon them, they found ways of communication to relieve the tedium of silence.

Because her wages were small as a finisher and because her need of work was great, Mimi obeyed implicitly the instructions given her. She made few friends, and even these few were kept at a distance. Only one girl progressed beyond the barrier Mimi imposed. Sylvia Smith was the name she gave Mimi, and their tables adjoined.

“How do you like Old Faithful?” Sylvia inquired as she led Mimi to the lunchroom where the girls were provided with tea or coffee at noon while they ate the lunches they had brought.

“Old Faithful?” Mimi, puzzled, inquired.

“Yeah⁠—the fitter we got,” Sylvia mumbled as she bit deep into a sandwich.

“Oh⁠—she’s very nice.”

“You don’t know her, kid. She’s a pain⁠—just wait until you do something wrong⁠—you’ll want to jump down her throat when she bawls you out with all the other girls grinning at you behind her back.”

“I hope then I’ll never make any mistakes,” Mimi murmured.

“Don’t worry, kiddo. You’ll make ’em. And the best way to handle Old Faithful is to keep your mouth shut and let her gab on until she runs out of breath. The one we had before she came was a coloured girl⁠—she knew her stuff and we didn’t try no monkey business with her, either. But she treated us like we were human⁠—”

“A coloured girl?” Mimi asked, alarm creeping into her voice.

“Yeah. Say, where you from?”

“New York, now. New Orleans was where I was born.”

“Oh⁠—I thought you talked like you was from the South. Well, up here being coloured don’t count as much as it does down your way⁠—”

Mimi hastened to disclaim the imputation in Sylvia’s voice.

“That’s all right, dearie. I wasn’t accusing you of prejudice.”

“No⁠—no, I’m not prejudiced,” was Mimi’s reply. She felt a sense of guilt at her duplicity, but at the same time Sylvia’s words gave her assurance that the task of passing would not be as difficult as she had feared.

“Race prejudice is a lot of bunk,” Sylvia was philosophizing. “Take me, for instance. I went to Manhattan Trade, too. My real name’s Bernstein⁠—but you can’t get by in some of these places if they think you’re a Jew. So my name here is ‘Smith.’ I’m starting at the bottom just like you, to learn the tricks of the trade, but some day I’m going to have my own business. You see, my mother’s French and I took after her, so I can pass for French even if I don’t speak any of that lingo. So I know what prejudice means, dearie. Some of the girls tried to get nasty when they put Miss Lawrence over us⁠—Miss Lawrence was the coloured woman⁠—but I liked her and she soon had ’em under her thumb, believe me.”

As Sylvia chattered on, Mimi felt an urge to tell her new friend that she too was sailing under false colours, but she feared to reveal this fact so early in their acquaintance. Caution urged her to remain silent though she felt she could trust Sylvia implicitly despite the fact she had seen her for the first time a few hours before. She liked Sylvia. She was slangy. She was coarse, after a fashion. But it took no very keen eye to see that beneath these externals she was made of fine stuff. Ambitious, too. Just like a Jew, Mimi thought, and though she meant nothing derogatory, she was ashamed she had used a phrase so often spoken in dispraise of Sylvia’s race. Yes, she was going to like Sylvia.

“Say, Mimi⁠—you’re French, too, aren’t you?⁠—let’s have lunch together every day. I don’t have anything to do with the rest of the girls⁠—all they think about is clothes and lovers⁠—but I like you.”

“And I like you, too, Sylvia,” Mimi shyly answered, stirred by the prompt offer of friendship.

“That’s OK, then. We’ll be real pals. And any time you want to know anything, just call on me.”

“Tell me, Sylvia, what became of Miss Lawrence⁠—the coloured woman who was a fitter? Is she still working for Francine?”

“Nope⁠—some of the girls objected to her and raised such a row she left. She’s got a place of her own in Harlem⁠—she’s married now and Francine don’t know it but a lot of these swells go all the way up there to get Miss Lawrence to do their clothes. Francine would throw a fit or two if she found it out.”⁠ ⁠…

Mimi liked her work. She started at fifteen dollars a week but before many months had passed her pay was increased. The hours were not as long as they seemed and she learned to like Sylvia more and more as each day brought forth some new sign of the determination and keen intelligence that lay back of Sylvia’s rather slangy and disrespectful manner. With Mimi there was none of the subtle antagonisms Sylvia felt towards the other girls. This hostility was born of Sylvia’s contempt for their greater polish and worldly cleverness, their air of distinction with which they aped the manners of the patrons of Francine’s whom they watched when the girls walked on the Avenue during the lunch hour. Sylvia would never have admitted it, but there was, too, envy in her heart of these among whom she felt like the proverbial ugly duckling. Mimi saw without difficulty the motives which inspired Sylvia’s distrust and dislike, but she never hinted even that she understood. Sylvia would have been hurt, pained terribly, had she felt Mimi ascribed her emotions to such sources. But whatever their source, they served as a driving power of tremendous strength in Sylvia’s life. She often told Mimi her plans and dreams, at first shyly, then freely.

“I was born way down on the East Side⁠—father and mother came here from France when they had only one child. I was the third and there were four after me⁠—no chance down there at all. So I made up my mind I was going to get somewhere and I pulled out of that hole and here I am. I had to sew on men’s clothes that mother brought home from the factory⁠—started sewing when I was eight years old. I didn’t get much education, and living down there, I soon lost what little I had, got to talking rough and using slang⁠—oh, you needn’t try to save my feelings⁠—I know I’m rough as a dockhand. But I’m going to night school⁠—and some day I’m going to be somebody.”

Sylvia’s face, dark and in moments of intense feeling strong with the mark of Israel upon it, lighted up as she looked down the years and saw herself sitting as Francine now did in a delicately beautiful “studio” of her own, while all around her bustled employees of Madame Sylvia.

“Take Francine, for instance. She says she is French, but you and I are lots more French than she is⁠—every time she opens her mouth and spills some French words, you can hear Killarney all through it. And if she can get away with it, well, I can put it over, too.”

Under Sylvia’s direction Mimi began to see new worlds in New York she had never thought of penetrating. At first to occupy her mind, later because the pursuit of knowledge was an intriguing and comforting thing, she began to spend her evenings at night school. She finished her course in designing, she studied French, soon regaining her old-time proficiency in the tongue which had once been more native to her than English, she took courses in English literature and economics and psychology. With Sylvia she attended lectures at the Rand School and at Cooper Union. Most of the theories advanced there seemed to her visionary and impractical⁠—the burning intensity of most of the students and hearers frightened and repelled her. Like alchemists of old searching, probing, seeking diligently for the mysterious and elusive secret by which baser metals could be changed into gold, so many of these seemed intent on finding some panacea which could be applied willy-nilly to all problems, economic, social, political, and in a flash solve them all. Though she kept her thoughts to herself, nevertheless the test tube in which she tried all these solutions and solvers was in their reactions towards Mimi’s own people⁠—her own, even though she had deserted them. Do they include consideration of the Negro as a human being just like themselves when they talk glibly of the “comrades” and “the brotherhood of man”? was the question she found herself constantly asking.

It was at the very beginning of Mimi’s work at Francine’s that an Austrian archduke was assassinated at Sarajevo. Austria, Serbia, Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Japan⁠—one by one they tumbled into the whirlpool of slaughter and blood and bullets. Headlines screamed and front pages were filled with stories of Belgium invaded, of the Marne and Louvain. Francine apparently was untouched except there was more work to be done now that Paris and its energies were turned to the making of guns instead of gowns. Mimi was deeply moved by the stories of scores, hundreds, thousands of deaths, but in time she scanned the headlines as she hurried home in the evenings on the subway with the calm acceptance of these horrors which long familiarity brings. Sometimes she remembered the phrase they had used in Atlanta when coloured people were subjected to indignities and injustice⁠—“You can get used to being hung if you’re only hung often enough.” Or, at other times, she accepted the stories of slaughter with a fatalistic, a not altogether hopeless philosophy which might be summed up in the words: “Oh, well, it’s white people killing white people⁠—the more they kill, the better the chance for coloured peoples.” But most of the time she thought of these things not at all, but centred her attentions on her work, her studies, the slow accumulation of enough money to bring Petit Jean to her.