The Ways of White Folks Read online

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.

  III

  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.

  IV

  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 p
lay 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.

  Oceola returned North to prepare for her New York concert in the fall. She wrote Mrs. Ellsworth at Bar Harbor that her doctor boy-friend was putting in one more summer on the railroad, then in the autumn he would intern at Atlanta. And Oceola said that he had asked her to marry him. Lord, she was happy!

  It was a long time before she heard from Mrs. Ellsworth. When the letter came, it was full of long paragraphs about the beautiful music Oceola had within her power to give the world. Instead, she wanted to marry and be burdened with children! Oh, my dear, my dear!

  Oceola, when she read it, thought she had done pretty well knowing Pete this long and not having children. But she wrote back that she didn’t see why children and music couldn’t go together. Anyway, during the present depression, it was pretty hard for a beginning artist like herself to book a concert tour—so she might just as well be married awhile. Pete, on his last run in from St. Louis, had suggested that they have the wedding at Christmas in the South. “And he’s impatient, at that. He needs me.”

  This time Mrs. Ellsworth didn’t answer by letter at all. She was back in town in late September. In November, Oceola played at Town Hall. The critics were kind, but they didn’t go wild. Mrs. Ellsworth swore it was because of Pete’s influence on her protegee.

  “But he was in Atlanta,” Oceola said.

  “His spirit was here,” Mrs. Ellsworth insisted. “All the time you were playing on that stage, he was here, the monster! Taking you out of yourself, taking you away from the piano.”

  “Why, he wasn’t,” said Oceola. “He was watching an operation in Atlanta.”

  But from then on, things didn’t go well between her and her patron. The white lady grew distinctly cold when she received Oceola in her beautiful drawing room among the jade vases and amber cups worth thousands of dollars. When Oceola would have to wait there for Mrs. Ellsworth, she was afraid to move for fear she might knock something over—that would take ten years of a Harlemite’s wages to replace, if broken.

  Over the tea cups, the aging Mrs. Ellsworth did not talk any longer about the concert tour she had once thought she might finance for Oceola, if no recognized bureau took it up. Instead, she spoke of that something she believed Oceola’s fingers had lost since her return from Europe. And she wondered why any one insisted on living in Harlem.

  “I’ve been away from my own people so long,” said the girl, “I want to live right in the middle of them again.”

  Why, Mrs. Ellsworth wondered further, did Oceola, at her last concert in a Harlem church, not stick to the classical items listed on the program. Why did she insert one of her own variations on the spirituals, a syncopated variation from the Sanctified Church, that made an old colored lady rise up and cry out from her pew, “Glory to God this evenin’! Yes! Hallelujah! Whooo-oo!” right at the concert? Which seemed most undignified to Mrs. Ellsworth, and unworthy of the teachings of Philippe. And furthermore, why was Pete coming up to New York for Thanksgiving? And who had sent him the money to come?

  “Me,” said Oceola. “He doesn’t make anything interning.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Ellsworth, “I don’t think much of him.” But Oceola didn’t seem to care what Mrs. Ellsworth thought, for she made no defense.


  Thanksgiving evening, in bed, together in a Harlem apartment, Pete and Oceola talked about their wedding to come. They would have a big one in a church with lots of music. And Pete would give her a ring. And she would have on a white dress, light and fluffy, not silk. “I hate silk,” she said. “I hate expensive things.” (She thought of her mother being buried in a cotton dress, for they were all broke when she died. Mother would have been glad about her marriage.) “Pete,” Oceola said, hugging him in the dark, “let’s live in Atlanta, where there are lots of colored people, like us.”

  “What about Mrs. Ellsworth?” Pete asked. “She coming down to Atlanta for our wedding?”

  “I don’t know,” said Oceola.

  “I hope not, ’cause if she stops at one of them big hotels. I won’t have you going to the back door to see her. That’s one thing I hate about the South—where there’re white people, you have to go to the back door.”

  “Maybe she can stay with us,” said Oceola. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Pete. “You want to get lynched?”

  But it happened that Mrs. Ellsworth didn’t care to attend the wedding, anyway. When she saw how love had triumphed over art, she decided she could no longer influence Oceola’s life. The period of Oceola was over. She would send checks, occasionally, if the girl needed them, besides, of course, something beautiful for the wedding, but that would be all. These things she told her the week after Thanksgiving.

  “And Oceola, my dear, I’ve decided to spend the whole winter in Europe. I sail on December eighteenth. Christmas—while you are marrying—I shall be in Paris with my precious Antonio Bas. In January, he has an exhibition of oils in Madrid. And in the spring, a new young poet is coming over whom I want to visit Florence, to really know Florence. A charming white-haired boy from Omaha whose soul has been crushed in the West. I want to try to help him. He, my dear, is one of the few people who live for their art—and nothing else.… Ah, such a beautiful life!… You will come and play for me once before I sail?”