in Springfield, Massachusetts, at that moment, Bart Judson, a grown man, a businessman, too interested in the Almighty Dollar to give any thought to a wife, was certainly giving no thought to an eleven-year-old hell-raiser way down South. But for Bart, whose inescapable destiny this unknown hoyden was to be, it might have been better if her sisters had never been born.
CLEO ARRIVED in Springfield three years later. She and Josie reached their teens within a month of each other. Cleo became the Kennedy kitchen help and caught her hair up in a bright bandana to keep it out of the cooking. Josie caught her hair up, too, but with pins and combs in the fashion. She put on a long dress and learned to pour tea in the parlor. Cleo learned to call her Miss Josephine, and never said anything that was harder.
Providence appeared as an elderly spinster, a northern lady seeking sun for her sciatica. Cleo’s way home lay past her boarding place. She was entranced by Cleo’s beauty as she returned from work, her hair flying free, the color still staining her cheeks from the heat of the cookstove and the fire in her heart, and her eyes sea-green from her sullen anger at working in the white folks’ kitchen.
Miss Peterson, hating to see this sultry loveliness ripen in the amoral atmosphere of the South, urged Mama to let her take Cleo North. Mama considered it an answer to prayer. With Cleo getting so grown, Mama’s heart stayed in her mouth. She didn’t know what minute Cleo might disgrace herself. The wildness in the child might turn to wantonness in the girl. And that would kill Pa. Better for him if she sent Cleo North with this strict-looking spinster.
Cleo considered going North an adventure. Miss Josephine, who had never been outside of Carolina, would turn green with envy. In her secret sessions with her heartsick sisters, Cleo promised to send for them as soon as she got rich. She did not know how she was going to do it, but this boastful promise was more important than the performance.
She had thought she was going to night school when she reached the North. But her conscientious custodian, seeing that Cleo looked just as vividly alive in Springfield as she had looked in South Carolina, decided against permitting her to walk down darkened streets alone. There were too many temptations along the way in the guise of coachmen and butlers and porters.
Cleo’s time, between her easy chores, was spent in training her tongue to a northern twist, in learning to laugh with a minimum show of teeth, and in memorizing a new word in the dictionary every day.
The things that Cleo never had to be taught were how to hold her head high, how to scorn sin with men, and how to keep her left hand from knowing what her right hand was doing.
She saw Bart Judson six months after her arrival, on one of the few occasions that she was let out of her cloister. This brief encounter, with a plate-glass window between them, made no impression on either participant. The wheels of their inseparable destiny were revolving slowly. For shortly thereafter Bart was to be on his way to Boston. And not for five years more was Cleo to follow, and then with no knowledge that Bart Judson had preceded her.
As they stared disinterestedly at each other, he seeing only a pretty, half-grown, countrified girl, she seeing only a shirt-sleeved man with a mustache, and neither recognizing Fate, the disappointed goddess had half a mind to change their charted course. Then with habitual perversity thought better of it.
Cleo had come to a halt before a store front, where an exquisite pile of polished fruit was arrayed on a silver tray, the sole and eye-compelling window display. Two men were busy inside the store, one, a fair-skinned man whom Cleo mistook for white and the proprietor, was waiting on the customer, the other man, obviously the colored help, was restocking the counters. The colored man stared briefly, as did Cleo. Then her eyes moved to a wide arch which made convenient access to an ice-cream parlor next door.
Two retail stores on busy State Street was the distance Virginia-born Bart had come in his lucky boots on his way to the banana docks of the Boston Market. Cleo, with ten cents burning a hole in her pocket and her throat parched for a fancy dish of ice cream, slowly walked away, because she wasn’t certain that the owner wanted colored customers. And, as a matter of fact, Bart didn’t.
When he and Cleo met five years later, again it was pure chance. But this time Fate flung them headlong at each other, and for Bart, at least, there was no mistaking that he had met the woman he wanted for his wife.
Cleo was sent to Boston by the relatives of her Springfield benefactress when the old lady’s lingering illness was inevitably leading her to the grave. The relatives rallied around her, for there were always cases of elderly people deciding to leave their estates to faithful servants. They arrived en masse, for there were cases, too, of elderly people deciding that one devoted relative was more deserving than the rest.
They overflowed the small house. There was no room for Cleo, and also no need, for the women industriously cooked and cleaned, went errands, and wrote letters. One of the letters was to a Boston friend of Miss Peterson, who knew Cleo slightly from her occasional visits to Springfield. She was importuned to give shelter to this young Negro girl. With Christian charity, she promptly did so.
She shared her home with a nephew, whom she had raised and educated. The young man, coming of age, was not grateful. He wanted to get married. He intended to leave home. He was so obdurate about these matters that his aunt, Miss Boorum, was nearly resigned to spending her declining years alone, regretting the sacrifice that had caused her spinsterhood.
Cleo seemed a light in the gathering gloom. She was southern, she was colored. From what Miss Boorum had read of southern colored people they were devoted to what they quaintly called “my white folks,” and quite disdainful of their own kind, often referring to them as “niggers.” They liked to think of themselves as an integral part of the family, and preferred to die in its bosom rather than any place else. It was to be hoped that Cleo would show the same sterling loyalty.
In Boston Cleo settled into the same routine that she had endured in Springfield. She was indifferent to the change. One old white woman looked just like any other old white woman to her. Only difference was Miss Boorum wore false teeth that slipped up and down when she talked. She paid the same five dollars a month, the sum that Cleo had been receiving, obliquely, since she was sixteen. It was not considered wages. The amount was not the thing that mattered so much as the spirit that prompted it. Though Cleo’s duties were similar to a servant’s, she was considered a ward. She was fed and clothed, and given a place at table and a chair in the parlor, except when there was company. At such times she put on an apron, held her proud head above the level of everybody’s eyes, and wished they would all drop dead.
Both her Springfield and Boston protectresses felt that Cleo was better off without money. Each month Miss Boorum, as had her predecessor, sent five dollars to Mama affixed to a little note in an aging hand full of fancy flourishes that Mama spent a day deciphering. These custodians of Cleo’s character had no wish to teach her to save. Nothing, they knew, is a greater inducement to independent action than knowing where you can put your hand on a bit of cash.
Their little notes reported to Mama on Cleo’s exemplary behavior. But Cleo was neither good nor bad. She was in a state of suspension. She knew she was paying penance for all the joyous wildness of her childhood. She had been exiled to learn the discipline that Mama’s punishments had not taught her. She did not mind these years of submission any more than she had minded Mama strapping her. If you were bad, you got punished. But you had had your fun. And that was what counted. These meek years would not last forever. The follies of childhood were sweet sins that did not merit eternal damnation. This was the period of instruction that was preparing her for adulthood. Yet she knew she was not changing. She was merely learning guile.
She
