with a Negro flavor, came down from his study in acute anxiety. Here was the stranger his common sense had commanded to come. Here was the man who would set him free. And his eyes were hot with hatred. Bart saw the young man’s anguish. He saw that Cleo did not see it. Nor Miss Boorum. He had to get Cleo out of this house before the fever in the young man’s eyes spread to his loins. He could not let her be lost in one wanton night. Or her image would lie on his eyelids for the rest of his life.
All the next day he worried like a hen with one helpless chick. When his picture-making grew too intolerable, he washed off his surface sweat and went to Miss Boorum’s. He approached the house by way of the alley, hoping to find Cleo in the kitchen, where he could talk unheard. He had better luck than he bargained for. She was in the clothes yard. She had clothespins in her mouth, and was too surprised to take them out.
He began to whisper fiercely, and she only heard half of what he said, for he kept jerking his head around to see who might be coming. He told her hurriedly and harriedly that she was in great danger, a wolf was abroad in Miss Boorum’s nephew’s clothing. She was not safe, and never would be safe, so long as she stayed within reach of his clutches. She was too young to be alone in Boston. She had no mother to guide her. She needed a good man’s protection. She needed a husband. He would marry her today if she would have him. If she would have him, he would apply for a license today and marry her at City Hall at nine o’clock on Thursday morning.
If he had proposed to her any other way, if he had courted her for a longer time, she might have refused him, out of sheer contrariness. He had not frightened her with his fears. She felt that she could subdue any man with her scorn. But she wanted to get away. She couldn’t stand seeing Miss Boorum’s nephew moping around like a half-sick dog if woman hankering was what ailed him. If he ever came hankering after her, she’d stab him dead with an ice-pick. And no man on earth, let alone a white man, was worth going to hell for.
She was still so wrapped up in murderous thoughts and daring Miss Boorum’s demoralized nephew to come within a foot of her that she married Bart without thinking about it. When she found herself in her marriage bed, she let him know straightaway that she had no intention of renouncing her maidenhood for one man if she had married to preserve it from another.
Bart had expected that he would have to lead her to love with patience. He was a man of vigor and could wait without wasting for Cleo’s awakening. Some part of him was soothed and satisfied by the fact of his right to cherish her. It did not torment him to lie beside her and know that he could not possess her. He threw his energy into buying and selling. For he loved his fruit almost as much as he loved his wife. There was rich satisfaction in seeing it ripen, seeing the downiness on it, the blush on it, feeling the firmness of its flesh.
When Cleo was twenty, their sex battle began. It was not a savage fight. She did not struggle against his superior strength. She found a weapon that would cut him down quickly and cleanly. She was ice. Neither her mouth nor her body moved to meet his. The open eyes were wide with mocking at the busyness below. There was no moment when everything in her was wrenched and she was one with the man who could submerge her in himself.
Five years later, she conceived a child on a night when her body’s hunger broke down her controlled resistance. For there was no real abhorrence of sex in her. Her need of love was as urgent as her aliveness indicated. But her perversity would not permit her to weaken. She would not face the knowledge that she was incomplete in herself.
Yet now, as she walked toward the trolley stop, she was determined not to live another year without her sisters.
CLEO SAILED up Northampton Street with Judy in tow. Dark, unshaven faces split in wide grins, and low, lewd whistles issued from between thick lips. This was her daily cross to bear in this rapidly deteriorating section of Boston. The once fine houses of the rich were fast emptying of middle-class whites and filling up with lower-class blacks. The street was becoming another big road, with rough-looking loungers leaning in the doorways of decaying houses and dingy stores. Coarse conversations balanced like balls in mouths stretched wide to catch the dirty pellets and toss them to other agile word jugglers all along the way.
They kept on the lookout for Cleo because she walked proud with her eyes on a point above their bullet heads. They had sworn to a man to make her smile.
“Look away, look away,” moaned an ogling admirer. “The yeller sun has took up walking like a natchal woman.”
Roars of appreciative guffaws greeted this attempt at wit. As the laughter subsided, a falsetto voice implored, “Lawd, take me to heaven while I’m happy. You done open my eyes and I done see a host of angels coming at me. She look like fire, and she ack like ice. I’m hot, I’m cold. Oh, Lawd, have mercy on my soul.”
Twin spots glowed in Cleo’s cheeks. A stream of white-hot words erupted inside her, but did not pass the thin line of her lips. She swallowed them down and felt the spleen spread to the pit of her stomach. Men were her enemies because they were male.
The trolley wires began to hum. “Here comes the trolley,” said Cleo, with an expelled breath of profound relief. “Pick up your feet and don’t you dare fall down. If you get yourself dirty before we get to Brookline, I’ll give you to a Chinaman to eat.”
The trolley halted, and she boosted Judy aboard. She dropped a single fare in the slot — Judy was small for going on six — asked for a transfer, guided Judy down the aisle of the swaying car, and shuttled her into a window seat. She sank down beside her and fanned herself elegantly with one gloved hand, stirring no air whatever.
She looked herself now, gay and earth-rooted and intensely alive. Her gray eyes sparkled at Judy, at the slyly staring passengers, at the streets that grew cleaner and wider as the trolley left the Negro neighborhood, at the growing preponderance of white faces.
Judy’s nose was pressed against the glass. Cleo nudged her and whispered, “Judy,” what do I tell you about making your nose flat?”
Judy sighed and straightened up. The exciting street scene was a whole inch farther away. She withdrew into an injured silence and studied her reflection in the glass. It was not very clear, but she knew what she looked like. She looked like Papa.
The people on the streetcar didn’t know that. They regarded her in a way that she was quite used to. They were wondering where Cleo got her. They carefully scrutinized Cleo, then they carefully scrutinized her, and raised their eyebrows a little.
She was dark. She had Papa’s cocoa-brown skin, his soft dark eyes, and his generous nose in miniature. Cleo worked hard on her nose. She had tried clothespins, but Judy had not known what to do about breathing. Now Cleo was teaching her to keep the bridge pinched, but Judy pinched too hard, and the rush of dark blood made her nose look larger than ever.
A little white dog with a lively face and a joyful tail trotted down the street. Judy grinned and screwed around to follow him with her eyes.
Cleo hissed in her ear: “Don’t show your gums when you smile, and stop squirming. You’ve seen dogs before. Sit like a little Boston lady. Straighten your spine.”
The trolley rattled across Huntington Avenue, past the fine granite face of Symphony Hall, and continued up Massachusetts Avenue, where a cross-street gave a fair and fleeting glimpse of the Back Bay Fens, and another cross-street showed the huge dome of the magnificent mother church of Christian Science. At the corner of Boylston Street, within sight of Harvard Bridge and the highway to Cambridge, Cleo and Judy alighted to wait for the Brookline Village trolley.
Cleo
