The Wedding (17 page)

The children she gave Isaac grew older, making friendships, riding bicycles, less at her heels in her free hours home from school. The young sleep-in who took charge of them in their mother’s working hours was also much less at their beck and call. She was left to do more housework, conscientiously turning herself into the Coleses’ housekeeper so that Mrs. Dr. Coles would be able to sit with a book on her lap when she came home from school after a long day of trying to put a smattering of hygiene and an intelligent tongue into newly arrived Southern heads. The schoolteacher began to feel like a fifth wheel. Her home was taken care of, and her children were taking care of themselves. Her husband’s few requests were directed toward the willing little servant. The outlets for her femininity that the schoolteacher had been raised to expect from marriage were being closed off to her one by one.

She could have felt sorry for herself or she could have come to terms with it, and she chose to come to terms with it. With quiet objectivity, she began to adapt her instincts to another image. Slowly, with much stopping and starting and grinding of gears, her masculine genes began to function and gave her life a new direction, and made money her standard of success.

She began to buy slum property, one piece at a time, then two, then three, and in time a whole row of ramshackle multiple dwellings. Most of them had been foreclosed, and she bought them for a song, often just for the unpaid taxes. To the previous owners, disinterested inheritors, the cost of the extensive repairs necessary to make the flats livable would mean years before there was any profit in their profits.
The schoolteacher’s profits were almost immediate, though. She did not improve her properties. She did not have to, for she never had a vacancy. There was a war on, and work for everybody. Blacks were coming in droves from the South, and no decent neighborhood would have them. They did not even go there to look. They looked for the familiar, the rundown streets, the ragged houses.

They asked for no more than a room at cheap rent. This the schoolteacher gave them, in addition to inside toilets and tap water. If the hall toilets were often choked and unusable, they were still used, for they were a step up from an outhouse buzzing with greenflies. Though the water ran red from rusty pipes and couldn’t be drunk until the rust settled, it saved an old woman a lot of walking to and from a spring way yonder with a heavy pail. If the ceilings were unsightly, and sometimes a piece of plaster fell, if here and there a floor board was chinked up with rags to keep out the rats, if the roof leaked on top-floor tenants so badly that their rooms were crowded with basins, so be it. It was still a lot better than the hanging tree.

They were up North. No more lynching rope. No more burning crosses. No more walking in the gutter to let “Mr. Charlie” have the whole sidewalk. No more “Aunties,” no more “Uncles.” No more dying for want of a doctor, no more children working in the fields who didn’t know their asses from their elbows while the school bell rang for the white man’s child. Up North, a man could learn that reading and writing wouldn’t hurt anybody. A woman could learn to hope for more than she had. If they lived near the railroad tracks and the Northern air was heavy with smoke and
grime, still it filled their lungs with freedom. No hardship would drive them away. The indescribable beauty of the South would haunt them forever, though, would make the babbling old beg to go home to die, would make the young wish they could have it both ways when a measure of prosperity came.

The schoolteacher never had any vacancies. All the money that came in never had to go out. When a minor accident occurred—a step collapsed, and a tenant turned his ankle—she was prompt to replace the step and offer her apologies. She collected outgrown children’s clothes and toys for Christmas distribution. She never evicted a tenant who was between jobs, even occasionally lending him money at an interest rate much lower than a usurer would have demanded to help tide him over. Every month she would ride the trolley to the bank, her money bag full of collected rent. When she stopped in on her tenants to make her hated monthly call, she could never help being bemused by the fact that Isaac may have been at a particular apartment the night before. The door would certainly have been flung open more eagerly for him than for her, his doctor’s bag eyed with reverence for the medicine it contained and their mouths poised for excuses for use when he requested payment upon leaving. These were people who lived at the lowest level. Food came first for them, rent came next, shoes for the children came when they could, and the doctor came when he was called.

The schoolteacher grew money-rich with each influx from the South, but Isaac was only enriched with charity, a crazy commodity to peddle for cash. He worked to the dange
point of tiredness trying to keep migrants alive in their harsh adjustment to freedom’s hunger, to the numbing cold that crippled the limbs of the old, to the wet, pneumonia-riddled cold that filled the funeral parlors with fragile children in cheap caskets, to the city smoke that filled lungs not used to it and laced the lips with blood, to the epidemics that raced like wild horses, leaving no house without its wailing, to the pavements that could not be plowed and planted with purging greens to pacify a belly hard as stone from winter’s coarse and costive diet.

Against all odds, and all of Isaac’s modest expectations, the grim tide of disease and death slowly diminished under his vigilance. He was never surer of his reason for living, or of his indifference to dying. As long as he could save more lives than the one he was losing in a steady drain of stamina, he was content. From among those saved might come the great man, or the father or forefather of the great man, the man made for his time, the man that history would mark.

The doctor saved enough ghetto lives to keep the schoolteacher’s supply of employable tenants at a constant level. They were humbly grateful for her forbearance in letting them have a roof to be sick under, and while they owed the doctor their lives, a debt they could never repay, the back rent they owed the schoolteacher could be reckoned in dollars and cents. In a few years the schoolteacher had more money than anybody she knew. And everybody she knew wanted to help her spend it. She could not avoid the obligations that money brought. Though little interested in socializing, she had to give parties to showcase her affluence.

Her parties were serviced by the best caterers, whose
unhappy white waiters walked through the crowds with thinly veiled disdain. There was imported champagne, which uninstructed tongues lapped like water because it did not kick like a mule or clobber them until the morning after. The schoolteacher grew tired of spending her money on other people’s hangovers, but her exciting parties—in such contrast to her sober inclinations—had become an institution. Her friends, for whom she had real affection despite her impatience for their drunken performances, looked forward like children to the major holidays and the hospitality that she alone could provide.

She did not deny that she alone had the means to celebrate a holiday without robbing Peter to pay Paul. But she soon devised a way to do the same with more élan and without any means at all. Her Sunday reading had come to include the society papers of the metropolitan newspaper, not because she cared a whit what white society did, but because she did not want to do it differently, since some of her guests were in the employ of these seasoned socialites and knew how things should be done. In her reading, she made the discovery that in the case of an invitational charity ball an admittance fee was perfectly in order, the accepted custom being to deduct expenses from the proceeds and donate the rest to some worthy cause. This was perfect: between the half-clothed children in the ghetto where she taught school (her own sons were resident students at their father’s prep school in New England), and her renters, who raised their families on less than a living wage, she knew off the top of her head more than enough deserving names to fill the pages of the poor. Where before she had felt only irritation at the
time consumed in planning a party, organizing a charity ball gave her a feeling of purpose, an expectation that the end would justify the effort.

She was smart enough to form a committee of congenial friends. Though it was she who paid whatever bills came due in advance of the ball, and she who would have to pay out of pocket whatever bills came after the ball if the door receipts were disappointing, she encouraged her committee to feel that their enthusiasm and their ideas were as important as her bankbook. Her friends responded by tripping over each other to contact people, both those they knew well and those they knew slightly. The schoolteacher had shrewdly chosen her committee for their social position: those they knew slightly were glad to come to get to know them better, and perfectly happy to pay for the entree they had never been offered for free. In time they would be insiders too, serving on committees.

The schoolteacher chose a colored lodge for the site of her first ball, the century being too new for even a passing glance at a ballroom in a white hotel. But she and her committee transformed the bleak hall with flowers and floating streamers and soft lights, and a lot of soap and water. The evening was a smash. It was the biggest event in the short and lively history of colored society in New York. No one with a dollar to spare or a dress to wear had stayed away. The money raised exceeded all estimates, and it would do so much good in so many areas of painful need—for babies sleeping in bureau drawers, older children sleeping in bags on a dusty floor, school-aged children without shoes, cripples without crutches, and eyes half blind without glasses. So
many needed so much that once the schoolteacher started helping a little she became overwhelmed by how much more she could never hope to do. She saw a dead man lying shamed in an old patched shirt—and God knows a man should lie down for the last time in a new white shirt. She saw the old held together with string that once was bone, their shriveled, hunger-hardened stomachs wanting no more than a pinch of snuff tobacco. It was little enough, but it made all the difference in the hours of a man’s drawn-out dying.

The successive balls were as triumphant as the first. The second ball blazed across the Christmas holidays. One inspired social climber who kept an artful eye on the mighty committee should a vacancy occur announced herself as a “patron” of the ball, a title which included the right to pin a slip of paper on her bosom with her name and rank, and the privilege of paying more to grace the dance floor than the ladies whose bosoms were unpapered. With other social climbers scrambling to follow suit, the yield was like the proverbial loaves and fishes.

The spring spectacular, blessed with springlike weather, brought contingents from Boston and Washington, the cities that considered themselves and New York a holy trinity in which New York placed a definite third. Boston was inclined to boast that none of its forebears had ever been slaves, and Washington felt a right to boast that all its best people were fair-skinned descendants of congressmen and senators, while New York could not really substantiate either claim.

Perhaps by way of maid to mistress, the schoolteacher’s estimable philanthropic efforts became known to a long-established
white social agency. This agency’s broader aims were meeting a baffling resistance from the newly transplanted colored people it sought to help; to them a white interrogation, however sympathetic, implied a threat that they would be sent back to the South if they could not support themselves in the North. The schoolteacher was invited to a board meeting, where she sipped tea with self-consciously solicitous ladies with high bosoms and long sleeves. The meeting had been called and the schoolteacher summoned in order for the board to score her on appearance and deportment. With a score of B or more she would be offered membership, the first colored woman ever to be so honored, thereby giving the board the Christian feeling of handpicked brotherhood.

When the schoolteacher heard that she had passed muster, she was properly impressed by the honor. It was another colored first, and the curious American custom of keeping a scorecard of colored firsts was well established. She wrote the board a gracious letter of thanks, restraining the impulse to be profuse. Her careful wording acknowledged their natural right to expect an excellence in her above and beyond the requirements of equality.

Before her letter of acceptance, the schoolteacher’s pity for the poor had never disturbed her sleep. When she sat on their shabby chairs (hoping that nothing was crawling around on her collar) and watched them count out part of their rent in slow little piles of nickels and pennies, she pitied them their hard times that made them a few nickels shy of the amount due, and she forgave them and, having forgiven them, she forgot them on her way to the bank.

Her balls had been inspired by her discovery that she could charge admission in the name of charity. The proceeds had been given to the ghetto poor because the genteel poor would not sell their pride at any price. All she knew about the ghetto poor was that she did not have the same grace or gentility that made poverty less obvious, less of an odor. She set about to learn more.

The agency’s workers had learned very little. Their efforts to understand the day-to-day life of the swelling ranks of the urban poor had proved a dismal failure. The schoolteacher could not afford to fail, though; she had a moral obligation to succeed. She was on trial before an all-white jury, whose decision would influence other decisions in other fields that colored people of ability hoped to enter. At home, at her desk, she laid out the rough beginnings of a plan. She began to think of her tenants in an entirely different light: as research material. She bought a brand-new notebook to carry into the field, and she intended to fill it with unsentimental facts. She did not for a moment identify with the people of the ghetto, any more than she identified with their common ancestors in Africa.

On her first day she was filled with confidence as she entered into the darkness of despair. She sat on the suspect chairs and invited the tenants to sit down with her. They had never sat down with her before unless they had been too sick to stand, whether she came as their rent collector or their Lady Bountiful. In either case they had always felt too poor in her presence even to act polite, too cowed by her prosperity to offer her a cup of water, which shamed their country manners since a cup of God’s water was the first thing you
fetched anyone, friend or stranger, who had come from a distance and whose throat might be dry.