Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/111

 fee, and find some other employment agency, a more imposing one, if possible. She had had enough of those on 135th Street.

She didn’t want to go home, either. Her room had no outside vista. If she sat in the solitary chair by the solitary window, all she could see were other windows and brick walls and people either mysteriously or brazenly moving about in the apartments across the court. There was no privacy there, little fresh air, and no natural light after the sun began its downward course. Then the apartment always smelled of frying fish or of boiling cabbage. Her landlady seemed to alternate daily between these two foods. Fish smells and cabbage smells pervaded the long, dark hallway, swirled into the room when the door was opened and perfumed one’s clothes disagreeably. Moreover, urinal and fœcal smells surged upward from the garbage-littered bottom of the court which her window faced.

If she went home, the landlady would eye her suspiciously and ask, “Ain’t you got a job yet?” then move away, shaking her head and dipping into her snuff box. Occasionally, in moments of excitement, she spat on the floor. And the little fat man who had the room next to Emma Lou’s could be heard coughing suggestively—tapping on the wall, and talking to himself in terms of her. He had seen her slip John