Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/146

 “I don’ haul no coal”

“It’s like this, Emma Lou, they don’t want no dark girls in their sorority. They ain’t pledged us, and we’re the only two they ain’t, and we’re both black.”

''The ineluctability of raw experience! The muddy mirroring of life’s perplexities Seeing everything in terms of self The spreading sensitiveness of an adder’s sting.''

“Mr. Brown has some one else in mind”

“We have nothing here”

She should have been a boy. A black boy could along, but a black girl

Arline was leaving the cast of “Cabaret Gal” for two weeks. Her mother had died in Chicago. The Negro Carmen must be played by an understudy, a real mulatto this time, who, lacking Arline’s poise and personality, nevertheless brought down the house because of the crude vividity of her performance. Emma Lou was asked to act as her maid while Arline was away. Indignantly, she had taken the alternative of a two weeks’ vacation. Imagine her being maid for a Negro woman! It was unthinkable.

Left entirely to herself, she proceeded to make herself more miserable. Lying in bed late every morning, semi-conscious, body burning, mind disturbed