Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/192

 convince Alva, though, that her battalion of admirers were all of the platonic variety. “I know niggers too well,” Alva had summed it up to Emma Lou, “so I told her she just must go, and she went.”

“But,” Emma Lou had queried when he had started to talk about something else, “what about your second wife?”

“Oh,” he laughed, “well, I married her when I was drunk. She was an old woman about fifty. She kept me drunk from Sunday to Sunday. When I finally got sober she showed me the marriage license and I well nigh passed out again.”

“But where is she?” Emma Lou had asked, “and how did they let you get married while you were drunk and already had a wife?”

Alva had shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know where she is. I ain’t seen her since I left her room that day. I sent Braxton up there to talk to her. Seems like she’d been drunk too. So, it really didn’t matter. And as for a divorce, I know plenty spades right here in Harlem get married any time they want to. Who in the hell’s gonna take the trouble getting a divorce, when, if you must marry and already have a wife, you can get another without going through all that red tape?”

Emma Lou had had to admit that this sounded logical, if illegal. Yet she hadn’t been convinced.