Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/201

 wouldn’t. Yet he liked him well enough not to kick him into the streets. Something, he told Emma Lou, should be done for him first, so Alva started doing things.

First, he got him a girl, or rather steered him in the direction of one who seemed to be a good bet. She was. And as usual, Braxton had little trouble in attracting her to him. She was a simple-minded oversexed little being from a small town in Central Virginia, new to Harlem, and had hitherto always lived in her home town where she had been employed since her twelfth year as maid-of-all-work to a wealthy white family. For four years, she had been her master's concubine, and probably would have continued in that capacity for an unspecified length of time, had not the mistress of the house decided that after all it might not be good for her two adolescent sons to become aware of their father’s philandering. She had had to accept it. Most of the women of her generation and in her circle had done likewise. But these were the post world war days of modernity and, well, it just wasn’t being done, what with the growing intelligence of the “darkies,” and the increased sophistication of the children.

So Anise Hamilton had been surreptitiously shipped away to New York, and a new maid-of-all-work had mysteriously appeared in her place. The