Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/242

 gether, trying to find a church to attend regularly, she had immediately black-balled the Episcopal Church, for she knew that most of its members were “pinks,” and despite the fact that a number of dark-skinned West Indians, former members of the Church of England, had forced their way in, Gwendolyn knew that the Episcopal Church in Harlem, as in most Negro communities, was dedicated primarily to the salvation of light-skinned Negroes.

But Gwendolyn was a poor psychologist. She didn’t realize that Emma Lou was possessed of a perverse bitterness and that she idolized the thing one would naturally expect her to hate. Gwendolyn was certain that Emma Lou hated “yaller” niggers as she called them. She didn’t appreciate the fact that Emma Lou hated her own color and envied the more mellow complexions. Gwendolyn’s continual damnation of “pinks” only irritated Emma Lou and made her more impatient with her own blackness, for, in damning them, Gwendolyn also enshrined them for Emma Lou, who wasn’t the least bit anxious to be classified with persons who needed a champion.

However, for the time being, Emma Lou was more free than ever from tortuous periods of self-pity and hatred. In her present field of activity, the question of color seldom introduced itself except as Gwendolyn introduced it, which she did continually, even