Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/41

 Emma Lou snickered. Emma Lou answered by shaking her head. The girl continued:

“I’ve been standin’ in line and climbin’ stairs and talkin’ and a-signin’ till I'm just 'bout done for.”

“It is tiresome,” Emma Lou returned softly, hoping the girl would take a hint and lower her own strident voice. But she didn’t.

“Tiresome ain’t no name for it,” she declared more loudly than ever before, then, “Is you a new student?”’

“I am,” answered Emma Lou, putting much emphasis on the “I am.”

She wanted the white people who were listening to know that she knew her grammar if this other person didn’t. “Is you,” indeed! If this girl was a specimen of the Negro students with whom she was to associate, she most certainly did not want to meet another one. But it couldn’t be possible that all of them—those three girls and those two boys for instance—were like this girl. Emma Lou was unable to imagine how such a person had ever gotten out of high school. Where on earth could she have gone to high school? Surely not in the North. Then she must be a southerner. That’s what she was, a southerner—Emma Lou curled her lips a little—no wonder the colored people in Boise spoke as they did about southern Negroes and wished that they would stay South. Im-