The Blacker the Berry Read Online Free Page A

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. Imagine any one preparing to enter college saying “Is you,” and, to make it worse, right before all these white people, these staring white people, so eager and ready to laugh. Emma Lou’s face burned.
    “Two mo’, then I goes in my sock.”
    Emma Lou was almost at the place where she was ready to take even this statement literally, and was on the verge of leaving the line. Supposing this creature did “go in her sock!” God forbid!
    “Wonder where all the spades keep themselves? I ain’t seen but two ’sides you.”
    “I really do not know,” Emma Lou returned precisely and chillily. She had no intentions of becoming friendly with this sort of person. Why she would be ashamed even to be seen on the street with her, dressed as she was in a red-striped sport suit, a white hat, and white shoes and stockings. Didn’t she know that black people had to be careful about the colors they affected?
    The girl had finally reached the bursar’s window and was paying her fees, and loudly differing with the cashier about the total amount due.
    “I tell you it ain’t that much,” she shouted through the window bars. “I figured it up myself before I left home.”
    The cashier obligingly turned to her adding machine and once more obtained the same total. When shown this, the girl merely grinned, examined the list closely, and said:
    “I’m gonna pay it, but I still think you’re wrong.”
    Finally she moved away from the window, but not before she had turned to Emma Lou and said,
    “You’re next,” and then proceeded to wait until Emma Lou had finished.
    Emma Lou vainly sought some way to escape, but was unable to do so, and had no choice but to walk with the girl to the registrar’s office where they had their cards stamped in return for the bursar’s receipt. This done, they went onto the campus together. Hazel Mason was the girl’s name. Emma Lou had fully expected it to be either Hyacinth or Geranium. Hazel was from Texas, Prairie Valley, Texas, and she told Emma Lou that her father, having become quite wealthy when oil had been found on his farm lands, had been enabled to realize two life ambitions—obtain a Packard touring car and send his only daughter to a “fust-class” white school.
    Emma Lou had planned to loiter around the campus. She was still eager to become acquainted with the colored members of the student body, and this encounter with the crass and vulgar Hazel Mason had only made her the more eager. She resented being approached by any one so flagrantly inferior, any one so noticeably a typical southern darky, who had no business obtruding into the more refined scheme of things. Emma Lou planned to lose her unwelcome companion somewhere on campus so that she could continue unhindered her quest for agreeable acquaintances.
    But Hazel was as anxious to meet one as was Emma Lou, and having found her was not going to let her get away without a struggle. She, too, was new to this environment and in a way was more lonely and eager for the companionship of her own kind than Emma Lou, for never before had she come into such close contact with so many whites. Her life had been spent only among Negroes. Her fellow pupils and teachers in school had always been colored, and as she confessed to Emma Lou, she couldn’t get used