The Ways of White Folks Read Online Free

smile and took off his shirt.
    “Your undershirt, too,” said Anne. But it turned out that he had on a union suit, so he had to go out and change altogether. He came back and mounted the box that Anne said would serve just then for a slave block, and she began to sketch. Before luncheon Michael came in, and went into rhapsodies over Luther on the box without a shirt, about to be sold into slavery. He said he must put him into music right now. And he went to the piano and began to play something that sounded like Deep River in the jaws of a dog, but Michael said it was a modern slave plaint, 1850 in terms of 1933. Vieux Carré remembered on 135th Street. Slavery in the Cotton Club.
    Anne said, “It’s too marvellous!” And they painted and played till dark, with rest periods in between for Luther. Then they all knocked off for dinner. Anne and Michael went out later to one of Lew Leslie’s new shows. And Luther and Mattie said, “Thank God!” and got dressed up for Harlem.
    Funny, they didn’t like the Carraways. They treated them nice and paid them well. “But they’re too strange,” said Mattie, “they makes me nervous.”
    “They is mighty funny,” Luther agreed.
    They didn’t understand the vagaries of white folks, neither Luther nor Mattie, and they didn’t want to be bothered trying.
    “I does my work,” said Mattie. “After that I don’t want to be painted, or asked to sing songs, nor nothing like that.”
    The Carraways often asked Luther to sing, and he sang. He knew a lot of southern worksongs and reels, and spirituals and ballads.
    “Dear Ma, I’m in hard luck:

Three days since I et
,
And the stamp on this letter’s

Gwine to put me in debt.”
    The Carraways allowed him to neglect the garden altogether. About all Luther did was pose and sing. And he got tired of that.
    Indeed, both Luther and Mattie became a bit difficult to handle as time went on. The Carraways blamed it on Mattie. She had got hold of Luther. She was just simply spoiling a nice simple young boy. She was old enough to know better. Mattie was in love with Luther.
    At least, he slept with her. The Carraways discovered this one night about one o’clock when they went to wake Luther up (the first time they’d ever done such a thing) and ask him if he wouldn’t sing his own marvellous version of John Henry for a man who had just come from Saint Louis and was sailing for Paris tomorrow. But Luther wasn’t in his own bed by the furnace. There was a light in Mattie’s room, so Michael knocked softly. Mattiesaid, “Who’s that?” And Michael poked his head in, and here were Luther and Mattie in bed together!
    Of course, Anne condoned them. “It’s so simple and natural for Negroes to make love.” But Mattie, after all, was forty if she was a day. And Luther was only a kid. Besides Anne thought that Luther had been ever so much nicer when he first came than he was now. But from so many nights at the Savoy, he had become a marvellous dancer, and he was teaching Anne the Lindy Hop to Cab Calloway’s records. Besides, her picture of “The Boy on the Block” wasn’t anywhere near done. And he did take pretty good care of the furnace. So they kept him. At least, Anne kept him, although Michael said he was getting a little bored with the same Negro always in the way.
    For Luther had grown a bit familiar lately. He smoked up all their cigarettes, drank their wine, told jokes on them to their friends, and sometimes even came upstairs singing and walking about the house when the Carraways had guests in who didn’t share their enthusiasm for Negroes, natural or otherwise.
    Luther and Mattie together were a pair. They quite frankly lived with one another now. Well, let that go. Anne and Michael prided themselves on being different; artists, you know, and liberal-minded people—maybe a little scatter-brained, but then (secretly, they felt) that came from genius.They were not ordinary people, bothering about the liberties of