Because she had not long lost Mama, and now she had lost her new bicycle, Cleo burst into heartbroken howls. Her heretofore unshed tears flowed in a torrent. Mr. Judson sat and rubbed his upset stomach and felt himself drowning helplessly in her welling eyes and tumbled hair.
When she could speak, she sobbed accusations. Why didn’t he look where he was going? Why hadn’t he jumped out of her way? Look at her brand-new bicycle. Who did he think was going to get her another one?
He was, Mr. Judson assured her gallantly. He helped her to her feet, though she fought him all the way, jerking and twisting out of his unexploring hands. He asked her for her name and address, and she gave them to him defiantly. She knew this poor darky didn’t have one thin dime to lay against another, but if he wanted to talk big, let him back up his promise. He told her his name, and she forgot it immediately. What did she want to know his name for? She wasn’t going to give him a bicycle.
He offered to see her home. She refused so vehemently that he pictured her parents as martinets, and supposed that the courtship, on which he had decided the minute he got back his breath, would be long and hazardous.
She took the poor wreck of her bicycle and pushed off unaided. It was a painful journey, and she was often admonished to get a horse. She reached home footsore and furious. Miss Boorum’s nephew flew to the door, for Cleo rang the bell so sharply that the unhappy young man had the rather pleasurable foreboding that a policeman had brought bad tidings.
It was Cleo. He had never seen her in a wild moment, and he was further undone. For now he saw her with all her aliveness, her dark hair streaming, her eyes sparking green stars, the blood in her cheeks with the tear streaks and dust streaks, and her apple breasts betraying the pulse of her angry heart. He knew God was punishing him for his desire to see her dead by sending her back more alive than ever.
That night Miss Boorum’s nephew and Mr. Judson tossed and turned in their restless sleep, while Cleo slept like a rock from all the air she had imbibed on the long ride and the long walk.
Mr. Judson was ardently in love. Why it had come upon him like this, he could not have explained, except that he had reached the age for it. He had distrusted women until now. He thought all they saw in a man was his pocketbook. When they asked him flattering questions, he imagined they were prying into his affairs, trying to find out how much he had that they would have if they married him. Artfully he had sidestepped them all, spending his days in such hard work that sleep came easily, and there were no wakeful hours of aching loins. On Sunday afternoons he strolled in the city’s parks.
His excursions into society were infrequent and unsuccessful. He did not look like a rich man, for he wore a disguise of ancient suits to confuse the predatory. He did not resemble a Bostonian. His tongue was soft and liquid. He was dark. He was unimpressed by backgrounds. He made it plain that if you were a State House attendant, you were only a porter to him, no matter how many of your forebears had been freeborn.
The men with whom he had daily contact were unpretentious rich men, the bankers, the brokers, the shipowners, the heads of wholesale houses. When he moved among colored men, he was slightly contemptuous, though he thought he was merely bored. He had been in business for himself since he was ten, and was never wholly able to understand anyone who was content to let someone else be the boss man.
Bart bought the finest bicycle he could find in Boston and dispatched it next day, with a crate of oranges and two handsome hands of bananas that he hoped would impress Cleo’s parents.
He called the following Sunday, and was surprised to find that Cleo worked in service, but rather pleased. She ought to consider herself a lucky girl to be courted by a man of substance. Miss Boorum, herself, showed him into the parlor, and sat down with a colored man for the first time in her life. Though she had not seen through her nephew, she saw through Bart immediately. He was in love with Cleo. This did not surprise her. It was typical of colored men.
Her nephew, hearing a male voice below with a Negro flavor, came down from his study in acute anxiety. Here was the stranger his common sense had commanded to come. Here was the man who would set him free. And his eyes were hot with hatred. Bart saw the young man’s anguish. He saw that Cleo did not see it. Nor Miss Boorum. He had to get Cleo out of this house before the fever in the young man’s eyes spread to his loins. He could not let her be lost in one wanton night. Or her image would lie on his eyelids for the rest of his life.
All the next day he worried like a hen with one helpless chick. When his picture-making grew too intolerable, he washed off his surface sweat and went to Miss Boorum’s. He approached the house by way of the alley, hoping to find Cleo in the kitchen, where he could talk unheard. He had better luck than he bargained for. She was in the clothes yard. She had clothespins in her mouth, and was too surprised to take them out.
He began to whisper fiercely, and she only heard half of what he said, for he kept jerking his head around to see who might be coming. He told her hurriedly and harriedly that she was in great danger, a wolf was abroad in Miss Boorum’s nephew’s clothing. She was not safe, and never would be safe, so long as she stayed within reach of his clutches. She was too young to be alone in Boston. She had no mother to guide her. She needed a good man’s protection. She needed a husband. He would marry her today if she would have him. If she would have him, he would apply for a license today and marry her at City Hall at nine o’clock on Thursday morning.
If he had proposed to her any other way, if he had courted her for a longer time, she might have refused him, out of sheer contrariness. He had not frightened her with his fears. She felt that she could subdue any man with her scorn. But she wanted to get away. She couldn’t stand seeing Miss Boorum’s nephew moping around like a half-sick dog if woman hankering was what ailed him. If he ever came hankering after her, she’d stab him dead with an ice-pick. And no man on earth, let alone a white man, was worth going to hell for.
She was still so wrapped up in murderous thoughts and daring Miss Boorum’s demoralized nephew to come within a foot of her that she married Bart without thinking about it. When she found herself in her marriage bed, she let him know straightaway that she had no intention of renouncing her maidenhood for one man if she had married to preserve it from another.
Bart had expected that he would have to lead her to love with patience. He was a man of vigor and could wait without wasting for Cleo’s awakening. Some part of him was soothed and satisfied by the fact of his right to cherish her. It did not torment him to lie beside her and know that he could not possess her. He threw his energy into buying and selling. For he loved his fruit almost as much as he loved his wife. There was rich satisfaction in seeing it ripen, seeing the downiness on it, the blush on it, feeling the firmness of its flesh.
When Cleo was twenty, their sex battle began. It was not a savage fight. She did not struggle against his superior strength. She found a weapon that would cut him down quickly and cleanly. She was ice. Neither her mouth nor her body moved to meet his. The open eyes were wide with mocking at the busyness below. There was no moment when everything in her was wrenched and she was one with the man who could submerge her in himself.
Five years later, she conceived a child on a night when her body’s hunger broke down her controlled resistance. For there was no real abhorrence of sex in her. Her need of love was as urgent as her aliveness indicated. But her perversity would not permit her to weaken. She would not face the knowledge that she was incomplete in herself.
Yet now, as she walked toward the trolley stop, she was determined not to live another year without her sisters.
CLEO SAILED up Northampton Street with Judy in tow. Dark, unshaven faces split in wide grins, and low, lewd whistles issued from between thick lips. This was her daily cross to bear in this rapidly deteriorating section of Boston. The once fine houses of the rich were fast emptying of middle-class whites and filling up with lower-class blacks. The street was becoming another big road, with rough-looking loungers leaning in the doorways of decaying houses and dingy stores. Coarse conversations balanced like