“But—but, Judge,” Elsa almost wailed, “you—you don’t understand! You see, I don’t want any cases, lest I—”
“Five p.m.!” The Judge’s voice was not choleric now, but deadly, quietly ominous. “5 p. m.—or that disbarment order, young lady, dated 5 p.m. today, will go forth by both phone and messenger—to its proper destination. Five p.m.”
“But—but, Judge, I—”
But nothing but the echo of an angry savage click—followed by deep silence—greeted Elsa on the instrument.
The Judge, irately, had hung up!
CHAPTER VII
A Trip to the Black Belt
Elsa, dismounting hurriedly from the South State Street car in the vicinity of Aunt Linda Cooksey’s home, knew that she was indeed in the Black Belt. For a Negro motion-picture theatre advertising a double-bill of lurid melodramas—admission 5 cents only!—vied with a dingy pawnshop in front of which flapped moth-eaten suits at $2 each. Fried-fish stands, moreover, were much in evidence—each with its two frying pans mounted on a two hole gasoline burner, the one containing the usual hamburgers and greasy intertwined onions, the other, sizzling cadaver-colored perch, and with invariably its black proprietor in a gargantuan cook’s white hat; and black tradesmen looked out of dusty, fly-specked shop windows as Elsa made her way hastily along the block between 23rd and 24th Streets.
But Elsa, now so definitely in the Black Belt, knew something even more than that she was in the Black Belt.
And with even greater assurance! Because it was based on the mathematics of “never-having-failed!” She knew, in short, that before 2 hours should elapse today, she would accidentally meet up with somebody she had not seen—well—for an eternity! For, getting off the streetcar, she had glimpsed a white horse with two black legs. And it had never failed to be a perfect omen. One black leg—one hour. Two black legs—two hours. Quite all she wondered, at most, was just who the party would prove to be.
Not dreaming, in the least, that he would be no less than her drunkard half-cousin, Saul Moffit, only son of her half-uncle, Silas Moffit. And whom she was destined to meet—of all places!—at no less a spot than—
But now reaching a narrow dark passageway between a Negro undertaking parlor, containing a child’s casket in the window, trimmed with lacy frills, and a fruit store with sticky fruit outside, Elsa made her way back through the passageway, the chill of which penetrated her bones even as she traversed it.
In the rear, facing a leaning unpainted cottage which, propped up firmly at one front corner with assorted bricks and stones, nevertheless tilted definitely toward the other side which rested on a huge, rusty, upturned preserving kettle, Elsa knocked at the knobless door which, thanks to its being both knobless and lockless, did not close by one full inch—and yet firmly resisted her knock.
A moment later, a black hand, evidently unwinding yards and yards of wire from a nail somewhere on the inside door casing, was visible, and presently the door, liberated, swung open. And there stood Aunt Linda Cooley who, as part of Elsa’s father’s house, had brought Elsa up from babyhood until she was 16.
A lean, rangy woman, Aunt Linda was—a “skinny ’ooman” as her own kind termed her; a woman who did not show what years might have passed over her head.
Indeed, if it had held any grey, such would have been ever occluded—thanks to the red bandanna which entirely and, always, tightly enshrouded it. From the lobes of her ears, protruding out from under the taut edge of the bandanna, hung heavily great brassy rings such as an African savage might wear, and which were in perfect keeping wig some of her neighbors’ description of her as “dat voodoo ’ooman whut lib a’hind de coffin shop.”
The sleeves of Aunt Linda’s brilliantly and gypsy-like flowered cotton dress were rolled up, and her bony forearms were sudsy—showing that she was managing, in these $4-a-month living-quarters, to scare up a few w’ite folks’ clothes to wash.
“Well, fo’ de lan’ sake, Chil’,” she was saying. “Whut you dain’ obah heah? Ah would t’ink you would be in you’ office studyin’—an’ heppin’ dem w’ite folks to git out ob trubble.”
“No, Aunt Linda—I’m over here—and in trouble myself!”
“You—in trubble, Elsa? Well, Chil’—come in—right to oncet.”
Elsa stepped in. The reception quarters of Aunt Linda’ three-room home—its combined kitchen and living room!—were graced by a rusty kitchen 4-hole range which burned coal and wood, and which, like the house itself, was propped up, at one of its corners, on a small upturned stewing kettle. A huge square of cold linoleum, with patches and holes in it, covered the floor of the room, though its gelidity was more than compensated for by the brilliant scarlet cheesecloth drapes which hung at either side of the long window gazing out on the dingy rear yard. Two chairs, one a swing-seat affair, and lined with carpet, the other, a huge flat-handled rocker with two different rockers glued to it, and hair leaking out of its leather bottom, beckoned to “comp’ny” as even did the gargantuan coal-oil lantern which, in lieu of electric bulb or gas chandelier, stood atop a square plaque of wood suspended by four wires from the crumbling ceiling.
Through a door, partly ajar, could be seen a white iron bed, with paint scaling away, but with one leg broken squarely off and the bed therefore propped up on that corner, exactly as were house and kitchen range, but this time by a wooden soap box. While through another door, also partly ajar, and leading to a room fronting doubtlessly on the rear alley, was visible the bright rim of a zinc wash-tub, giving forth from itself and through the very door aperture the smell of fresh suds—and indicating, thereby, how Aunt Linda kept the business operations of her home separate from the social ones.
“Now you set you’sef’ down, honey chil’,” Aunt Linda was saying. “And tell yo’ Auntie whut is wrong.”
Elsa did sit down, in the big chair made like a swing.
And Aunt Linda, wiping off the suds from her wrists, and hooking her front door to again, with a double turn of her wire, deposited her rangy, toothpick-like self in the capacious, flat-handled, hair-stuffed rocker facing Elsa.
“Whut wrong now, Chil’? Fo’ you mussa come to yo’ aunt fo’ adwice, didn’ you?”
“Well, Aunt Linda, I came to you because I—well—I just didn’t hardly know what to do. I never yet knew advice that you gave me on any subject—even whether you did, or whether you didn’t, know anything about the subject—to be anything but good advice, nor—Anyway—I came straight to you.”
“Da’s de baby! Now whut on yarth is wrong?”
“Well, Aunt Linda, it’s about that big piece of Northwest Side vacant property Father left me. Colby’s Nugget, as I guess even you’ve heard it called? Rather, maybe I should say, my visit to you is about my own 9/10ths ownership in the property!” She paused. “You know, of course, exactly how Father left it to me; how it comes to me only when I’m thirty, and how—”
“Ob co’se, Chil’. An’ he leab it in dat way, I t’ink, so dat it don’ leak away f’um you, w’en you is nothin’ yit but a baby, in rich libbin’, an’ dressin’, an’ traipsin’ down to Floridy, an’ sich like t’ings, an’ so’s no ol’ forchunehuntin’ count or somp’n try to mahhy you.”
“Perhaps yes,” Elsa agreed sadly.
“But ob co’se,” Aunt Linda said frowningly, “it kin leak away wid all de unpaid taxes on it—hebbins, Chil’, dey mus’ be putty much now, ain’t dey?”
“Taxes, Aunt Linda? Why—I thought you knew. Father turned in to the city a judgment he got on the condemnation of another piece he had—a judgment which he couldn’t collect from this darn city!—for taxes in advance. With the result, Aunt, that