The Living is Easy. Dorothy West

her frosty stare with a look of such solemn reproach that Cleo blushed a little and gave her a guilty smile. There were times when she was thoroughly disconcerted by the fact that her child was a separate being with independent emotions. To her a child was a projection of its mother, like an arm which functioned in unison with other component parts and had no will that was not controlled by the head of the woman who owned it.

      Judy took advantage of Cleo’s small shame and let her lower lip quiver. Her midday meal had been a gulped glass of milk and a ham sandwich swallowed in half-chewed lumps, with Cleo urging her to haste and talking her out of her soft request for ice cream.

      “I’ll telephone your father to bring home a pint of vanilla for you to eat all by yourself,” Cleo promised, though she knew that was not the same thing as spooning a vanilla sundae from a silver dish at a downtown drugstore.

      Judy gave a delicate sniff which was meant to convey that she was receptive to this suggestion but not reconciled. She stood quietly while Cleo shifted her packages and dug for her doorkey. In Cleo’s packages were evening slippers and an evening dress for Thea, who was more in need of a daytime dress and street shoes. And most in need of her overdue wages. Cleo had meant to reserve some money for Serena, but the saleslady had influenced her choices, and she could not resist her flattering assumption that money was no object. As usual, she had had to count her pennies to pay her trolley fare.

      As she opened the door and butted Judy inside, she heard her landlady’s “Psst!” from the parlor. Miss Johnson came toward her, feeling her way among the Victorian furniture that she had inherited, along with the house, at the death of the mistress she had served so faithfully.

      It was this bizarre bequest, made in consideration of Miss Johnson’s failing sight and her forty-year familiarity with every inch of the house, that had started the exodus of well-to-do whites from this particular street. At the time of this mass removal, there was a scattering of Negro householders on neighboring streets. But they were moneyed people whose progeny went to white Sunday schools and played decorously in next-door yards while they were still young enough to come under the general heading of children. Miss Johnson was a lady’s maid, and therefore an undistinguished Negro who deserved no more special consideration than a white servant who happened to be left a house. As the tone of a street is considerably lowered when mistress and maid live side by side, the high visibility of a Negro maid, added to this, plunged its desirability to zero.