There Is Confusion/Chapter 8

If Peter was unconscious of the utter desirability of association with the young Marshalls, Maggie Ellersley was not. Ever since her childhood when she had overheard a conversation between a cousin and her mother, she had made up her mind to attach herself to some such family and see what came of it.

The cousin and her mother worked together for some wealthy white people. Maggie's mother was a laundress, a spare hard-working woman to whom life had meant nothing but poverty and confusion. On Thursdays and Fridays of each week she washed and ironed and gossiped with "my cousin Mis' Sparrow" who was cook at the house on Madison Avenue. Maggie used to come there for dinner and go home with her mother.

"Mis' Sparrow," small and spidery, had a perpetual complaint against the world. In particular she experienced envy toward those who were better off than herself. Her jaundiced disposition may be excused, however, when one reflects that hers was a lot which had been hard ever since she could remember. She was poor, she was weak, she was ignorant. Add to that the fact that she was black in a country where color is a crime and you have her "complex." Some people would say she had really done well in one sense with her life. She had attained by her own unaided efforts to a comfortable, even if menial, position, where she had heat, light and enough to eat. They would ask: Considering her beginnings what ​more could she want? Alas, in that dull soul unknown aspirations stirred, amazing questions took form. "Why, why, why?" asked Mis' Sparrow in her own peculiar dialect, "are all the sweetness and light of life showered on some and utterly denied to me?"

At present Mis' Sparrow had fastened a resentful eye on Mrs. Proctor, the bride of the son of the "white folks" for whom she worked. Edmonia the maid had told her about the newcomer, and over the supper table she retailed it to Mrs. Ellersley.

"She wan't nobuddy. Jes' a little teeny slip of ole white gal. No money, no fambly, no nuthin'."

"Where'd he meet her then?" asked Mrs. Ellersley, uninterested but polite.

"Young Mr. Proctor's sister met her in boardin'-school, poorest thing there," replied Mis' Sparrow, wiping a puckered mouth with her apron. "'Monia says Miss Dorothy sorry for her and got her a job in her father's office. Mr. Harry was jes' home f'um college; he saw her, took a fancy to her and jes' married her. Jes' wouldn't listen to nobuddy a-tall."

"Don't it beat all," pondered Mrs. Ellersley, "how some people have all the luck? Now if that kind of thing could just happen to my Maggie."

Mis' Sparrow was unmoved by the irrelevant allusion to Maggie. Where would she get such a chance?

"'Monia says she don't even love him. Liked some young travelin' salesman she'd known all her life. 'Monia declares she cries about him when she's by herself."

"What she marry him for then?" asked Maggie Ellersley, aged twelve, and an interested listener.

"H'm child, wouldn't you do anything to get away f'um hard work, an' ugly cloes an' bills? Some w'ite folks has it most as bad as us poor colored people. Only thing is they has more opporchunities."

​Maggie, visualizing the life which she and her mother endured, thought she probably would. She thought it again after they had reached the tenement in Thirty-fifth Street where the two of them lived. It was the famous "Tenderloin" of those days and Maggie's spirit revolted with a revulsion of feeling which never ceased to amaze her mother against the sordidness of that place. There were three rooms. The front one looked on the street and so was well lighted, but the other two got light only from the air-shaft. Mrs. Ellersley, a widow who considered herself fortunate to be one, rented the front room out, usually to train-men (perhaps some of Meriwether's acquaintances were among them), occasionally to a married couple.

She and Maggie slept and lived in the two wretchedly ventilated rooms, in a perpetual gloom penetrated ever so slightly by a flickering blue flame. A confusion of clothes, obscene old furniture, boxes, stale newspapers was littered about them. For some reason the rooms were everlastingly damp, perhaps because, although rain could get down the air-shaft, the sunlight never could. The rooms gave Maggie a constantly eerie feeling, which in later more fortunate years she was always able to recall by the sight of a gas-flame burning low and blue.

They never, in those days, enjoyed a really bright flame. Saving was Mrs. Ellersley's insistent because necessary fetish. Maggie's tea was always weak, and never sweet enough. The bread—baker's with holes in it, yesterday's, two loaves for five cents—was always stale; the meat usually salt and sometimes tainted.

Out of it all Maggie bloomed—a strange word but somehow true. She was like a yellow calla lily in the deep cream of her skin, the slim straightness of her body. She had a mass of fine, wiry hair which hung like a cloud, a mist over two ​gray eyes. Her lips, in spite of her constant malnutrition, persisted unbelievably red. When she met excitement those gray eyes darkened and shone, her cheeks flushed a little, her small hands fluttered. And she was nearly always excited. Something within her frail bosom pulsed in a constant revolt against the spirit of things that kept her in these conditions.

"I will not always live like this, Ma—I'll get out of it some way."

And her mother, though always scoffing, believed her with a dreary hopefulness. "If there's a way to be found out, Maggie'll find it."

Maggie found early that one avenue of escape lay through men. They were stronger than women, they made money. They did not give the impression of shrinking from spending the last penny lest when that cent was gone there should be no more. All the train-men liked her. She could not get much order in that abominable home, but she could and did keep herself clean and neat. She washed her few garments over night; she wound a stray ribbon, from a box of cigars or a box of candy, through her hair. Some of the men, young students, "on the road" during their summer vacations, used to flirt with her.

"Hurry and grow up, Mag. When I get through school I'll come back and marry you. How'd you like to live in a little house—not like this!—in Washington?" Or Wilmington or Savannah as the case might be. "I'd give you pretty dresses."

Poor Maggie. Her calla-lily charm visibly lessened in those days when she opened her pretty mouth. She disclosed herself then for what she was, a true daughter of the Tenderloin.

"Aw quit your kiddin!"

But she came slowly to realize that here was a way out. If she could only grow up—if she were—say—seventeen.

​She was persistently frail, else her mother might have put her to work. As it was she was sent to school very regularly—to save fuel and gas. Evenings she went to the houses where her mother worked and got her dinner.

On the night after she had listened to Mis' Sparrow's comments about young Mrs. Proctor, she sat thoughtful a long time. She had sense enough to know that very often these train-men stayed poor. They made pretty good money—they did, too, in those days—but not enough to save their wives from labor. Maggie did not want to wash and iron, to go through the dreary existence which had been her mother's when her father was living; he had run on the road.

Suppose, just suppose, there were some colored men who were fortunate, successful, who had enough to eat, who could give their wives help. Her mother knew of ministers like that. There were colored doctors and lawyers somewhere. Their very titles connoted prosperity.

"Ma," she spoke out of her brown study, "are there any very rich colored men?"

"Not any very rich ones, I don't think," Mrs. Ellersley replied thoughtfully, "but lots very well off, comfortable, with servants to wait on 'em." She sighed.

"I'm going to meet one," said Maggie solemnly, and henceforth she thought, she dreamed of nothing else.

When she was fourteen young John Howe, who was occupying the front room, came down with a spell of typhoid fever. He begged Mrs. Ellersley not to send him to the hospital, and it was impossible to get him to his home in Oklahoma. He had enough money to see him through, and he put his fortunes and his case into her withered hands. All the train-men knew of Mrs. Ellersley's absolute honesty. She did what she could for him, sat up long nights, gave him his medicine faithfully, "counted out his money."

​But it was Maggie who gave real service. She stayed out of school to attend him. The doctor gave her a list of directions which she followed with meticulous care. In that shabby house down in that terrible district John Howe met with an attention, a devotion from the humble woman and her delicate daughter, such as no money could have bought him in the seats of the mighty.

John Howe was a Lincoln divinity student, intermittently working his way through college. He sat up gaunt and weak in the scratched bed of cheap cherry wood and picked with long skeleton fingers at the thin blue and white checked coverlet.

"Maggie, you and your mother've been mighty good to me. Look here, I've got to pay you back somehow. After this illness I'll have to stay out of school a year. What do you want?"

Maggie stared at him, her gray eyes going black in the yellow oval of her face.

"There's only one thing I want, Mr. Howe, and you couldn't give me that."

"I could try. What is it?"

"Oh Mr. Howe, if you could just get us out of this awful place, this house, this street! If I could just get to know some decent folks———"

"Well, I don't see how I could arrange about the folks. Where do you want to live, if you go from here? There're not many places for colored folks in New York."

"There are houses for colored people up in Fifty-third Street, and decent folks living in them."

"But my goodness, Maggie, it costs a fortune to rent one of those houses."

"I know, oh, I know. But if we could just get started. Mother could fill the house with roomers. Why there've been ​twelve men here for this room since you've been sick. The rest of the rooms aren't much, but mother always keeps this room tidy, and we're honest. They all know that. Never missed a penny here, any of them. And they tell their friends about us. Lots of times they tell Ma if she only had more room she'd have all the roomers she wanted."

"But you've no furniture."

"We could buy on the instalment plan." She had her scheme all worked out. Clearly she had nursed her project. "Mr. Howe, if you could just help us to begin."

He would, he told her, convinced by her earnestness. "What exactly do you want me to do, Maggie?"

She wanted him to make his headquarters with them for the year, and to pay as much as he could in advance. It was still early summer. He must write and tell other men, who would want rooms, and get a few of them to pay in advance, too. "Train-men won't mind that," she told him shrewdly, "they'll like to know they have some place to go to when they've cleaned themselves out at cards, or whatever it is they do. That will pay a month's rent, and leave something, and with what we pay on this—this hole, we'll have something to put on the furniture."

"I guess you're right," said Howe, "I'll speak to your mother about it."

But that was useless. Mrs. Ellersley was sure of her livelihood, her mere existence here, but she was doubtful about a great venture. "Of course, for Maggie's sake I'd like to get away."

"Oh, Ma, do—do, Ma," Maggie had pleaded in an ecstasy of longing. "This is our one chance. You see if we don't take this we'll never get away."

Fortunately she had Howe to back her. "She's right, Mrs. Ellersley, and this is no place for a young girl to grow up. ​You can count on me. I'll go look for a house, and see about some furniture. I know plenty of fellows would be glad to come."

Miraculously the scheme worked. It gave Maggie her first insight into the workings of life. If you wanted things, you thought and thought about them, and when an opportunity offered, there you were with your mind made up to jump at it.

Of course they were poor, but at least they were decent. John Howe, staying for that year in New York, realizing more and more how truly he was indebted to Maggie and her mother, took a proprietary interest. He laid the cheap rugs, he set up the cots, three in a room, he did mysterious jobs in the bath-room which to Maggie was always so marvelous. He bought tools and fixed window-cords which the landlord neglected. Maggie darned his socks for him, and he bought some wall-paper, cheap but clean and virginal, a soft yellow, and papered her square box of a room. A good job he made of it, too. Another roomer at his instigation made a dressing table out of a packing box which Mrs. Ellersley, re-invigorated, covered with scrim.

Gradually, word of her rooming-house spread among the better class of transients. All her lodgers gave her their mending to do, she washed for some of them, gave breakfast to a few chosen spirits, and they paid willingly and well.

Maggie was in transports. This was something like a home. Of course, she had to attend school in the district. Her mother took her as soon as matters were settled. She looked fresh and neat in a dark blue serge dress trimmed with black braid, the gift of melancholy Mis' Sparrow who in turn had had it from young Mrs. Proctor. The dress was worn, but it was whole, and Maggie had tacked a tiny turnover of white lace in the high collar.

​She was assigned to the eighth grade. There were two of them in the school. Her star was in the ascendant, for she was assigned to the one of which Sylvia Marshall was a member. She would have fared differently if it had been Joanna, for unless she were markedly clever, Joanna, who was intellectually a snob, would probably never have seen her. But Sylvia spied her at once. She came over to Maggie at recess.

"You're a new girl, aren't you? Want me to show you your way around?"

Maggie looked at the pretty girl, charming in a soft dark red cashmere dress made with a wide pleated skirt. She had on little patent leather, buttoned shoes with cloth tops, and a big red bow perched butterfly fashion on her dark head. Joanna wore her hair rather primly back from her face, but Sylvia's was parted and rolled in waves over her ears, then it was caught up and confined by the bow. She had a thin gold bracelet on one arm. And about her hung the aura of well-being and easy self-assurance which marked all the Marshall children.

"I wish you would," said Maggie.

Sylvia in those days was an ardent worker in Old Zion Sunday School and had promised to help in a campaign for more students. She told Maggie about it within the next two or three days.

"My mother is going to entertain the new folks whom I get to join. Will you join?"

Maggie would and so went to Sylvia's home as her mother's guest.

She never forgot that home with its quiet dignity and atmosphere of prosperity. The Marshall children were a revelation to her. She had not known of colored people like these.

"At last I'm getting to know decent people," she told her mother.

​She had a passion for respectability and decency quite apart from what they connoted of comparative ease and comfort, though she coveted these latter, too, and meant some day to have them.

"Two months ago," she thought, "I was still in that horrible house on Thirty-fifth Street, and I got away. If that could happen, anything could happen." She lay in her bed at nights in the little yellow room and saw visions.