# Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten)/Book 1/Chapter 2

With Olive Hamilton, who worked as a responsible secretary-stenographer for a white lawyer on Wall Street—Olive herself was seven-eighths white—Mary occupied an apartment on the sixth storey of a building on Edgecombe Avenue, that pleasant thoroughfare facing the rocky cliff surmounted by City College. Neither of the girls earned very much money, but their salaries were supplemented by occasional welcome cheques from their families which made it possible for them to live comfortably, especially as Olive was an excellent cook. Mary could fry an egg and boil coffee, but here her culinary capacities ended.
Each of the girls had her own bedroom; the use of the sitting-room they shared. The sitting-room, though small, was pleasant. The furniture included an upholstered couch, several easy chairs, a desk, a table with an electric lamp, and a phonograph. Blue-flowered chintz curtains hung at the window. The walls were brightened by framed reproductions of paintings by Bellini and Carpaccio which Mary had collected during a journey through Italy.
​Olive's personal taste inclined to the luxurious. Her dressing-table was hung in lace over pink satin and her bed was covered with a spread of the same materials. On the dressing-table was laid out a toilet-set of carved ivory, an extravagance which had cost her a great deal of economy in other directions. A bottle of Narcisse Noir stood near the toilet-set. Framed, on a table, and on the walls, were many photographs of friends. A French worsted doll lay dejected in one corner.
Mary's taste was more sober. There was only one picture in her room, a reproduction of the Monna Lisa. Her bed-cover was plain white; her dressing-table austere and generally devoid of articles, save for inexpensive brush, comb, and mirror. On the shelves of a bookcase were ranged volumes by James Branch Cabell, Anatole France, Jean Cocteau, Louis Bromfield, Aldous Huxley, Sherwood Anderson, Somerset Maugham, Edmond Gosse, Elinor Wylie, James Huneker, and others. Several Negro writers were represented by inscribed copies: Charles W. Chesnutt by The Conjure Woman, James Weldon Johnson by Fifty Years, Jean Toomer by Cane, Claude McKay by Harlem Shadows, W. E. B. Du Bois by The Souls of Black Folk, Walter White by The Fire in the Flint, Jessie Fauset by There is Confusion. In addition, on her writing-table stood a photograph of her father, in a silver frame, and usually a row of a dozen or so of the latest books which she had borne home from ​the library in an effort to keep abreast with the best of the modern output, an altruistic endeavour which enabled her to offer her patrons advice when they were in doubt, as so often she found they were.
Mary's life was simple but full: she found she had very little time to spare. Six days a week, and one evening, she worked in the library. Leaving the library usually in the afternoon around five, she often went to the Park for a walk. Then she came home, changed her dress, and read or mended her clothes while Olive cooked dinner. In the evening, frequently there would be callers: the girls knew all the young men and women in the Harlem literary circles, most of the young school-teachers, doctors, lawyers, and dentists. To some extent they mingled with, but did not entertain, the richer social set that lived in the splendid row of houses Stanford White had designed on One hundred and thirty-ninth Street, or in other pleasant localities. These people occasionally invited Mary or Olive to large dinner or bridge-parties. The girls also encountered them at dances. It had become, Olive observed cynically to Mary, quite the thing for these more affluent folk to take up with the young intellectuals since their work had begun to appear in the Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, the American Mercury, and the New Republic. The young intellectuals accepted these hitherto unfamiliar attentions without undue humility, at the same time laughing a good deal about them among themselves. Times ​had changed indeed when brains, rather than money, a lighter colour, or straight hair, was the password to social favour. The limits of the Blue Vein Circle were being extended.
The girls took in most of the good plays and musical entertainments, revues and song recitals alike, downtown, usually sitting in the balcony to save expense, although Olive was light enough and Mary's features were sufficiently Latin so that they were not rudely received when they asked at the box-office for places in the orchestra. Once or twice, however, when they had been escorted to the theatre by some man of darker colour, they had been caused some humiliation and embarrassment. On one such occasion, after the usher had seated them, the house-manager had descended the aisle to demand a view of their stubs. On examination, he informed them that a mistake had been made, assuring them that their seats were for another night. He refused, moreover, to relinquish the stubs and escorted them to the lobby where he stated that he would willingly exchange them for balcony tickets, as the orchestra for this particular evening had been sold out. The lesson was learned. Thereafter Olive always took charge of the stubs and, if a view of them were requested, held them up so that the figures might be deciphered, but refused to permit them to leave her fingers.
Occasionally, caught in the lower part of town at an inconvenient hour, the question arose as to where ​one might eat. Olive alone was white enough to be spared any anxiety on this count, and even Mary, accompanied by Olive, succeeded in passing, but when their companion had unmistakably African features, difficulties arose. Once, indeed, when their escort had been a very black Negro of international reputation they had been ejected from a hotel dining-room. The head-waiter who was acquainted with Olive and was quite aware that she had Negro blood, explained that he himself had no objection to serving coloured people, but that X—— was so undeniably black that the patrons of the restaurant might object to his proximity. The taboo, it appeared, was solely one of colour, and there were, it sometimes occurred to Mary, the highest advantages, both social and economic, in being near white or yellow, or, if dark, possessed of Spanish features and glib enough with words in some foreign tongue to convince the waiter that one belonged to a dark European race, but, unfortunately, as Olive knew well to her cost—she had once been insulted by a policeman because a black man had accompanied her to a Negro restaurant—in certain public places in Harlem the reverse difficulty arose.
With one young man in particular, Howard Allison, the girls were accustomed to discuss these and allied problems which touched their very existence. Allison's father had been born a slave. He was nine years old when he was freed. Later he had become an itinerant preacher. By scrimping, his fam​ily had managed to send Howard to Harvard, and afterwards to Columbia Law School. He had just begun to practise his profession; as yet he was quite destitute of clients. Handsome and tall, dark brown in colour, he had personal reasons for being seriously interested in the perplexing phases of the Negro problem.
One night he came in after dinner—Olive, expecting him, had prepared a large pot of coffee—with Richard Fort Sill, a young man who was so white that, like Olive, below the line he was never taken for a Negro.
They became expansive over the coffee and cigarettes.
Of course, Howard was saying, it isn't so bad for us as it was for those who came before. We at least have Harlem.
Sill began to snicker. The Mecca of the New Negro! The City of Refuge! he cried derisively.
I don't know that we even have Harlem, Olive argued, so many white people come up here now to the cabarets. Why, in one or two places they've actually tried to do a little jim crowing!
Think of it! Howard replied. It isn't, he went on, that we want to mingle with the whites—I mean that we don't want to much more than we are already compelled to—but it is a bore to have them all over our places while we are excluded from their theatres and restaurants merely on account of our colour, theatres and restaurants which admit Chi​nese and Hindus—if I wore a turban or a burnous I could go anywhere—and prostitutes of any nationality. Why, a white prostitute can go places where a coloured preacher would be refused admittance.
True enough, Counsellor, Sill drawled. There's no social line drawn in jail anyway. Probably Marcus Garvey is treated just as well as his fellow convicts. . . . He was lounging in a chair with his hand hanging so far over one arm that his cigarette almost singed the rug. . . . It all comes down, he went on, to that question the ofays are always asking each other: would you like your sister to marry a Negro? You must realize, my dear coloured brethren, that social equality means a mingling of the sexes of the two races. Sill's tone was tinged with a bitter irony.
Well, Howard laughed, the buckras should have thought of that earlier, before you were born, Dick. How did you get as white as you are?
The Southern explanation is that Sherman marched to the sea.
They all laughed.
He must have had a considerable and very vital army, was Olive's comment. You know as well as I do that practically every other ofay in the South has a coloured half-brother and you know how many successful intermarriages there have been, especially in the West Indies. It strikes me as particularly amusing what they have to say, these ofays, about the geniuses of our race. Oh yes, they admit that ​Pushkin was a genius, that Dumas was a genius, but it was because they had white blood! Apparently miscegenation is a very fine thing indeed after it has happened, but for God's sake don't let it happen!
You know very well, Mary inserted, as she set down her empty cup, that the best people of our race object to mixed marriages more strenuously than the whites do. I believe if the social barriers were let down there would be fewer of them than there are now.
And if the barriers were let down, another great factor would be eliminated, Howard asserted, the present advantage of being as near white as possible. Why, the white Negro—you, Dick, or Olive—can go anywhere, to any hotel or theatre, without being challenged. You know the number of us that have gone even farther than that.
Buda Green is passing, Olive put in. I met her on Fifth Avenue last Sunday. She was with a white man and she tipped me a wink. Later, she called me up and told me all about it. You can't blame her. I couldn't do it, though. No matter what happens, I stick to my race.
Mary noted that a more intense expression had come into Dick Sill's face.
You say that, he said, but I wonder how much you mean. Think how much easier it is to get jobs if you don't acknowledge your race. Why, even in the Negro theatre they won't engage dark girls. In their world, the white world, they won't even give ​you a look-in at anything good if you're not somewhere near their colour. Ollie, do you think for one moment you'd be engaged as a private secretary if you were black? You know you wouldn't. And the same thing is true of me. Well, I've thought it all out and I'm going to pass!
Dick! The trio cried out simultaneously.
Yes, he went on defiantly. Not today or tomorrow perhaps, but sooner or later I'm going to pass, go over the line, and marry a white woman. It serves them jolly well right for forcing us to. I'd like to start a movement for all us near whites to pass. Ina short time there wouldn't be any Negro problem. There wouldn't even be any Negroes.
Well, a good many have preceded you, Howard said. I've heard there are about eight thousand in New York alone.
I couldn't do it, Olive asserted. I just couldn't do it. Somehow I feel my race.
What race? cried Dick. What race do you feel? If you lived in Brazil and had one drop of white blood you'd be considered white. Here the reverse is true. What's the coloured race ever done for you? Dick, now thoroughly worked up, demanded. What?
Well, they haven't done anything particularly for or against me, but somehow in spirit I belong to them. I know that. I don't feel white. What you do is your business, just as it's Buda's business. I just couldn't do it myself, that's all.
​Mary was conciliatory. We go round and round like squirrels in a cage and we never get anywhere, she said. Is there any solution? Sometimes I like to think there is, and sometimes I don't really care. Do you know, when we keep away from this subject, we have so much pleasure among ourselves that I sometimes think it isn't very important . . . she hesitated . . . if a thoughtless white person occasionally is rude. You can laugh all you like, Dick, but Harlem is a sort of Mecca. In some ways it's even an advantage to be coloured. Certainly on the stage it's no handicap. It's almost an asset. And now the white editors are beginning to regard Negroes as interesting novelties, like white elephants or black roses. They'll print practically anything our coloured writers send in. . . .
That won't last. Dick interrupted her fiercely. The time is coming and soon enough, at that, when the Negro artist will have to compete with the white artist on an equal plane if he expects to make any impression. I think the ofays must be getting tired of saying "Pretty good for a Nigger."
Howard had been meditating. I believe, he said at last, a trifle sententiously, Mary thought, that there is a solution for what is called the race problem. . . . The others all stared at him. . . . You know old Booker T was all for conciliation; then Du Bois came along and was all for an aggressive policy. Now neither of these methods worked for a very simple reason, because fundamentally, and gener​ally speaking, the white race is not vitally interested in the Negro problem. In the mass they are quite indifferent to it. It doesn't bother them, so they just forget it. I learned that much at Harvard. They don't argue about it or even think about it much. Rather, they are inclined to ignore it, until some jig or other annoys them and then they lynch him or start a riot or something.
Then, he continued, still speaking earnestly, there is the policy of the young coloured intellectuals, from whom we have heard so much during the past two years, which is simply to adopt a mental attitude of equality and break the bars down gradually through the work of our artists. That won't be successful either, except for the artists. Of course, Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes and Countee Cullen can go anywhere within reason. They will be invited to white dinner parties, but I don't see how that's going to affect the rest of us.
Why not? Olive demanded.
Because the white people they meet will regard them as geniuses, in other words, exceptions. Yes, they will say to themselves, these are certainly unusually brilliant and delightful individuals; it's a pity all Negroes aren't like them. So they will go on neglecting the plight in which our respectable middle class finds itself.
Well, Mary said, I thought you had a solution.
So I have. It's simple enough to state, not so ​easy to achieve. It's merely economic. As soon as we, in the mass, become rich enough we will become powerful. You can't keep up the bars when your pocket-book is affected, no matter how violent your prejudice. As soon as we are rich enough, we will go wherever we really want to go, and do what we want to do. White people may sneer at us, but they will receive us. Look at the Jews. A lot of Nordics despise them, but they can't ignore them. They're much too important financially.
But, Counsellor, you're only stating Booker T's old premise, Dick put in. He said all that—not, to be sure, quite so bluntly—and what has happened? Any time one of us saves a little money, the white world becomes green-eyed with jealousy, to say nothing of our own group.
Booker I did say something like that tentatively, Howard admitted, but we've got to work faster than he expected us to. He urged Negroes to acquire land and work it. It's better to acquire land and sell it. And it's true that in the South the poor whites are envious if we get on and in Harlem the shines are jealous. I said it was going to be difficult. All of us have very serious handicaps to overcome. Nevertheless . . .
Bottle it, Howard, Olive cried, yawning. I've heard enough of this lecture for one evening. Let's listen to Clara Smith. She wound up the phono​graph and put on a record. Soon the moaning wonder of the Blues singer's voice sounded in the little room:
The tears were streaming down Mary's cheeks. The others were sitting in solemn, dejected silence.
Oh hell, Ollie, Dick complained, I don't see that you've improved matters much. 'Try the Funny Blues!