The Living is Easy
The Living is Easytakes a close, critical look at upper-class Black society in Boston around World War I. At its center is Cleo Jericho Judson, born in the South, the oldest of several sisters, a woman who exploits or creates weakness in others to gain her place in society and to maintain her role as the focus of her sisters' dependent admiration. Cleo is conniving, self-serving, domineering, as well as beautiful, dramatic, and breath-taking in her audacity. She hears of a house in a higher-class part of Boston where "there wasn't another colored family she knew who had beaten her to it." The rent is thirty-five dollars; she tells her husband it is fifty, convinces the landlord to accept twenty-five, and pockets the difference. Once she has the house, she convinces her sisters and their children to "visit" her; five months later, only Cleo still has a marriage and the sisters have nowhere else to go. Yet if Cleo is unethical, there is a clarity to her motives that is lacking in the Boston-born society she is determined to join, an elite society consisting of light-skinned, college-educated daughters and sons of self-made businessmen who - when the money runs out - find themselves caught between their own pride and the racism of the rest of the world. Dorothy West knew the society she wrote about - in fact, many of the characters are based on real people - and her observations are both sharp-edged and empathetic.-- For great reviews of books for girls, check outLet's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. --From500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister