Their young women goe not shadowed (clothed) amongst their own companie, until they be nigh eleven or twelve returns of the leafe old, nor are they much ashamed thereof, and therefore would the before remembered… sometymes resorting to our fort… but being over twelve years, they put on a kind of semecinctum lethern apron before their bellies, and are very shamefaced to be seen bare.
— wantons before marriage and household drudges after, it is extremely questionable whether they had any conception of it.
The woman in red finished at the window. So Sam said:
“You go on ahead there. I’m not in that big a rush.” He hefted the three shopping bags, two in his right hand, so that the handle cords moved half an inch across his stinging palms.
“That’s awful nice of you. They do get restless sometimes, when they have to stand still so long. I appreciate it a lot.” She turned and announced to the shuffling gaggle: “Now you all stay with this nice colored gentleman right here. I’m going to the window there to get you your penny postcards.” She smiled at Sam in turning and stepped toward the bars.
The girls moved up around him. One, though in another torn coat and with the same kind of rag over her hair — and her expression just as vacant — , was actually pretty, as she looked off to the side. Her face was the darkest. The bones in it were fine. Her figure, beneath her poor coat, seemed fit. For a moment Sam imagined her some displaced tribal princess, stepped from an ancient African sect to be dazzled by the modern day — till she turned: the far part of her face was a scarred cascade from a burn.
There was not even an eye in it.
Tides of black and brown made a torrent down her skull. So as not to stare, Sam dropped his eyes — and saw, beneath her torn hem, her ankles and the legs above them were as badly burned as her face. She wore only some sort of slippers, which her heels had slid over the edge of, onto the mat slewed with snot-colored slush. Sam turned a little, lifted his eyes again — and caught a whiff of unwashed sourness. Could that be one of them?
Really, he thought, the things that could be wreaked on the body!
Sam’s bags were weighty with Hubert’s and Elsie’s and Corey’s — and his own — gifts. But the floor was too wet to set them down.
Just then the Ablir girl ran forward to the window beside theirs, shouldering aside the generous-breasted, humus-skinned woman who had just handed in a package as the bars had been, for a moment, unlocked and swung aside.
The bars clicked closed; the woman said, “Hey, you — !”
With all her brachydactylic fingers, Ella pointed through.
Inside, the white clerk brought forward a toy horse, that Ella must have seen. He stuck one plush hoof through the bars and waved it at her. Ella took a breath, grabbed it, and tried to tug it out — but, still smiling, the clerk pulled it from her grip and raised it higher between the bars, beyond her reach, to wave the leg once more.
Silent, determined, Ella jumped, missed, jumped again. She didn’t jump very high; and the little lift she managed suggested her physical coordination was deeply impaired.
The woman who’d just handed her package through looked down now, frowned, then began to smile.
From behind the bars, the clerk said with a notable brogue: “All right, little girl. Now you have to let the other people mail their letters.”
Biting her broad underlip, Ella Ablir backed from the cage, gazing within.
A bunch of penny postcards in one hand, not yet put into her pocket book, the woman in the green coat stepped away from the next window over to receive the child’s shoulders with guiding gloves. At the contact, the woman’s worried look relaxed. “All right,” she said. “Let’s all behave. Come on, now — let’s go. I got your penny postcards for you. We’re going to take them back home and draw pictures of what we want for Christmas and send them to Santa Claus at the North Pole. That’s what we’re going to do now.” As she stepped by Sam, she smiled her gratitude for his brief vigil — and explained: “They won’t never get nothing. And they can’t write. But they like to draw the pictures and send them to Santa.” She turned to the girls. “Now all of us. Let’s go!”
Their cardboard tags at their several levels on threadbare cloth (the tall one’s coat was ludicrously too small), they shuffled before the woman, like wounded angels or emissaries from another world, up between the lines of Christmas mailers loaded with letters and packages to be sent by sea and rail and air to where and wherever.
Postage on all Sam’s three shopping-bags full came to two dollars and seventeen cents.
Turning from the window, the bags at his side empty and all in one hand now, flapping like wind-abandoned sails, Sam saw the big clock on the wall above the door. It was circled in eight concentric rings of metal, each one set back from the next (for the eight planets, perhaps?), the face a ninth and central wafer, whiter than ice, arrow-tipped hands upthrust, long one right and short one left, telling him it was five past eleven.
That noon was the first time Sam tried to find the underground magic shop at Forty-second Street. For most of his exploration, he kept making the same turns and going along the same underground alleys, even as he tried to get somewhere new, finally to give up: he didn’t want to be late for dinner at Corey and Elsie’s. When he was unsure of what train he was actually supposed to take to get back to Harlem, he asked an elderly Negro in a suit with baggy knees and the jacket and vest grayed with powdered plaster, who was carrying a chest of tools on the platform — and came home.
New Year’s Day was practically balmy. For a while Sam retained a memory of strolling down Lenox Avenue, just a sweater under his suit jacket. Hands in his pants pockets, he whistled jets of music and condensed breath, ambling by the pine trees discarded that morning at the curb over soiled snow clutching the sidewalk’s rim. Wooden stands were still nailed to the trunks: crossed planks, a board square, or some more complicated contrivance with braces. The needle-bare branches transformed the trees into long-slain carcasses.
The next day the temperature dropped to a previously unknown and, till then unbelievable, paralytic cold. What had been snow and slush became a rind of ice over the city. That night, ears stinging and face a mask of pain from the wind, Sam hurried toward Mount Morris past a mound of trees, delicately afire in the corner lot, one still with ornaments on its charring branches, black before crackling flame.
Late in February’s icy circuit, when Sam answered the door, Clarice came in, waving a newspaper, cheeks blotched red with cold. “You’ve got to see this. This is too much. This is, I tell you, the living end!”
Hubert got up from the wing chair. “What is it?”
“What is it?” The room was chill; and though Clarice’s coat was open, she didn’t shrug it off. “Here — now did you believe you were ever going to live to see something like this in a paper — even a New York City paper?”
The picture took up a quarter of the second page.
White actress Mary Blair knelt on the ground beside a seated, twenty-six year old Negro actor, Paul Robeson, kissing his hand! The play was Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, scheduled to open at the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village sometime that spring. Robeson played a young, Negro law student —
“See. He was a lawyer, Hubert — like you.”
“He plays a lawyer,” Hubert corrected. “In the play.”