The Blacker the Berry . . .

by Wallace Thurman

“It’s like this, Emma Lou, they don’t want no dark girls in their sorority. They ain’t pledged us, and we’re the only two they ain’t, and we’re both black.”

She should have been a boy. A black boy could get along, but a black girl . . .

Left entirely to herself, she proceeded to make herself more miserable. Lying in bed late every morning, semi-conscious, body burning, mind disturbed by thoughts of sex.

Emma Lou had obtained some of these arsenic wafers and eaten them, but they had only served to give her pains in the pit of her stomach. Next she determined upon a peroxide solution in addition to something which was known as Black and White Ointment. After she had been using these for about a month she thought that she could notice some change. But in reality the only effects were an increase in blackheads, irritating rashes, and a burning skin.

Don’t whiten your skin boo

Ofttimes men spoke to her, and tried to make advances, but they were never the kind she preferred. She didn’t like black men, and the others seemed to keep their distance.

Karma!!!

Slap him in the face. Change your seat. Don’t be an idiot. He has a nice smile. Look at him again.

Jasper Crane.

His brother wasn’t very nice to him . . . wanted to kick him out because he was jealous of him, thought his wife was more attentive than a sister-in-law should be.

Emma Lou to lend him five dollars. He said he wanted to buy a job. She did. And when he left her, he kissed her passionately and promised to meet her on the next day and to telephone her within an hour.

But he didn’t telephone nor did Emma Lou ever...

Meanwhile several other men approached her, a panting fat Jew, whom she reported to the usher, a hunchback whom she pitied and then admired as he “made” the girl sitting on the other side of him; and there were several not very clean, trampy-looking men, but no Jasper.

Consistency rude AF

she stood in front of her mirror for over an hour, fixing her face, drenching it with a peroxide solution, plastering it with a mudpack, massaging it with a bleaching ointment, and then, as a final touch, using much vanishing cream and powder. She even ate an arsenic wafer. The only visible effect of all this on her complexion was to give it an ugly purple tinge, but Emma Lou was certain that it made her skin less dark.

Just not smart at all but I saw this coming

Emma Lou actually shoved the supple, slender boy she was dancing with in Alva’s direction. She mustn’t lose him this time. She must speak. They veered close to one another. They

almost collided.

She saw Alva sitting in a box in the balcony, and suggested to her companion that they parade around the balcony for a while. He assented. He was lonesome, too.

‘The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.’”

“The only thing a black woman is good for is to make money for a brown-skin papa.”

Yet he had to do something with Emma Lou, and release from the quandary presented itself from most unexpected quarters.

Alva had consented to act as cicerone, and, realizing that these people would be more or less free from the color prejudice

She did not have to know that these were not his regular companions, and from then on she would have no reason to feel that he was ashamed to have her meet his friends.

She was certain now that Alva loved her, certain that he was not ashamed or even aware of her dusky complexion. She had felt from the first that he was superior to such inane truck, now she knew it. Alva loved her for herself alone, and loved her so much that he didn’t mind her being a coal scuttle blond.

Alva would never invite her where she would not be welcome. These were his friends. And so was Braxton, but Alva said he was peculiar.

All of you know that white is the symbol of everything pure and good, whether that everything be concrete or abstract.

Ivory Soap is advertised as being ninety-nine and some fraction per cent pure, and Ivory Soap is white. Moreover, virtue and virginity are always represented as being clothed in white garments. Then, too, the God we, or rather most, Negroes worship is a patriarchal white man, seated on a white throne, in a spotless white Heaven, radiant with white streets and white-apparelled angels eating white honey and drinking white milk.”

I need to talk about this on Monday

“We are all living in a totally white world, where all standards are the standards of the white man, and where almost invariably what the white man does is right, and what the black man does is wrong, unless it is precedented by something a white man has done.”

Mulattoes have always been accorded more consideration by white people than their darker brethren. They were made to feel superior even during slave days . . . made to feel proud, as Bud Fisher would say, that they were bastards.

Preachhhhh

it is generally the Negro with a quantity of mixed blood in his veins who finds adaptation to a Nordic environment more easy than one of pure blood, which, of course, you will admit, is, to an American Negro, convenient if not virtuous.”

Speakkkkk

You see, people have to feel superior to something, and there is scant satisfaction in feeling superior to domestic animals or steel machines that one can train or utilize.

It is much more pleasing to pick out some individual or some group of individuals on the same plane to feel superior to. This is almost necessary when one is a member of a supposedly despised, mistreated minority group.

“and they got hoppin’-john out there, too.” “What the hell is hoppin’-john?”

“There ain’t nothin’ for you to understand, but that I want you to get out of my house. I don’t have no such carryings-on around here. A drunken woman in my house at all hours in the morning, being carried in by a man! Well, you coulda knocked me over with a feather.”

Ohhh damn not kicked out

“You must get out. Your week is up Wednesday. That gives you three days to find another room, and I want you to act like a lady the rest of that time, too. The idea!” she sputtered, and stalked out of the room.

Then she began to wonder about her landlady’s charges. There was no need arguing about the matter. She had wanted to move anyway.

who wouldn’t be color-conscious when everywhere you go people are always talking about color. If it didn’t make any difference they wouldn’t talk about it, they wouldn’t always be poking fun, and laughing and making jokes. . . .”

Hence, she had stayed to herself, had had very few friends, and had become more and more resentful of her blackness of skin.

He had been the only completely satisfying thing in her life, and it didn’t seem possible for one who had pretended to love her as much as he, suddenly to

become so completely indifferent.

He had been thoroughly disgusted with her and had intended to relent only after she had been forced to chase him for a considerable length of time. But Geraldine’s coming had changed things altogether.

Alva knew when not to attempt something, and he knew very well that he could not toy with Emma Lou and live with Geraldine at the same time. Some

of the others were d...