The Blacker the Berry quotes

More acutely than ever before Emma Lou began to feel that her luscious black complexion was somewhat of a liability, and that her marked color variation from the other people in her environment was a decided curse.

Not that she minded being black, being a Negro necessitated having a colored skin, but she did mind being too black.

More acutely than ever before Emma Lou began to feel that her luscious black complexion was somewhat of a liability, and that her marked color variation from the other people in her environment was a decided curse.

Not that she minded being black, being a Negro necessitated having a colored skin, but she did mind being too black.

She couldn’t understand why such should be the case, couldn’t comprehend the cruelty of the natal attenders who had allowed her to be dipped, as it were, in indigo ink when there were so many more pleasing colors on nature’s palette.

Get a diploma?—What did it mean to her? College?—Perhaps. A job?—Perhaps again. She was going to have a high school diploma, but it would mean nothing to her whatsoever.

The tragedy of her life was that she was too black.

Her face and not a slender roll of ribbon-bound parchment was to be her future identification tag in society. High school diploma indeed!

Get a diploma?—What did it mean to her? College?—Perhaps. A job?—Perhaps again. She was going to have a high school diploma, but it would mean nothing to her whatsoever. The tragedy of her life was that she was too black.

Her face and not a slender roll of ribbon-bound parchment was to be her future identification tag in society.

High school diploma indeed! What she needed was an efficient bleaching agent, a magic cream that would remove this unwelcome black mask from her face and make her more like her fellow men.

Here was her chance. She would make friends with this girl and should she happen to be a new student, they could become friends and together find their way into the inner circle of those colored students who really mattered.

Emma Lou was essentially a snob. She had absorbed this trait from the very people who had sought to exclude her from their presence.

All of her life she had heard talk of “right sort of people,” and of “the people who really mattered,” and from these phrases she had formed a mental image of those to whom they applied.

She had been in New York now for five weeks, and it seemed like, well, just a few days.

Five weeks⁠—thirty-five days and thirty-five nights, and of these nights John had had two.

And now he sulked because she would not promise him another; because she had, in fact, boldly told him that there could be no more between them.

Emma Lou drew closer to the building. She must get that shine off of her nose.

It was bad enough to be black, too black, without having a shiny face to boot.

She stopped in front of the tailor shop directly beneath the office of Angus and Brown, and, turning her back to the street, proceeded to powder her shiny member. Three noisy lads passed by.

Bell bottom trousers hid all save the tips of his shiny tan shoes. “Fats” was looking at Emma Lou, too, but as he passed, he turned his eyes from her and broadcast a withering look at the lad who had spoken:

“Man, you know I don’t haul no coal.”

There was loud laughter and the trio merrily clicked their metal-cornered heels on the sunbaked pavement as they moved away.

“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.”

The ineluctability of raw experience! The muddy mirroring of life’s perplexities.⁠ ⁠… Seeing everything in terms of self.⁠ ⁠… The spreading sensitiveness of an adder’s sting.

“Mr. Brown has someone else in mind. …”

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.

Alva had lost all patience with Braxton, and profanely told him so. No matter what his condition, Braxton would not work. He seemed to believe that because he was handsome, and because he was Braxton, he shouldn’t have to work.

He graced the world with his presence. Therefore, it should pay him.

“A thing of beauty is joy forever,” and should be sustained by a communal larder. Alva tried to show him that such a larder didn’t exist, that one either worked or hustled.

But his charms were too obviously cultivated, and his technique too clumsy. He would attract almost anyone to him, but they were sure to bolt away as suddenly as they had come.

He could have, but he could not hold.

Now, as Alva told Emma Lou, this was a distinct handicap to one who wished to be a hustler, and live by one’s wits off the bounty of others.

It was presumed that she had gone downtown to live in the apartment of the woman for whom she worked. Braxton seemed unconcerned about her disappearance, and continued his peacock-like march for some time, with feathers unruffled, even by frequent trips to the pawnshop.

But a peacock can hardly preen an unplumaged body, and, though Braxton continued to strut, in a few weeks after the break, he was only a sad semblance of his former self.

Alva nagged at him continually. “Damned if I’m going to carry you.” Braxton would remain silent. “You’re the most no-count nigger I know. If you can’t do anything else, why in the hell don’t you get a job?”

The midnight show at the Lafayette on Friday is quite a social event among certain classes of Harlem folk, and, if one is a sweetback or a man about town, one must be seen standing in front of the theater, if not inside.

It costs nothing to obstruct the entranceway, and it adds much to one’s prestige. Why, no one knows.

Without untoward incident Emma Lou and Alva found the seats he had reserved. There was much noise in the theater, much passing to and fro, much stumbling down dark aisles.

There must be other potent elements to humor besides surprise. Then a very Topsy-like girl skated onto the stage to the tune of “Ireland must be heaven because my mother came from there.”

Besides being corked until her skin was jet black, the girl had on a wig of kinky hair.

Her lips were painted red—their thickness exaggerated by the paint. Her coming created a stir. Everyone concerned was indignant that something like her should crash their party. She attempted to attach herself to certain men in the crowd.

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.

She measured everything by her own moods and reactions, translated everything into the language of Emma Lou, and variations bewildered her to the extent that she could not believe in their reality.

So, when the company had passed through New York on its way from Philadelphia to Boston, she had approached Alva’s door once more.

She found herself strangely uninterested in anything they might construct. She didn’t see that it would make much difference in the world whether they did or did not. Months of sophisticated reading under Campbell Kitchen’s tutelage had cultivated the seeds of pessimism experience had sown.

Life was all a bad dream recurrent in essentials. Every dog had his day and every dog died.

These priggish little respectable persons she now knew and associated with seemed infinitely inferior to her. They were all hypocritical and colorless. They committed what they called sin in the same colorless way they served God, family, and race.

They were all hypocritical and colorless. They committed what they called sin in the same colorless way they served God, family, and race. None of them had the fire and gusto of Alva, nor his lightheartedness.

At last she had met the “right sort of people” and found them to be quite wrong.

However, she quelled her growing dissatisfaction and immersed herself in her work. Campbell Kitchen had told her again and again that economic independence was the solution to almost any problem. When she found herself a well-paying position she need not worry more.

Campbell Kitchen had told her that when she found economic independence, everything else would come.

Well now that she had economic independence she found herself more enslaved and more miserable than ever.

She wondered what he thought of her.