Irvin Cobb - J. Poindexter, Colored стр 6.

We gets into a taxihack and we rides for what seems like to me it's several miles and still are not nowheres near the outskirts as far as I can judge, and when finally we gets to the new location I has another astonishment. For here all day I've been expecting we'd land at a private residence but this place to which we've come at don't look like no private residence to me. It's more like the hotel we just left only more bigger and mighty near as tall. In all other respects additional it certainly is a grand establishment.

It's got a kind of a private road so's carriages can drive in under shelter off the sidewalk and 'way back inside is a round piece of ground all fixed up with solid marble benches and little cedar trees and flowerbeds, like a cemetery. I thinks to myself that maybe this here is the private burying-plot for the owner's family; but still there ain't no tombstones in sight excepting one over the front door with words cut on it, and since I figures I has done showed ignorance enough for one day, I don't ask no fool questions about it. The help here also wears fancy clothes, but is my own color. I'm glad of that because I counts now on having some black folks to get acquainted with and to talk to; but just as soon as one of 'em opens his mouth and speaks I knows they is not my kind even if they is my complexion. Because he don't talk like no white folks ever I knowed and yet he don't talk like none of the black folks does at home. Still, just from his conversation I can place him. There was two just like him which was brought along once by a Northern family staying in our town but they didn't linger long amongst us. They didn't like the place and no more the place didn't like them. They claimed they was genuine West Indians, whatever that is, and they made their brags constant that they also was British subjects. But Aunt Dilsey Turner she always said they looked more like objects to her. Aunt Dilsey, which she was Judge Priest's cook for going on twenty years, is mighty plain-spoken about folks and things which she don't fancy. And she did not fancy these two none whatsomever.

When we gets upstairs to our section I'm sort of disappointed in it. The furniture ain't new and shiny like what I naturally expected 'twould be. Most of it is kind of old and dingy and hacked-up-looking. The curtains at the setting-room windows is all frayed-like and mighty near wore through in spots. And the Sublette family must a-run out of money before they got round to buying the carpets because they is not no carpets at all but only a passel of old faded rugs scattered about the floor here and there. Some of the chairs the best company chairs, too is so old they is actually decrepit. I'd say that by rights they belonged in a second-hand store, or leastways up in the attic. Moreover, they ain't no upstairs to our department nor yet there is not no downstairs nor no cellar, but instead, everything, kitchen, pantry, and the rooms for the help and all, runs on one floor. But Mr. Dallas he deports himself like he is satisfied and it ain't for me to be finding fault if he sees fitten not to find any.

Anyway, I is so busy for a little while flying round and getting things unpacked that I has no time to utter complaints. Pretty soon, though, I has to knock off hanging up Mr. Dallas' suits to mix a batch of cocktails from the private stock he has brought along with him in one of his trunks, because this here Mr. Raynor he telephones he's bringing some of his friends for a round of drinks with Mr. Dallas and then Mr. Raynor says they'll ride out in his motor-car to a road-house to get 'em some dinner. I takes his message off the telephone and I knows that's what he says, surprising though it do sound.

That's a couple of new ones on me eating dinner when it's already mighty near past supper-time and eating it at a road-house, too! I says to myself that New York City is getting to act more curiouser to me every minute I stays in it. Because the only road-house ever I knowed of by that name used to stand alongside the toll-gate just outside the corporation limits on the Mayfield road and the old white man which collected the tolls lived in it, his name being Mr. Gip Bayless. But the gate is done torn down since the public government taken over the gravel roads, and anyhow, even in its most palmiest days, none of the quality wouldn't never think of stopping there at that little old rusty house for their vittles. They'd mighty near as soon think of having a picnic at the pest-house.

Still and notwithstanding, Mr. Dallas ain't indicating no surprise when I conveys to him what Mr. Raynor says, so I reflects to myself that if toll-gate houses up here is in proportion to everything else this one which they're aiming to go to, must probably be about the size of a county courthouse, with a slate roof on it and doubtless a cupola. So I just gets busy and mingles up a batch of powerful tasty cocktails in the shaker. I knows they is tasty from a couple of private samples which I pours off for myself out in the pantry. My experience has been that the only way you can tell is a cocktail just right is to taste it from time to time as you goes along.

Immediately soon here comes Mr. Raynor with his friends which there is four of them, besides himself one other gentleman named Bellows and three ladies. One of the ladies is older than the other two, but decorated more younger, if anything, than what they is. Introducing her to Mr. Dallas, Mr. Raynor says her name is Mrs. Gaylord but they all calls her Jerry. She's pretty near entirely out of eyebrows, but she has got more than a bushel of hair which is all kind of frozen-looking and curled up tight on her head. It don't look natural to me and I knows it ain't natural a little bit later when Mr. Raynor sets down on the arm of her chair and throws his arm around her sort of offhand and sociable-like, and she up and tells him for Heaven's sake to be careful and not muss her up because she says she's only just that day spent forty dollars and four hours getting a permanent wave put in.

At that I says to myself, I says:

"Well, betwixt w'ites an' blacks we su'ttinly is mekin' the world safe fur them beauty doctors. Niggers down South spendin' all the money they kin rake an' scrape togither gittin' the kinkiness tuck out of they haids an' fashionable ladies up yere spendin' their'n gittin' it put in! It's a compliment to one race or the other, but jest w'ich I ain't purpared to say."

The other ladies is named Miss O'Brien and Miss DeWitt but it's kind of hard for me at first to remember which from which seeing that the rest of the party scarcely ever calls 'em anything except Pat and Bill-Lee. They is both mighty nice and friendly but they is exclusively different one from the other. Miss Pat she's got her hair chopped off short like a little boy's and she acts kind of like a boy does, too free and easy and laughing a lot and smoking a cigarette so natural that it's like as if she must a-been born with one in her mouth and it lighted. And yet for all that, I seems to get the impression that way down underneath she's kind of tired of herself and everything around her.

But this here Miss DeWitt she is tall and slender and kind of quiet. She must a-been feeling poorly lately because her face is just dead-white and her lips is still bright red from the fever and when she sets down in a chair she just seems to kind of fall back into it, all limp-like. She ain't saying much with her mouth but she does a sight of talking with her eyes which is big and black and sort of lazy-like most of the time. She sure is decked up with jewelry like the Queen of Sheba, too. She's got big heavy necklaces round her neck and great long ear-rings in her ears and many bracelets on both her arms. She's even got two big bracelets clamped round one of her ankles, which I judges she didn't have room for 'em nowheres else and so put 'em there to keep from losing 'em; and when she moves the jewelry all jingles freely and advertises her. She walks with a kind of a limber swimming gait, soft and glideful; of course it ain't exactly like swimming and yet that's the only way I can designate what her walking puts me in mind of. She wears dead black clothes and that makes her paleness seem all the more so.