In 1926, Dorothy West submitted a short story, “The Typewriter,” to a writing contest sponsored by Opportunity, and tied for second place, sharing the accolade with Zora Neale Hurston. West, like Hurston, received widespread recognition especially after African American and feminist scholars rediscovered her writing decades later – such as when the Feminist Press republished West’s novel The Living is Easy in 1982, or 34 years after its initial release. Unlike Hurston, who died in 1960, West was still alive in the late twentieth century to witness her work being enjoyed by subsequent generations of readers. In the meantime, she went on to produce work well into her eighties, seeing her second novel The Wedding (1995) become a best-seller and a television mini-series, produced by media mogul Oprah Winfrey.
Born in Boston in 1907, Dorothy started school at age four, wrote her first story at seven, and entered the prestigious Girls’ Latin School at 10. Her story “Promise and Fulfillment” was published in The Boston Post while she was still a schoolgirl. Her father, Isaac Christopher West, was a former slave and successful Boston entrepreneur, called “Boston’s Black Banana King” for his thriving wholesale fruit business, who could afford to tutor his only daughter at home. Rachel Pease Benson, her mother, came from a family of 22 children. Rachel instilled in her daughter Dorothy a sense of pride and determination. Raised in Brookline and a student at Boston University, she was still a teenager when she arrived in Harlem in the mid-1920s – when Langston Hughes affectionately referred to her as “The Kid.” After winning the Opportunity prize, she moved to Harlem with her cousin, the poet Helene Johnson, and helped publish the experimental magazine Fire!! with Hughes, Countée Cullen, and Wallace Thurman. She immersed herself in all aspects of 1920s Harlem culture; she pursued theatrical endeavors such as a small role in the 1927 stage adaptation of the novel Dubose Heyward published two years earlier, Porgy.
As the cultural promise of the New Negro Renaissance faded with the prolonged economic devastation of the 1930s, West attempted to resuscitate the movement’s vitality by founding a literary quarterly called Challenge (1934–1937). Challenge and its more politically radical successor that first appeared in October 1937, New Challenge, introduced a new generation of writers to the public – Margaret Walker, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. Again founded by West but this time co-edited with Marian Minus and, to a lesser extent, Wright, New Challenge was notorious for featuring the clarion essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” In this essay, Wright indicts more readily and vociferously than West would have liked the New Negro Renaissance for failing to speak directly to the disfranchised conditions of African Americans, a mission he now invites fellow writers of his era to share. The urgency of Wright’s message was not enough to propel New Challenge past the first issue. Amid editorial strife, the magazine folded before the New Year.
West remained productive after the demise of New Challenge. Into the 1940s, she worked for the Federal Writers’ Project and wrote short stories for The New York Daily News. By the end of this decade she had moved permanently to her family’s vacation home in Oak Bluffs, a town on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, The Living is Easy. Though designed for serialization in the popular Ladies Home Journal, the magazine reneged on its offer for fear of backlash from southern white readers. Released as a book in 1948, The Living Is Easy was a commercial disappointment, ignored by most critics until its re-release when West was in her seventies.
Closer to the end of her life, West was working as a billing clerk and a journalist for the Vineyard Gazette. To her good fortune, she came into contact with a neighbor on the island – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. As editor at Doubleday, Onassis worked with West to publish her second novel, The Wedding, in 1995. The novel’s success encouraged Doubleday to publish another book by West, The Richer, the Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences, shortly before her death in 1998.
Barnes, Paula C. “Dorothy West: Harlem Renaissance Writer?” New Voices on the Harlem Renaissance: Essays on Race, Gender, and Literary Discourse. Eds. Australia Tarver and Paula C. Barnes. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. 99–124.
Goldsmith, Meredith. “The Wages Of Weight: Dorothy West’s Corporeal Politics.” Mosaic 40.4 (2007): 35–49.
Gordon, Michelle Yvonne. “The Chicago Renaissance.” A Companion to African American Literature. Ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 271–285.
Jones, Sharon L. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Mitchell, Verner D. and Cynthia Davis. Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, A Biography of the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011.
Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. Dorothy West’s Paradise: A Biography of Class and Color. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
Wilks, Jennifer M. Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Ch. 4.
It occurred to him, as he eased past the bulging knees of an Irish wash lady and forced an apologetic passage down the aisle of the crowded car, that more than anything in all the world he wanted not to go home. He began to wish passionately that he had never been born, that he had never been married, that he had never been the means of life’s coming into the world. He knew quite suddenly that he hated his flat and his family and his friends. And most of all, the incessant thing that would “clatter clatter” until every nerve screamed aloud, and the words of the evening paper danced crazily before him, and the insane desire to crush and kill set his fingers twitching.
He shuffled down the street, an abject little man of fifty-odd years, in an ageless overcoat that flapped in the wind. He was cold, and he hated the North, and particularly Boston, and saw suddenly a barefoot pickaninny sitting on a fence in the hot, Southern sun with a piece of steaming corn bread and a piece of fried salt pork in either grimy hand.
He was tired, and he wanted his supper, but he didn’t want the beans, and frankfurters, and light bread that Net would undoubtedly have. That Net had had every Monday night since that regrettable moment fifteen years before when he had told her – innocently – that such a supper tasted “right nice. Kinda change from what we always has.”
He mounted the four brick steps leading to his door and pulled at the bell, but there was no answering ring. It was broken again, and in a mental flash he saw himself with a multitude of tools and a box of matches shivering in the vestibule after supper. He began to pound lustily on the door and wondered vaguely if his hand would bleed if he smashed the glass. He hated the sight of blood. It sickened him.
Someone was running down the stairs. Daisy probably. Millie would be at that infernal thing, pounding, pounding. … He entered. The chill of the house swept him. His child was wrapped in a coat. She whispered solemnly, “Poppa, Miz Hicks an’ Miz Berry’s orful mad. They gointa move if they can’t get more heat. The furnace’s bin out all day. Mama couldn’t fix it.” He said hurriedly, “I’ll go right down. I’ll go right down.” He hoped Mrs. Hicks wouldn’t pull open her door and glare at him. She was large and domineering, and her husband was a bully. If her husband ever struck him it would kill him. He hated life, but he didn’t want to die. He was afraid of God, and in his wildest flights of fancy couldn’t imagine himself an angel. He went softly down the stairs.
He began to shake the furnace fiercely. And he shook into it every wrong, mumbling softly under his breath. He began to think back over his uneventful years, and it came to him as rather a shock that he had never sworn in all his life. He wondered uneasily if he dared say “damn.” It was taken for granted that a man swore when he tended a stubborn furnace. And his strongest interjection was “Great balls of fire!”
The cellar began to warm, and he took off his inadequate overcoat that was streaked with dirt. Well, Net would have to clean that. He’d be damned – ! It frightened him and thrilled him. He wanted suddenly to rush upstairs and tell Mrs. Hicks if she didn’t like the way he was running things, she could get out. But he heaped another shovelful of coal on the fire and sighed. He would never be able to get away from himself and the routine of years.
He thought of that eager Negro lad of seventeen who had come North to seek his fortune. He had walked jauntily down Boylston Street, and even his own kind had laughed at the incongruity of him. But he had thrown up his head and promised himself: “You’ll have an office here some day. With plate-glass windows and a real mahogany desk.” But, though he didn’t know it then, he was not the progressive type. And he became successively, in the years, bell boy, porter, waiter, cook, and finally janitor in a downtown office building.
He had married Net when he was thirty-three and a waiter. He had married her partly because – though he might not have admitted it – there was no one to eat the expensive delicacies the generous cook gave him every night to bring home. And partly because he dared hope there might be a son to fulfill his dreams. But Millie had come, and after her, twin girls who had died within two weeks, then Daisy, and it was tacitly understood that Net was done with childbearing.
Life, though flowing monotonously, had flowed peacefully enough until that sucker of sanity became a sitting room fixture. Intuitively at the very first he had felt its undesirability. He had suggested hesitatingly that they couldn’t afford it. Three dollars the eighth of every month. Three dollars: food and fuel. Times were hard, and the twenty dollars apiece the respective husbands of Miz Hicks and Miz Berry irregularly paid was only five dollars more than the thirty-five a month he paid his own Hebraic landlord. And the Lord knew his salary was little enough. At which point Net spoke her piece, her voice rising shrill. “God knows I never complain ’bout nothin’. Ain’t no other woman got less than me. I bin wearin’ this same dress here five years, an’ I’ll wear it another five. But I don’t want nothin’. I ain’t never wanted nothin’. An’ when I does as’, it’s only for my children. You’re a poor sort of father if you can’t give that child jes’ three dollars a month to rent that typewriter. Ain’t ’nother girl in school ain’t got one. An’ mos’ of ’ems bought an’ paid for. You know yourself how Millie is. She wouldn’t as’ me for it till she had to. An’ I ain’t going to disappoint her. She’s goin’ to get that typewriter Saturday, mark my words.”
On a Monday then it had been installed. And in the months that followed, night after night he listened to the murderous “tack, tack, tack” that was like a vampire slowly drinking his blood. If only he could escape. Bar a door against the sound of it. But tied hand and foot by the economic fact that “Lord knows we can’t afford to have fires burnin’ an’ lights lit all over the flat. You’all gotta set in one room. An’ when y’get tired setting y’c’n go to bed. Gas bill was somep’n scandalous last month.”
He heaped a final shovelful of coal on the fire and watched the first blue flames. Then, his overcoat under his arm, he mounted the cellar stairs. Mrs. Hicks was standing in her kitchen door, arms akimbo. “It’s warmin’,” she volunteered.
“Yeh,” he was conscious of his grime-streaked face and hands, “it’s warmin’. I’m sorry ’bout all day.”
She folded her arms across her ample bosom. “Tending a furnace ain’t a woman’s work. I don’t blame you wife none ’tall.”
Unsuspecting, he was grateful. “Yeh, it’s pretty hard for a woman. I always look after it ’fore I goes to work, but some days it jes’ ac’s up.”
“Y’oughta have a janitor, that’s what y’ought,” she flung at him. “The same cullud man that tends them apartments would be willin’. Mr. Taylor has him. It takes a man to run a furnace, and when the man’s away all day – ”
“I know,” he interrupted, embarrassed and hurt. “I know. Tha’s right, Miz Hicks, tha’s right. But I ain’t in a position to make no improvements. Times is hard.”
She surveyed him critically. “Your wife called down ’bout three times while you was in the cellar. I reckon she wants you for supper.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled and escaped up the back stairs.
He hung up his overcoat in the closet, telling himself, a little lamely, that it wouldn’t take him more than a minute to clean it up himself after supper. After all, Net was tired and probably worried what with Mrs. Hicks and all. And he hated men who made slaves of their womenfolk. Good old Net.
He tidied up in the bathroom, washing his face and hands carefully and cleanly so as to leave no – or very little – stain on the roller towel. It was hard enough for Net, God knew.
He entered the kitchen. The last spirals of steam were rising from his supper. One thing about Net, she served a full plate. He smiled appreciatively at her unresponsive back, bent over the kitchen sink. There was no one who could bake beans just like Net’s. And no one who could find a market with frankfurters quite so fat.
He sat down at his place. “Evenin’, hon.”
He saw her back stiffen. “If your supper’s cold, ’tain’t my fault. I called and called.”
He said hastily, “It’s fine, Net, fine. Piping.”
She was the usual tired housewife. “Y’oughta et your supper ’fore you fooled with that furnace. I ain’t bothered ’bout them niggers. I got all my dishes washed ’cept yours. An’ I hate to mess up my kitchen after I once get it straightened up.”
He was humble. “I’ll give that old furnace an extra lookin’ after in the mornin’. It’ll last all day tomorrow, hon.”
“An’ on top of that,” she continued, unheeding him and giving a final wrench to her dish towel, “that confounded bell don’t ring. An’ – ”
“I’ll fix it after supper,” he interposed quickly.
She hung up her dish towel and came to stand before him looming large and yellow. “An’ that old Miz Berry, she claim she was expectin’ comp’ny. An’ she know they must ’a’ come an’ gone while she was in her kitchen an’ couldn’t be at her winder to watch for ’em. Old liar.” She brushed back a lock of naturally straight hair. “She wasn’t expectin’ nobody.”
“Well, you know how some folks are – ”
“Fools! Half the world,” was her vehement answer. “I’m goin’ in the front room an’ set down a spell. I bin on my feet all day. Leave them dishes on the table. God knows I’m tired, but I’ll come back an’ wash ’em.” But they both knew, of course, that he, very clumsily, would.
At precisely quarter past nine when he, strained at last to the breaking point, uttering an inhuman, strangled cry, flung down his paper, clutched at his throat, and sprang to his feet, Millie’s surprised young voice, shocking him to normalcy, heralded the first of that series of great moments that every humble little middle-class man eventually experiences.
“What’s the matter, Poppa? You sick? I wanted you to help me.”
He drew out his handkerchief and wiped his hot hands. “I declare I must ’a’ fallen asleep an’ had a nightmare. No, I ain’t sick. What you want, hon?”
“Dictate me a letter, Poppa. I c’n do sixty words a minute. You know, like a business letter. You know, like those men in your building dictate to their stenographers. Don’t you hear ’em sometimes?”
“Oh sure, I know, hon. Poppa’ll help you. Sure. I hear that Mr. Browning. Sure.”
Net rose. “Guess I’ll put this child to bed. Come on now, Daisy, without no fuss. Then I’ll run up to Pa’s. He ain’t bin well all week.”
When the door closed behind them, he crossed to his daughter, conjured the image of Mr. Browning in the process of dictating, so arranged himself, and coughed importantly.
“Well, Millie – ”
“Oh, Poppa, is that what you’d call your stenographer?” she teased. “And anyway pretend I’m really one – and you’re really my boss, and this letter’s real important.”
A light crept into his dull eyes. Vigor through his thin blood. In a brief moment the weight of years fell from him like a cloak. Tired, bent, little old man that he was, he smiled, straightened, tapped impressively against his teeth with a toil-stained finger, and became that enviable emblem of American life: a businessman.
“You be Miz Hicks, huh, honey? Course we can’t both use the same name. I’ll be J. Lucius Jones. J. Lucius. All them real big men use their middle names. Jus’ kinda looks big doin’, doncha think, hon? Looks like money, huh? J. Lucius.” He uttered a sound that was like the proud cluck of a strutting hen. “J. Lucius.” It rolled like oil from his tongue.
His daughter twisted impatiently. “Now, Poppa – I mean Mr. Jones, sir – please begin. I am ready for dictation, sir.”
He was in that office on Boylston Street, looking with visioning eyes through its plate-glass windows, tapping with impatient fingers on its real mahogany desk.
“Ah – Beaker Brothers, Park Square Building, Boston, Mass. Ah – Gentlemen: In reply to yours of the seventh instant would state – ”
Every night thereafter in the weeks that followed, with Daisy packed off to bed, and Net “gone up to Pa’s” or nodding unobtrusively in her corner, there was the chameleon change of a Court Street janitor to J. Lucius Jones, dealer in stocks and bonds. He would stand, posturing, importantly flicking imaginary dust from his coat lapel, or, his hands locked behind his back, he would stride up and down, earnestly and seriously debating the advisability of buying copper with the market in such a fluctuating state. Once a week, too, he stopped in at Jerry’s, and after a preliminary purchase of cheap cigars, bought the latest trade papers, mumbling an embarrassed explanation: “I got a little money. Think I’ll invest it in reliable stock.”
The letters Millie typed and subsequently discarded, he rummaged for later, and under cover of writing to his brother in the South, laboriously, with a great many fancy flourishes, signed each neatly typed sheet with the exalted J. Lucius Jones.
Later, when he mustered the courage, he suggested tentatively to Millie that it might be fun – just fun, of course – to answer his letters. One night – he laughed a good deal louder and longer than necessary – he’d be J. Lucius Jones, and the next night – here he swallowed hard and looked a little frightened – Rockefeller or Vanderbilt or Morgan – just for fun, y’understand! To which Millie gave consent. It mattered little to her one way or the other. It was practice, and that was what she needed. Very soon now she’d be in the hundred class. Then maybe she could get a job!
He was growing very careful of his English. Occasionally – and it must be admitted, ashamedly – he made surreptitious ventures into the dictionary. He had to, of course. J. Lucius Jones would never say “Y’got to” when he meant “It is expedient.” And, old brain though he was, he learned quickly and easily, juggling words with amazing facility.
Eventually, he bought stamps and envelopes – long, important-looking envelopes – and stammered apologetically to Millie, “Honey, Poppa thought it’d help you if you learned to type envelopes, too. Reckon you’ll have to do that, too, when y’get a job. Poor old man,” he swallowed painfully, “came round selling these envelopes. You know how ’tis. So I had to buy ’em.” Which was satisfactory to Millie. If she saw through her father, she gave no sign. After all, it was practice, and Mr. Hennessey had promised the smartest girl in the class a position in the very near future. And she, of course, was smart as a steel trap. Even Mr. Hennessey had said that – though not in just those words.
He had gotten in the habit of carrying those self-addressed envelopes in his inner pocket where they bulged impressively. And occasionally he would take them out – on the car usually – and smile upon them. This one might be from J. P. Morgan. This one from Henry Ford. And a million-dollar deal involved in each. That narrow, little spinster who, upon his sitting down, had drawn herself away from his contact, was shunning J. Lucius Jones!
Once, led by some sudden, strange impulse, as an outgoing car rumbled up out of the subway, he got out a letter, darted a quick shamed glance about him, dropped it in an adjacent box, and swung aboard the car, feeling, dazedly, as if he had committed a crime. And the next night he sat in the sitting room quite on edge until Net said suddenly, “Look here, a real important letter come today for you, Pa. Here ’tis. What you s’pose it says?” And he reached out a hand that trembled. He made brief explanation. “Advertisement, hon. Thassal.”
They came quite frequently after that, and despite the fact that he knew them by heart, he read them quite slowly and carefully, rustling the sheet, and making inaudible, intelligent comments. He was, in these moments, pathetically earnest.
Monday, as he went about his janitor’s duties, he composed in his mind the final letter from J. P. Morgan that would consummate a big business deal. For days now, letters had passed between them. J. P. had been at first quite frankly uninterested. He had written tersely and briefly. Which was meat to J. Lucius. The compositions of his brain were really the work of an artist. He wrote glowingly of the advantages of a pact between them. Daringly he argued in terms of billions. And at last J. P. had written his next letter would be decisive. Which next letter, this Monday, as he trailed about the office building, was writing itself in his brain.
That night Millie opened the door for him. Her plain face was transformed. “Poppa – Poppa, I got a job! Twelve dollars a week to start with! Isn’t that swell!”
He was genuinely pleased. “Honey, I’m glad. Right glad,” and went upstairs, unsuspecting.
He ate his supper hastily, went down into the cellar to see about his fire, returned and carefully tidied up, informing his reflection in the bathroom mirror, “Well, J. Lucius, you c’n expect that final letter any day now.”
He entered the sitting room. The phonograph was playing. Daisy was singing lustily. Strange. Net was talking animatedly to Millie, busy with needle and thread over a neat, little frock. His wild glance darted to the table. The pretty little centerpiece of the bowl and wax flowers all neatly arranged: the typewriter gone from its accustomed place. It seemed an hour before he could speak. He felt himself trembling. Went hot and cold.
“Millie – your typewriter’s – gone!”
She made a deft little in-and-out movement with her needle. “It’s the eighth, you know. When the man came today for the money, I sent it back. I won’t need it no more – now! The money’s on the mantelpiece, Poppa.”
“Yeh,” he muttered. “All right.”
He sank down in his chair, fumbled for the paper, found it.
Net said, “Your poppa wants to read. Stop your noise, Daisy.”
She obediently stopped both her noise and the phonograph, took up her book, and became absorbed. Millie went on with her sewing in placid anticipation of the morrow. Net immediately began to nod, gave a curious snort, slept.
Silence. That crowded in on him, engulfed him. That blurred his vision, dulled his brain. Vast, white, impenetrable … His ears strained for the old, familiar sound. And silence beat upon them. … The words of the evening paper jumbled together. He read: “J. P. Morgan goes – ”
It burst upon him. Blinded him. His hands groped for the bulge beneath his coat. Why this – this was the end! The end of those great moments – the end of everything! Bewildering pain tore through him. He clutched at his heart and felt, almost, the jagged edges drive into his hand. A lethargy swept down upon him. He could not move, nor utter a sound. He could not pray, nor curse.
Against the wall of that silence J. Lucius Jones crashed and died.
1926
Dorothy West, “The Typewriter,” pp. 9–17, from The Richer, The Poorer. Copyright © 1995 by Dorothy West. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and Virago, an imprint of Little Brown Book Group, UK. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication is prohibited.
1 First published in Opportunity (July 1926).