The whole house was in an uproar. Curses and complaints escaped from the windows of 635 Saint Mary Street. Two women were in a state of open war. Fanny Fisher was taking down Helen Parrish, the rent collector, in a manner so scandalous that everyone on the street had paused to listen to the torrent of abuse. “Go to hell!” Fanny shrieked. Mary Riley closed her door so the children wouldn’t hear Fanny’s swearing. Katy Clayton didn’t enter the fray but delighted in Helen’s humiliation and encouraged Fanny with her laughter. “To hell with you!” The entire neighborhood heard Fanny’s tirade about the rent: “I don’t care what the book say. We don’t owe nothing!” Fanny was belligerent and drunk. The rent collector was not sure how much Fanny owed because the books were in a hopeless muddle. She had shown Mr. Fisher the garbled book of receipts. He could not read and so for an hour she patiently tried to figure out the sums and explain to him what was involved, and yet not daring to let him see how much everything was in a mess. Helen Parrish would not allow Fanny Fisher or her husband to doubt her authority or correctness in any way. “Mrs. Fisher, you will pay what is owed or you’ll find yourself in the streets!” “Damn you and the rent!” Fanny responded. A small flat wasn’t the world. Raising her voice above the thundering expletives, Helen ordered Fanny Fisher to be quiet. “Don’t ever dare speak to me in that manner again! Mrs. Fisher, take hold of yourself.” The command only invited another round of cussing and abuse. Damn bitch! Katy Clayton doubled over with laughter. Once again they had succeeded in defeating Lady Bountiful and bringing her down to their level.
Luckily, the police had not been summoned. Lieutenant Mitchell liked nothing better than dragging a colored woman off to jail. Twenty-four hours locked down for rioting and disorder, a few days more if he could call her by name, and he knew everyone on Saint Mary Street.
Fanny, spent and exhausted, returned to her room. Her neighbors heard the curses; but Fanny as easily might have said, I’m so tired. I’m just broke down. No doubt, her dreams were bigger than two small rooms on a block reeking with the stench of human waste and garbage. The ugliness was so brutal it could bring you to tears. She never forgot for a moment the violence required to make life so ugly, or the hate necessary to keep Negroes trapped in the awfulest quarters of the city. The injustice of having nothing and owing everything made her shout at Miss Parrish, as well as the shame of having been reduced to this. Fanny objected to the rent and the book that transformed their lives into columns of credit and debt. What you owed was just a way of saying that you were in their debt, still a slave. It was no different in the north. White folks loved to talk about what Negroes owed them personally, what they owed the country, what they owed themselves. It was a debt that could never be paid. Rent was just another burden intended to break you; and jail or the workhouse the threat intended to keep your black ass in line. A feeble act of charity could not repair all this damage, and the good intentions of Miss Parrish and Miss Fox did not make a damn bit of difference. Fanny would never beg and plead like Old Clayton, brought so low she was willing to sell the clothes off her back to make the rent, so that Miss Parrish, someone so clearly not in need at all, could write some numbers and notes in a book, scribbling furiously all the time like she was studying them, like their lives were just raw material for an experiment.
Fanny was past wondering what kind of life was possible on Saint Mary Street. Nothing was promised except hustling and scraping to get by. There was no way to win, just rage or submit, just get from one day to the next. So far this had taken Fanny from one bad place to another, but that was the case for most Negroes. When she first arrived in Philadelphia, she was just coming into the young woman she wanted to be, but she never got there, there was so little for her, only the meanness of the city. What could she do? Saint Mary Street was not so bad as the other places, but it was still the bottom.
It was a block infamous for gambling, brawling, and whoring. Saint Mary Street was in the ward of the city with the highest death rate and the poorest residents of Philadelphia. The street was only two blocks long and crowded with small wooden houses about to collapse and dark courts with houses even uglier leading from the main street. Dark Hebrew women, patient Negroes, and stout Germans live out their story day after day before the eyes of the street. Outliers, lawbreakers, and bad characters called it home. Decent folks suffered the bad. Black migrants, wide-eyed and unschooled, affected a pose of sophistication not rightly theirs; others idled on the front steps, deciding on the day’s lucky number and sharing the names of the few enterprises willing to hire Negroes. Men, by all appearances unattached because their wives were still waiting in Virginia or working as live-in maids in Chester or Camden, consorted with wild girls and deadbeat foreign women, making love in public view. Mom Hewitt, a low-life Irish as dissolute as her tenants and married to a colored man, had managed the tenements at 635 and 637 before Hannah Fox purchased them. Hannah Fox and Helen Parrish intended to set a very different tone.
They were the daughters of Philadelphia’s elite. Helen’s grandfather had been a surgeon at the Pennsylvania Alms Hospital, an opponent of capital punishment, a member of the Friends Yearly Meeting Committee on Indian Affairs, and the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. She and her first cousin Susan Wharton had grown up playing hide-and-seek in their grandfather’s cellar, which had been a station of the Underground Railroad. Susan was the grandniece of the steel magnate Joseph Wharton and a founding member of the College Settlement Association, the Saint Mary Street Library, and the Starr Center settlement house. Hannah Fox’s newly acquired wealth had not yet been cleansed by a family history of philanthropy and social reform. Her father had made a fortune speculating in oil ventures in western Pennsylvania, but she made good this inheritance by purchasing two tenements on the most infamous block in the slum. Here she and Helen began in earnest their career as housing reformers and their lifelong companionship.
Subjective need—their desire to live a purposeful and meaningful life—explained the presence of two wealthy white women in the heart of the Negro quarter. For Helen and Hannah, slum reform provided a remedy for the idleness of the privileged, a channel for the intelligence and ambition of college-educated women, and an exit from the marriage plot and the father’s house. No longer girls at thirty, they had eluded the conscription of wife. Without a Mr. to shield them from the dangers of life or prohibit them from associating with bad elements, they charted a path through streets peopled by Negroes, Russian Jews, Italians, thieves, prostitutes, sodomites, thugs, and anarchists. In the slum, they avoided the indictment: spinster, surplus woman, invert, and listened for the sounds of their name—Miss Parrish and Miss Fox—linked in good deeds rather than malicious gossip.
In the fortress of her office, Helen recorded all the details of her awful fight with the Fishers. The doubt and despair filled two pages of a schoolgirl’s composition book. Only a month earlier, she had been foolish enough to believe that surly Negro women might come to trust her and even call her a friend. It had been a gorgeous summer day. All the tenants from Saint Mary Street were invited to the colored lending library for cookies and lemonade. A handful of the women came, but none of the men. She wished the men had been there. It was easier with them than with the women. Most would bite their tongues rather than speak out of turn to a white woman. She thought she could trust the men, but not the women. The women were a different matter. It was mindful to be as wise as a serpent surely in dealing with the women. She must remember never to speak a word of one to any other. Even the most casual was sure to breed trouble. They were too much together, too much at home, and they loved to talk and gossip. She found knots of women in the yard, and whatever she did was sure to bring about some discussion—alone they were amenable, but en masse far from it.
That brilliant July afternoon, Helen offered no advice and issued no demands, but simply enjoyed the party. She finally heeded her aunt’s advice about the harm done by those who strive to regulate things too much, so she didn’t scold Poor Mary Riley for the chamber pot, which she kept under the bed for the children and which made her rooms foul-smelling and unbearable in the summer heat, or complain about Mary’s do-nothing husband, Charles, who had been out of work for weeks and gambling away the few pennies for milk and bread. More than once, Helen had berated Mary’s husband for failing to meet his duties. Charles Riley was a man easily defeated, so Helen conquered nicely, lecturing him about what he should be doing, never giving him a chance to speak. Did he not have enough spunk or did he have too much courtesy to fend off the attack? Poor Mary, a plain listless wisp of a girl, just sat perfectly meek and cowed.
At the tea party, even Poor Mary managed a smile. Too fast Katy Clayton was quite charming, when not steadfastly opposed to every good deed simply to prove she was not to be governed by anyone. They feel, poor things! Their ignorance and powerlessness, and yet such sick half-crazy ones like Fanny Fisher rage against it, taking hold of any little mistake to skirt her duties. What was to be done with a girl like Katy, who had been sleeping in the foyer to escape the summer heat, and sitting on the front steps, half-dressed, flirting with men in public view? Helen held her tongue. She didn’t caution Katy about the damage done to a girl’s reputation when she had too many gentlemen friends, or lecture Rebecca Clark about drinking beer in the yard. She didn’t stop Old Clayton, Katy’s grandmother, from making a meal of shortbread and consuming more than her share of lemonade. Bella Denby said if she could have lemonade like this every day, she would stop drinking whiskey. “Oh, if you would only have a saloon where I could get a drink like that, I never tasted anything so good in all my life.” With her hair pinned neatly to the top of her head, Bella could almost pass for a decent woman. Even with her bruised eye and dirty rags, she was still pretty. She seemed penitent & rebellious and gentle & rough all together. Her husband, Ike, had combed and plaited her hair in two braids as if she were still a country girl. An act of devotion by the same hands that had blackened her eye and cut her lip.
At the library, Helen and the women spoke freely, as if they were equals. They chatted about small things—the weather, the rising price of milk and bread, the new display in John Wanamaker’s window, a church outing in Cape May. Katy Clayton had gone to Chester for a camp meeting and the ladies’ evening was beautiful. She had her tintype taken, but it did not begin to be as pretty as she was. For a few hours, Miss Parrish did not threaten anyone with eviction or lecture Negro women about how to live. On a lovely July afternoon with the sun pouring through the windows, Helen felt satisfied that they were friends.
Every Monday Helen made the rounds, knocking at every door at 635 and 637, intent on the impossible—collecting the rent. She addressed the tenants by their surnames, almost always preceded by a Miss, Mrs. or Mr. It was the one sign of formal equality that they could count on. For her, it was an act of détente. Bella and Ike Denby didn’t even open their door, pretending not to be home week after week, and fooling no one. She had a talk with Joe Robinson and told him that if he married his white girl, he could not stay in the building. Too bad, she trusted him even though he was a darkey. Fanny Fisher, in lieu of the rent, offered to sweep the stairs. Old Clayton begged for a little more time and schemed to get what she didn’t have. She promised to pawn her shoes to meet some of what she owed if Miss Parrish would allow her another week. Her sons had not been able to help her and Katy was out of work, but looking. Soon as Katy finds something, we’ll catch up. Katy’s a good worker, she just need a chance. Mary Riley apologized as she had for the last five weeks. Poor Mary seemed content to stay home and sit on the edge of the bed all day minding her children. It was hard to think of her as a homemaker, and not an idle Negro woman. Helen scolded her about the need to meet her obligation as the tears brimmed in Mary’s eyes. Rent was a just debt. Mary had no right to expect any more of her and Miss Fox than clean rooms. As she left, Helen gave Poor Mary fifty cents for soup meat to feed the children and promised to bring her a pair of shoes the next week.
Old Clayton and Mary Riley were never able to meet the rent; they were always in debt. They swept the hallways and scrubbed the water closets and cleaned vacant rooms and passively received Helen’s abuse. They pawned their clothes and household items and they found piecemeal work—shucking oysters, washing clothes and linens, and repairing garments. On occasion, Helen extended loans, despite her belief that it would encourage laziness and a sense of entitlement. These calculated acts of kindness were not enough to bridge the gulf between poverty and the minimal requirements necessary to live. None of these stopgap measures afforded a way around the truth: more than sixty percent of the Negroes in the city lived in a state of poverty.
On Monday afternoons, Gallen, the porter, came to Helen’s office to report the events of the weekend. Her own efforts at spying had proven fruitless, turning up little besides a pack of playing cards and three pots of flowers in Ida Haines’s room and a half-emptied bottle of gin in Bella Denby’s cupboard, so she depended on the porter. Gallen seemed disappointed when nothing sensational happened, and relished the ugly details: Bella Denby was rioting on Saturday night. Ida Haines was arrested on Hirst Street in a disorderly house and locked up twenty-fours for getting in a rage. Fanny Fisher had been drinking all weekend since the doctor told her there was no hope. Now she said she could drink as much as she wanted. Gallen saved the worst for last, displaying the Negro trait for drama. On Saturday night, he had caught Katy Clayton making love with one of the Gallagher boys in the foyer. By the time he unlocked the door, he found Jim Gallagher, but no Katy. They must have heard his keys in the front lock. Gallen ordered him out and found Katy at the faucet in the backyard, she tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but he was no fool. He heard them going at it. He knew what the girl had been doing with Gallagher. All that commotion wasn’t holding hands. He had not believed the gossip about Katy; now he knew the rumors were true.
After the conversation with Gallen, Helen headed straight to the police precinct. She sought Lieutenant Mitchell’s help whenever the problems of Saint Mary Street were too big for her. Hannah was in London, and without her companion, Helen faltered. In the evenings, she would regale Hannah with the details of street life: “The other day a very good-looking darkey stopped me and asked for a room for himself and one other. You are married then? Oh yes, he replied. Then it is for you and your wife? No, for me and a young lady friend!”
Helen blanched at the word prostitute, but there was no getting around it. Lieutenant Mitchell promised that Katy would be arrested if caught in the act. She could be sent away for as long as three years for what she had done. Walking home from the station, Helen wondered if she had pursued the right course. The comfort she felt when the lieutenant assured her that he would handle the problem had disappeared. It was too late to stop what she had set in motion. Now Katy Clayton was at risk. If the lieutenant had his way, she would soon be off to the Magdalene House or the Eastern State Penitentiary. Helen hoped that no one had seen her at the police station. Whatever she did was sure to bring about some discussion. It was hard to blunder on as she did. She waited ’till circumstances impelled some action, then did what she knew was right, and yet felt no safety in being right. She didn’t know what was best.
Things sometimes turned out right after she did them, but she wanted a clear conscience before. Aunt Sue said that their feelings of rebellion against her dictating about their rooms or trying to legislate for them ought to be respected. Helen should never look into their closets or sneak into private homes, her aunt counseled, but Helen failed to heed this advice. Whenever she tried to dictate, they insisted that they had paid for the room and she had no right to interfere.
Helen failed to reach the women. Each sharp word and cut of the eye was the reminder. The women were as likely to send her to hell as to utter good day. Watching them gather in the courtyard, she looked on jealously, believing their intimacy to be a rejection of her. They were backlit by the late afternoon sun, the flat black shapes like silhouettes against the flank of sheets hanging behind them. Every indifferent glance and back turned toward her was a barricade keeping her outside the circle. When they withheld their recognition and made plain that they had no clear need of her, when she was unable to find her better self reflected in their eyes, when their hostility was so piercing it threatened to crush and destroy her, then the cluster of women assembled in the yard on a late August afternoon involved in the mundane tasks of hanging clothes, cracking pecans, and tying off buttons collapsed into a faceless them, a threatening crowd, a race without distinct features or characteristics. At such moments, Helen could see only treason en masse, the lines of battle were drawn; she thought, All are against me. She doubted if she would ever be able to reach them. Who would have guessed that the battle to be waged was against them as well as the slum?
Face to face with Katy or Fanny or Bella, she forced herself to remember that they were not the enemy. If it had been possible, she would have slipped into their skin just to know what they knew and to feel what they felt; and the women, as if sensing this desire to occupy their inner lives and stake claim, rebuffed her, refused her the right to enter their heads and hearts; they confided nothing.
Two colored women in well-cut dresses, tasteful hats, and impeccable gloves entered the office. Helen was not surprised to see them because few landlords would rent to Negroes, and the ones willing charged the highest rents for the shabbiest tenements in the ward. An interview with the two ladies would not be necessary. She turned the better sort away. Clearly they needed no help and were not suited for the neighborhood. Before Mamie Shepherd and her mother, Mrs. Eunice Berry, had a chance to say hello or give their names, Helen had dismissed them. There was no need of improvement that her eye could detect. The daughter, her resemblance to the older woman being unmistakable, was quite striking. She was lovely and disarmed Helen with her respectable manners and receptive doe-eyes. The sort easily led astray, Helen thought, making the case against her. A girl so gentle and yielding wouldn’t last a week before Katy Clayton lured her into trouble or a handsome thug seduced her.
Ladies, you would do best to steer clear of the neighborhood, she advised. Mamie’s mother agreed that it would be best for her daughter to look elsewhere. Eunice Berry had not failed to notice the garbage scattered in front of the other buildings and the brash, insistent stares of the men idling on the corner. Mamie would be safer with her until she found suitable rooms. Helen could see that the young woman was too refined for Saint Mary Street and had been accustomed to better. But Mamie insisted that she couldn’t stay in her mother’s house forever; a married woman needed her own place. It was only Mamie and her husband and she promised to be steady. It was impossible to find a room elsewhere. She was willing to try Saint Mary Street, if only temporarily. The appeal of the girl’s lovely upturned face and penetrating dark brown eyes turned Helen around. What a pretty, attractive little thing. Mamie Shepherd took possession of apartment number 5.
On Thursday evening, James Shepherd arrived. Nothing about Mr. Shepherd gave Helen reason to doubt his ability to guide Mamie in the right direction. Their rooms were already fixed nicely. At the first opportunity, she planned to speak privately with him about Katy Clayton and the others; they were young women Mamie would do better to avoid. On Saturday Helen visited again. It was Mamie’s birthday. She was nineteen years old and looking very bright and attractive. With the necessary support, the young couple might be able to create a decent life. For now, Helen intended to do what was within her power to shield Mamie from the others. She would not lose her as she had Ida Haines and Katy Clayton. She would try hard to influence her and keep her out of danger’s way, and she vowed to protect Mamie from her surroundings, especially with her husband away from home most of the week. He had been unable to find employment in Philadelphia, so like most colored men, he worked outside the city. With this girl, Helen would redouble her efforts.
Seated at the window, Mamie listened to the clamor of Saint Mary Street. The block pulsed with a hunger so sharp it made her ache just hearing it. All the violence and beauty and misery reverberated through the slum, winding through the streets and alleys and echoing in tenement flats. On any given night, Mamie might hear the piano rags drifting through the alley from the saloon on Seventh Street; the steady pound of fists as Irish hoodlums beat a black boy for sport; Old Clayton, absentmindedly humming My Way’s Cloudy, perched in the window one floor below; Lady Washington haggling over the price of what had already been done with a deadbeat patron still attached to her hips; the Gallagher brothers planted on the front steps swelling Katy Clayton’s head with sweet talk and coaxing her with promises; a white man from Pat O’Brien’s place in the courtyard flirting with Rebecca Clark and her friends, trying his hardest and getting nowhere, but with each round of beer the women becoming more forgiving and he more attractive. Mamie got to know her neighbors living with their sounds. People, in every other way strangers, became intimates. She recognized Bella’s sobs and knew to listen for the soft murmur of regret and the volley of pleas that followed Ike’s violence. Even with cheeks hurt purple and blue, Bella was still pretty, but everything else was destroyed. Charles Riley shouted at Mary and the children, believing they would be better off without him. He knew what a man was supposed to do and Mary begging him to stop talking like that. The peals of William Sutton’s laughter, sharp and shrill, piercing the air as he charmed his company, men and women alike, into surrender. Fisher’s baritone warning, “Enough Fanny. You trying to run to the grave?”
When she grew tired of listening to the lives of her neighbors, Mamie would get dressed and wander the streets, peering in store windows and making up stories about what she would do in that black velvet dress or what her life would be like if she lived in a stately limestone row house on Spruce Street as Miss Parrish did. On these aimless journeys through the city, Mamie moved as freely as she wanted. Her mother had warned her often that it wasn’t safe for her to drift and stray or to keep company with strangers. People would form the worst impression of a colored woman cruising through the streets on her own, especially at night. Anything might happen to her. So far, she had been lucky. No white man had ever insulted her, so she still felt comfortable going about alone. Strolling across the grid of streets that ordered the city, she slipped in and out of dozens of conversations. Roaming about unloosened a wild something that made her feel alive, a sharp pang of want that caused her to tremble. The black city at night was alive with possibility.
Some nights she would make her way to Gil Ball’s saloon on Seventh to have a beer and listen to a favorite rag. Or she would go to the Academy of Music if there was a vaudeville act or a minstrel show playing. She liked to go to the theater and dime amusements, and no one ever insulted her there. Sitting in the darkened auditorium, she experienced the transport that allowed poor girls to dream. It was why she loved the stage. She sat in the audience enchanted, gazing at the “airily dressed women” who “seemed to her like creatures from fairy-land.” A hundred other girls had experienced it: the feeling of being “lost” and “transfixed” and her soul “floating on a sea of sense.” It was grand. Looking at the actors on stage, she wondered what it would be like to be an actress and be up there. The glare of the footlights could convince anyone that a wonderful life awaited her somewhere. Absorbed in the brilliant musical acts, lost in the silks and laces, she preferred not to think about her life at all, instead claiming the glamour and pleasure of the stage as her own. It was the antidote to the stereopticon views of the poor in dilapidated homes and the miserable melodramas narrated by Miss Parrish.
The world was so vast and she had seen so little of it: leopards in snow-covered mountains, views of the North Pole and Japan, panoramic views of Paris, picture plays, an illustrated sequence of The Raven. With ten cents she could buy an excursion to the beautiful places she would never visit, experience lives she would never inhabit except in a darkened auditorium, yet it all seemed more real to her than the three-room flat in which she lived. As one image dissolved and another appeared, her heart raced. The images flickering across the screen transported her from a decent tenement on an awful block, ushered her into grand palaces, and conjured up the promise of a different life. It was the opposite of staying in place, locked inside the cramped rooms of Saint Mary Street, pretending to be content, and expected to be grateful. She became another person in another place, as in a dream, where the self you are is nothing like you at all, but at the same time so clearly you. The slides moving across the screen transformed the world in the blink of an eye; each image was ripe with the promise that the distance between now and what the future might hold could be easily bridged; it was as if that glorious you blanketed in the darkness of the theater was the only self who had ever existed.
Desire enchanted the city and made it beautiful to her. Otherwise, it appeared unsightly and hostile, the way it felt when she was trapped in her dismal apartment, bored and with no prospects besides what James or some other man could offer. When the city was no more than the harsh face of poverty—buildings tightly packed on too-narrow streets, ash barrels and trash containers cluttering the sidewalk, the stench of scavengers hauling their wagons of excrement through the streets after midnight, the dreary washed-out garments of domestics and haulers draped across the alley, and the sickly sweet smell of cheap bread from a tenement bakery—then she was less than she imagined, not her own woman at all, but just a colored girl adrift, a sad lonesome thing.
Like every other person on the block, Mamie wanted better than she had, better than the deprivation and unsightliness of the Negro quarter. Her waking hours were devoted to imagining what this might look like. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was still possible to believe that she would not be trapped in a tenement, even a decent one, forever. It was still possible to suppose that a plain, whitewashed room filled with cast-off furniture on an ugly block was a way station to someplace better. The Negro quarter was not yet “encircled by disaster,” so it didn’t seem foolish to believe that another kind of life was within reach.
Mamie Sharp was the name she had given at her previous address. Miss Parrish, you said you rented only to decent people. If you rent to Mamie Sharp, it’s clear you’ll take anyone. Soon this place will be as bad as it was when Mom Hewitt was in charge. The prying Mrs. Joyce rambled on, but Helen had stopped listening.
She had not expected good news when her neighbor appeared unexpectedly at the office. She listened but couldn’t square the story with the lovely nineteen-year-old residing in apartment number 5. Many thoughts rushed about in her head; but to affect an appearance of being in charge of the situation, she replied curtly: Mamie was there on trial—if she did not behave rightly, she would have to go. Helen refrained from asking anything that might give Mrs. Joyce the impression that she knew more about the tenants than Helen did. Rising from her chair, Helen thanked her for the information and forced the interview to close sooner than Mrs. Joyce had expected and to her clear dissatisfaction, but Helen was too agitated to remain seated. She dashed out, leaving Mrs. Joyce at her desk.
Had she been terribly wrong in her estimation of Mamie? As wrong as she had been about Ida, although even at the first meeting she suspected that Ida might drink. She had been wrong about Mrs. Henderson, thinking her respectable and well-to-do with her fine set of false teeth until the woman threatened to strike her. But Mamie was different. Helen had not had the chance to work with a girl of her quality, and so much might be accomplished with such fine material. But supposing the awful things Mrs. Joyce said were true?
When Helen knocked at the door, Mamie welcomed her inside. It was a bright hello, not the sullen “What?” that often met the rent collector’s arrival, with the door opened slightly, just enough for the protruding head to say, “I don’t have it” or “It ain’t right coming here on Sunday to conduct business,” and then banged shut after the last word uttered, without even the slightest courtesy of “Good afternoon” or “Pleasant evening.”
There was no easy way to lead into the matter of adultery, so Helen broached the issue directly. “Mamie, have you been going around town with other men? Have you?” The question was as much an accusation as inquiry. Mamie’s reply was no less direct: “Yes, I like to go about as I please.” Mamie didn’t apologize or offer any excuses for not being able to hold steady; she did not try to temper Helen’s judgment by admitting that she had been lonely. Loneliness could prompt reckless acts that one later regretted. Helen understood this well, laboring blindly, as she did in Hannah’s absence.
Mamie offered no excuse. She refused to apologize or explain.
“Mamie, have you no sense of right and wrong?” asked Helen.
Right and wrong didn’t have anything to do with it. “I am not the kind of woman to stay on my own. I like to go out with my friends.”
“Mamie, you can’t go around with a man who is not your husband. Surely you realize this?”
“I am no worse than anybody else,” replied Mamie. “I am not anymore bad than the majority of them. Yes I have been bad. But for the last week or two, James has been working by day and coming home at night, and I have not been going up around the theatres or anything like that.”
Mamie didn’t accuse Miss Parrish of interfering or call her a nosy bitch, as Bella Denby or Fanny Fisher would have. “Ever since James talked with you, he told me I must not go with Maizie Gibbs,” said Mamie. When Ida Haines came to visit he refused to let her in. Mamie didn’t feel the need to explain what she had done. James was the only one she had to answer to. Without guilt or remorse, she said, “Maybe I have been bad, but you can’t understand what I need.”
On the Saturday night of their third week on Saint Mary Street, James Shepherd kicked in the door of their apartment. He had been away for the week, and the man who had been keeping company with Mamie ran out with his shirt and shoes in his hands. It isn’t hard to imagine James consumed by rage and breaking the door in; the rest is uncertain and the details are sketchy, although the scene of love and betrayal unfolds along a familiar track, repeated endlessly and as often as the promise to be true:
James had not intended to bust up the rooms that had taken two weeks of arranging to make less inhospitable, but destroying one of the dining room chairs prevented him from putting his hands on Mamie. He could have demanded why, but didn’t because there was no point to it. There was nothing she could say to soften the blow or make it hurt less. He shoved her into the little room off the entrance that was his sanctuary. More of a closet than a room and outfitted only with a small card table, one chair, a box of cigars, and a Bible with the names of his parents and grandparents, the names and dates of birth of his brothers, and the few names of other kin they could still recall inscribed on the first page. James punched the wall above Mamie’s head to avoid looking into her eyes and to erase that I don’t have anything to be ashamed of look from her face. Her eyes were without a glimmer of conscience to which he might appeal. The empty stare nearly destroyed him. It made plain that he would never be enough and that there would never be enough in the world for her. Desperate to erase that look, he destroyed the room but the vacancy remained. He pushed her against the wall, pressed his body against hers, devoured her mouth and found his way through the obstacle of her underskirts. Mamie, Mamie, he called until the emptiness in those eyes drained away.
The picture is as painful as it is moving, a handsome young man, betrayed and reckoning with what he cannot possess, a woman who loves him, but who does not belong to him. It isn’t a scene anywhere described in Helen’s notebook. Mamie mentioned it briefly to Gallen. Perhaps she confided more to Maizie Gibbs or Katy Clayton. So one can only speculate about the fighting and pleading incited by her infidelity or the reservoir of love that enabled Mamie and James to weather it. The vulnerable and fragile relation of a couple as tender as newlyweds trying to make a life together without anything to support them or keep them from drowning is not likely to end well. Seen from her eyes or his it is no less heartbreaking.
James Shepherd was a thoughtful man, perhaps even a bit brooding or melancholy. He had lost too many he loved to be careless with relations. Loss threatened to diminish him; it was as if the people gone took away that particular part of him they had made special. Too many pieces had gone missing on the journey from his home in Florida to Philadelphia. He had lost two brothers he would have given his life for, still no word from them. He and Mamie were the only society that he required. He was content with that. They had so little time together with him working outside of the city, it was a relief to have a place all their own, not her mother’s house and secluded from the world.
He had traveled enough to know that you kept meeting the same folks wherever you arrived. The Negro quarter, Little Africa, the Tenderloin, the Bottom—looked and smelled the same no matter where you were, Richmond or Philadelphia, New York or Washington, Chicago or Pittsburgh. There was never enough air to breathe, no room to grow, no corner of earth hospitable enough to allow you to put down roots. Negroes were drifters, nomads, fugitives, not settlers. They had not been allowed “me” and “mine.” Even when you had the hubris to believe that you had staked a lasting claim, built a homehouse with enough space for your children and your brother’s children, where great-grandchildren sitting on the front porch might one day ask, “Poppa how did we get here?” and you would say something like: I made this house with my own hands, and this is yours, and within our gates no white man rules and other things that massaged them into feeling safe, yet put enough steel in their spine so that when they found out there was no protection against white folks, they would be able to hold the knowledge and stand down a hostile world. Even with all this, one day a white man could ride up to your front porch with a piece of paper in his hand that said none of this belonged to you; it was not yours and never had been, and what a fraudulent deed failed to accomplish, a torch and a rifle surely would. When that day came you had no choice but to fight and die or pick up and move on. And as long as this was so, Negroes had to be ready to take flight in a heartbeat, as he and his brothers had.
The first generation after slavery had been so in love with being free that few noticed or minded that they had been released to nothing at all. They didn’t yet know that the price of the war was to be exacted from their flesh. People were too busy dreaming of who they wanted to be and how they wanted to live and the acres they would farm, and searching for the mother they would never find, wondering what happened to their uncle, was their sister dead, and was it true that someone had seen two of their brothers as far north as Philadelphia? Freedom was the promise of a life that most would never have and that few had ever lived. But who could bear this? So colored folks were still looking, picking up and moving on, again and again.
With his two brothers gone, James had no one but Mamie. Too long had passed with no word for him not to imagine them in the grave, in chains, on the run. He was exhausted, waiting for a reply that would never come. All he had was Mamie. There were women prettier, women willing to buy him shoes and pocket watches and silk vests, women who would kiss the ground he walked on. A few left him before he had the chance to say goodbye first, but it hadn’t mattered much. There was no more to it than mixing it up and the fast life. Then his brothers went missing and he knew he had nothing. Mamie found him when there was so little of him left. He held onto her, fearing he might otherwise disappear. Don’t let me go. She held on as he learned to stop waiting for the sound of his name, as it was uttered by his brothers with the roar of the Gulf Coast in it.
Everything calm at 635 with the exception of Mamie. Helen questioned Gallen about Mamie and James. The gossip had spread, so others also had started to complain about Mamie. Contrary to what Helen wanted to believe, it appeared Mamie was very unprincipled. She didn’t even know if Mamie had ever been faithful to James. Gallen repeated what Mamie told him: when Shepherd was away, she had another man staying with her, and when her husband came home, he broke the door down. Gallen hadn’t seen or heard anything. If she didn’t tell him, the others might have.
Intimate arrangements on Saint Mary Street, as Helen learned, were never what they appeared. Was a husband a husband or a wife a wife after all? The terms of intimacy were so elastic for Negroes it was uncertain exactly what they meant—the wife of his youth or the woman he was living with now? Was the head of the household the father of the children or the man who supported them? One could never be sure if a young couple had been separated by work as they claimed, or if theirs was a free union not bound by the law. It was hard to decide whether the Negro family was really a family at all. A child arrived with one mother, only to be claimed months later as someone else’s child. Men were fathers, but separated from their children; or a husband might have two families. Women on the loose were unable or unwilling to make a home for anyone, or they lived in with white families while their own children were untended. Helen knew all of this, yet she was not prepared for Mamie. Not even her name was right. Mamie Sharp. She had been married when she was fifteen years old, and her husband abused and ill-treated her. Mamie left him about two years ago. Since then he had “married” again and she had “married” James Shepherd.
To make matters worse, now Mamie and James were behind on the rent. Helen went to see Eunice Berry on the pretext of collecting the past-due rent, but it was information that she wanted. Mamie’s mother confided that she had not been able to keep her daughter at home because she enjoyed the company of men. She feared for her.
The room was stifling. Mamie had spoken with James about the plan for them to separate, but he was unwilling to hear any of it. Helen Parrish sat trembling in the chair, waiting for James to emerge from the little room adjoining the front room. He was calm and polite, not raging, as she had feared. Helen waited for James Shepherd to speak. Mamie remained silent and distant, as if a bystander to the scene that was taking place in the front room. Helen knew everything now, and she would ask them to vacate the apartment, giving them a week’s notice, as was her usual practice. If he knew the law allowed three months, he might insist on taking it. Helen counted on his not knowing this or surmising the limits of her authority. James Shepherd didn’t say anything, so she began the conversation.
“Mr. Shepherd, this situation cannot bring Mamie any good,” Helen’s voice wavered. “When you applied for the room you pretended you were married. Had I known the truth, I never would have rented you the room. You cannot stay here.”
“Miss Parrish, we plan to leave as soon as we can find another place.”
Helen, surprised to hear this, looked at Mamie for confirmation, but Mamie ignored her. “In this unlawful relation, you cannot do her any good or protect her. She is in constant danger and temptation. Can’t you see that Mamie would be better off without you?”
James looked surprised. “Miss Parrish, I care for her. Don’t you suppose I would marry her if I could?”
“Whose fault is that?” Helen asked sharply. “Mamie rushed into a hasty marriage and must now pay for that.” The young couple had paid and they were paying now, but Helen carried on about the law and morality, blind to this essential fact.
“You can’t leave a husband on a whim and take up with another man. You are bound by those vows. You can’t just walk away and start over with someone else.” Helen looked at James as she spoke, but the words were directed at Mamie. “There is a civil and a religious law to condemn how you are living.”
“I love her,” said James. “This is no sudden thing.”
“But can you protect her?”
He had protected her. He had put a roof over her head and clothes on her back.
“You are no protection with her running the streets and in constant danger. Mr. Shepherd, you have given her nothing.”
James was silent.
“What have you done besides drag Mamie so low she can’t tell right from wrong? There is no protection in this arrangement.”
James allowed Helen to lecture on with few interruptions. He listened with a bowed head, waiting to speak. When Helen paused, he lifted his head and asked, “Miss Parrish, have you ever loved someone? Have you ever been married?”
Helen trembled. The arrogance of his question filled her with rage. At that moment, she decided not to spare James Shepherd, this man pleading about love and trying to save himself with words so pretty they might have been taken from a sonnet.
Helen did not reply.
“Then you do not know what you ask. I love that woman as I love myself.”
This was the trouble with Negroes—the law did not determine what was right and wrong in their eyes, as if they could live outside or oppose it. She had heard others besides the Fishers insist that no paper can decide if a thing is right or wrong, no paper can settle the matter of truth. Owning nothing and subsisting on so little, they let the heart decide everything. Love was their only anchor. It was clear to Helen that the sole thing that mattered to James Shepherd was: Do I want Mamie? Does she want me? Damn the law and Miss Parrish.
“Don’t you suppose I would marry her if I could?” he repeated.
Helen appraised the tall, striking young fellow and decided to break him.
“Mamie wants you to leave. She told me she is willing to give up her room and her ‘friend’ and find a new place. She wants you to leave. She is willing to do as I wished.”
James didn’t call Miss Parrish a liar, but he was unwilling to believe what she said was true. “Mamie?” James waited for her to reply, waited for her to deny it, but she didn’t answer. “Mamie, did you tell Miss Parrish you were willing to give me up?”
“I told Miss Parrish I would get another place.”
“Mr. Shepherd, Mamie told me she would not mind leaving anyone much.”
“Yes,” Mamie said, “only to get another place.”
“You are evading my question,” James said.
“I said I would leave and find another place,” admitted Mamie.
The air was thick with all the things they refused to say in front of Helen Parrish. I have forgiven you everything, James might have said. You know what kind of woman I am, Mamie might have ventured in reply. None of this was uttered, but it hung in the air between them.
“You know what I asked,” James implored.
“Yes,” Mamie said. “I told her that I’d leave you, as far as getting the place. I never intended to.”
“That is not what I understood. She told me that she would leave you,” Helen repeated. “Mamie, you said, ‘Oh no, I would not care.’ ”
James looked at Mamie, wishing it were just the two of them in the room.
“If you love Mamie, you can do more for her by letting her go. You can bring her no good.”
“Mamie, do you want me to go?” James asked in disbelief. His eyes made the appeal.
“Yes,” Helen insisted. “There is nothing you can do for her.”
“I have nowhere to go,” James said quietly. “I have no home. I have no people. I have brothers, but I don’t know where they are. I have a friend in New York.”
“You can find work and a home,” Helen replied curtly.
“A job and a room? Peace of mind is the only thing I will be looking for,” he responded.
“You will need to leave,” Helen insisted.
“Give me a little time,” James pleaded.
“I will be back tomorrow,” said Helen.
“I tried going away before, leaving her, but I could never stay away, but two or three days. Give me a little time. Please.”
That evening at home Helen tried to recount the exchange in her journal, but it proved difficult to write down. It was hard to know what to think—how deeply to take the meaning of it all. Helen transcribed the conversation, trying to recollect each word spoken, so she could better understand the strange experience of this triangle. The relay of “he said” and “she said” yielded a queer parlor drama. Despite her dutiful transcript, the truth of what had happened eluded her. In other circumstances, she might have written: I conquered nicely. To do so would have required her to own this need to hurt and possess. To acknowledge that James, this tall, handsome Negro, her foil, was the one sacrificed to jealousy.
In clashes with the other tenants, the lines of battle had been unmistakable. All were aware of the state of open war in which they were embroiled. With the Fishers and the Denbys, the boundaries were clear-cut and the antagonism open and unavoidable. When she gave Mrs. Henderson notice, the woman threatened to strike her. When she first arrived at number 5, Helen had been afraid that James Shepherd might threaten and curse, as had the others. The week before when she had called the police on Ike and Bella Denby, the officer remarked that Helen had a great deal of nerve to go among such people and that once a man had been thrown out of a window in this house. What would make one man throw another from a window? Was it a fight over a woman? she wondered. What kind of person was capable of such an act? So determined to finish off a man? Was it an act decided upon with a cool head and a brutal hand or a crime of passion?
Helen understood the cruelty unleashed by want. She and James had sparred for Mamie. She intended to rescue the girl, to train and manage her, to mold Mamie’s life in accordance with her designs. The best thing would be to send her to the country. The city promised only trouble for her. Helen wasn’t ashamed to admit that she cared deeply for the girl. The success of the work depended upon this mutual affection. When James Shepherd stepped into his front room, he had not been prepared to fight for his life; he never suspected that Mamie would be the weapon used against him. It was a rout—Helen had broken him as his beloved Mamie watched passively from the sidelines. He would leave the city in a matter of days. She would find a safe place for Mamie in the country where the girl would be far from temptation and in her hands.
If James truly loved Mamie, he could do more for her by leaving. Helen would make sure that Mamie was shielded and protected, something her consort could not do. Never before had Helen been so confident about what love required or how a woman should be loved. Miss Parrish, have you ever been married? Helen had skirted his question. Her heart was not the issue at hand. She wondered what Hannah would make of this—a black man trying to teach her about love and devotion.
The headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer identified him as Joseph Spanks, but Helen knew it was James Shepherd. Her first thoughts were about Mamie and how she might have been involved. She retrieved a pair of scissors from her desk drawer and carefully cut the article from the newspaper and pasted it into her journal:
SHOT IN THE NECK
The Mysterious Affray That Startled
Lisbon Street
SEVERAL CONFLICTING STORIES
George Grant, for Some Unknown Reason,
Pulls Out a Pistol and Deliberately Shoots
Joseph Spanks.
Joseph Spanks, colored, aged 23, of No. 635 Saint Mary Street, lies in Philadelphia Hospital in a dying condition from the effects of a pistol wound inflicted by George Grant, also colored, of No. 610 Barclay Street. So many conflicting stories are told that it is difficult to determine the cause of the affair. The police are inclined to believe that the shooting was the result of a drunken quarrel.
A few minutes after 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon passersby in the vicinity of Fifth and Hirst Streets were attracted by a commotion in Lisbon Street, a thoroughfare running off Hirst, between Fifth and Sixth streets. The noise proceeded from a shanty on the East Side, near Sixth Street. When the door was open Grant had fled and Spanks was standing in the centre of the room, bleeding profusely from a bullet wound in the neck.
A bystander who was in the apartment at the time said that Spanks was wrestling with another colored man when Grant said that if Spanks would move to one side he would shoot him. Spanks did so, and according to the bystander, he was shot on the spot. Another person, who claimed to be a witness, but who could not be found afterwards, said that it was an accident.
Spanks at the time had no idea he was seriously injured. Stopping the flow of blood with a handkerchief, he staggered out of the house. He got along all right until he reached Sixth and Lombard Street, when he sank down exhausted from the loss of blood.
James Shepherd was on his deathbed. Mamie had been at the hospital every day for the past two weeks. The couple was still together and with Mamie living in number five—to Helen’s dismay. Mamie continued to pose as James’s wife, except now she was running to the hospital and back, fearful of becoming a widow. There had been no quarrel between the two men, and, according to Mamie, they were friends. It was now clear that Mamie had deceived her as well as James. She never had any intention of leaving him or going to the country as she had agreed. Even Eunice Berry seemed to be singing a different tune now, saying that it was only right and appropriate for Mamie to attend her dying husband.
It was hard to believe that it had been only a month since Mamie had moved in. Helen browsed the pages of her journal. September 5th Mamie applied for the room. September 6th James Shepherd arrived, although it had seemed like weeks before he had appeared. The next week Mrs. Joyce showed up at Helen’s office with her rumors. By the second week, Mamie was late with the rent like everyone else. By the third week, Helen knew enough to write The Secret History of Mamie Sharp. Then lies, lies, lies.
After his release from the hospital, James and Mamie disappeared. Gallen heard a rumor they had gone to New York. Mrs. Joyce said they were living in a very disreputable house in the Seventh Ward. Helen had planned to ask Lieutenant Mitchell if they were still in Philadelphia and when George Grant was scheduled for trial, but decided against it.
Mamie had disappointed Helen far more than the others. It was her fault for trying to rescue a girl who didn’t want to be saved. Had Helen taken notice of the fierce desire in that wide-open face or really looked into those suppliant eyes, she would have known that Mamie Sharp wasn’t meant for a sheltered life in the country or the cut-down-to-size respectable poverty that was all Helen had to offer. In the end, Mamie turned out to be no different from Katy and the others. She, too, refused to be governed.
