Three Lives: Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle LenaStein, Gertrude
General
Three Lives: Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena
Stein, Gertrude
Working class women -- Fiction
Sometimes the thought of how all her world was made, filled the
complex, desiring Melanctha with despair. She wondered, often, how she
could go on living when she was so blue.
Melanctha told Rose one day how a woman whom she knew had killed
herself because she was so blue. Melanctha said, sometimes, she
thought this was the best thing for her herself to do.
Rose Johnson did not see it the least bit that way.
"I don't see Melanctha why you should talk like you would kill
yourself just because you're blue. I'd never kill myself Melanctha
just 'cause I was blue. I'd maybe kill somebody else Melanctha
'cause I was blue, but I'd never kill myself. If I ever killed myself
Melanctha it'd be by accident, and if I ever killed myself by accident
Melanctha, I'd be awful sorry."
Rose Johnson and Melanctha Herbert had first met, one night, at
church. Rose Johnson did not care much for religion. She had not
enough emotion to be really roused by a revival. Melanctha Herbert had
not come yet to know how to use religion. She was still too complex
with desire. However, the two of them in negro fashion went very often
to the negro church, along with all their friends, and they slowly
came to know each other very well.
Rose Johnson had been raised not as a servant but quite like their own
child by white folks. Her mother who had died when Rose was still
a baby, had been a trusted servant in the family. Rose was a cute,
attractive, good looking little black girl and these people had no
children of their own and so they kept Rose in their house.
As Rose grew older she drifted from her white folks back to the
colored people, and she gradually no longer lived in the old house.
Then it happened that these people went away to some other town to
live, and somehow Rose stayed behind in Bridgepoint. Her white folks
left a little money to take care of Rose, and this money she got every
little while.
Rose now in the easy fashion of the poor lived with one woman in her
house, and then for no reason went and lived with some other woman
in her house. All this time, too, Rose kept company, and was engaged,
first to this colored man and then to that, and always she made sure
she was engaged, for Rose had strong the sense of proper conduct.
"No, I ain't no common nigger just to go around with any man, nor you
Melanctha shouldn't neither," she said one day when she was telling
the complex and less sure Melanctha what was the right way for her to
do. "No Melanctha, I ain't no common nigger to do so, for I was raised
by white folks. You know very well Melanctha that I'se always been
engaged to them."
And so Rose lived on, always comfortable and rather decent and very
lazy and very well content.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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