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
Dr. Campbell soon got through with his reading, in the old newspapers,
and then somehow he began to talk along about the things he was
always thinking. Dr. Campbell said he wanted to work so that he could
understand what troubled people, and not to just have excitements, and
he believed you ought to love your father and your mother and to be
regular in all your life, and not to be always wanting new things and
excitements, and to always know where you were, and what you wanted,
and to always tell everything just as you meant it. That's the only
kind of life he knew or believed in, Jeff Campbell repeated. "No I
ain't got any use for all the time being in excitements and wanting to
have all kinds of experience all the time. I got plenty of experience
just living regular and quiet and with my family, and doing my work,
and taking care of people, and trying to understand it. I don't
believe much in this running around business and I don't want to see
the colored people do it. I am a colored man and I ain't sorry, and I
want to see the colored people like what is good and what I want
them to have, and that's to live regular and work hard and understand
things, and that's enough to keep any decent man excited." Jeff
Campbell spoke now with some anger. Not to Melanctha, he did not think
of her at all when he was talking. It was the life he wanted that he
spoke to, and the way he wanted things to be with the colored people.
But Melanctha Herbert had listened to him say all this. She knew he
meant it, but it did not mean much to her, and she was sure some day
he would find out, that it was not all, of real wisdom. Melanctha
knew very well what it was to have real wisdom. "But how about Jane
Harden?" said Melanctha to Jeff Campbell, "seems to me Dr. Campbell
you find her to have something in her, and you go there very often,
and you talk to her much more than you do to the nice girls that stay
at home with their people, the kind you say you are really wanting. It
don't seem to me Dr. Campbell, that what you say and what you do seem
to have much to do with each other. And about your being so good Dr.
Campbell," went on Melanctha, "You don't care about going to church
much yourself, and yet you always are saying you believe so much in
things like that, for people. It seems to me, Dr. Campbell you want
to have a good time just like all us others, and then you just keep
on saying that it's right to be good and you ought not to have
excitements, and yet you really don't want to do it Dr. Campbell, no
more than me or Jane Harden. No, Dr. Campbell, it certainly does seem
to me you don't know very well yourself, what you mean, when you are
talking."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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