The Blacker the Berry Read Online Free PDF Page B

she happen to be a new student, they could become friends and together find their way into the inner circle of those colored students who really mattered.
    Emma Lou was essentially a snob. She had absorbed this trait from the very people who had sought to exclude her from their presence. All of her life she had heard talk of the “right sort of people,” and of “the people who really mattered,” and from these phrases she had formed a mental image of those to whom they applied. Hazel Mason most certainly could not be included in either of these categories. Hazel was just a vulgar little nigger from down South. It was her kind, who, when they came North, made it hard for the colored people already resident there. It was her kind who knew nothing of the social niceties or the polite conventions. In her own home they had been used only to coarse work and coarser manners. And they had been forbidden the chance to have intimate contact in schools and in public with white people from whom they might absorb some semblance of culture. When they did come North and get a chance to go to white schools, white theaters, and white libraries, they were too unused to them to appreciate what they were getting, and could be expected to continue their old way of life in an environment where such a way was decidedly out of place.
    Emma Lou was determined to become associated only with those people who really mattered, northerners like herself or superior southerners, if there were any, who were different from whites only in so far as skin color was concerned. This girl to whom she was now about to introduce herself, was the type she had in mind, genteel, well and tastily dressed, and not ugly.
    “Good morning.”
    Alma Martin looked up from the book she was reading, gulped in surprise, then answered, “Good morning.”
    Emma Lou sat down on the bench. She was congeniality itself. “Are you a new student?” she inquired of the astonished Alma, who wasn’t used to this sort of thing.
    “No, I’m a ‘soph,’” then realizing she was expected to say more, “you’re new, aren’t you?”
    “Oh yes” replied Emma Lou, her voice buoyant and glad. “This will be my first year.”
    “Do you think you will like it?”
    “I’m just crazy about it already. You know,” she advanced confidentially, “I’ve never gone to school with any colored people before.”
    “No?”
    “No, and I am just dying to get acquainted with the colored students. Oh, my name’s Emma Lou Morgan.”
    “And mine is Alma Martin.”
    They both laughed. There was a moment of silence. Alma looked at her wristwatch, then got up from the bench.
    “I’m glad to have met you. I’ve got to see my advisor at ten-thirty. Good-bye.” And she moved away gracefully.
    Emma Lou was having difficulty in keeping from clapping her hands. At last she had made some headway. She had met a second-year student, one who, from all appearances, was in the know, and who, as they met from time to time, would see that she met others. In a short time Emma Lou felt that she would be in the whirl of things collegiate. She must write to her Uncle Joe immediately and let him know how well things were going. He had been right. This was the place for her to be. There had been no one in Boise worth considering. Here she was coming into contact with really superior people, intelligent, genteel, college-bred, all trying to advance themselves and their race, unconscious of intra-racial schisms caused by difference in skin color.
    She mustn’t stop upon meeting one person. She must find others, so once more she began her quest and almost immediately met Verne and Helen strolling down one of the campus paths. She remembered Verne as the girl who had smiled at her. She observed her more closely, and admired her pleasant dark brown face, made doubly attractive by two evenly placed dimples and a pair of large, heavily lidded, pitch black eyes. Emma Lou thought her to be much more attractive than