The Meeting Point Read Online Free PDF

his toe!” (Bernice exhaled all her hate.) Still staring at her, he went on, “…  and if she hollers, let her go, eeny-meeny-miney, moe!” Bernice had closed her eyes by now, against the catastrophe that almost happened. She would have slapped all life out of him, had he uttered that word. When she opened her eyes, thelittle boy was standing at the kitchen door, with the door and the door-post squeezed against his head, showing only the eyes and that part of his head which had no ears. His mouth was turned up in a sneer; his tongue was hanging out in derisive contempt. “And eeny-meeny-miney, moe! and catch a black nigger by her toe …” But he did not have the chance to finish it. Bernice’s shoe struck the aluminium screen door with a bang; and he fled with the remainder of the insult, terrified within him. His sister flounced. She placed the partially eaten cookie, scalloped by her tooth-prints, on the counter; juggled her fifty-dollar bracelet on her wrist; and left. She did not even bother to close the door behind her. Serene looked at Bernice, and then at Ruthie. And then she said, as if a great fatigue had come over her, “Come, Ruthie. Let us go upstairs.” She seemed much older after she said it. They left Bernice alone; with the tears falling down her face, like icicles melting from the branches of the tree on the front lawn.
    Many times during the thirty-two months she had worked for the Burrmann’s, Bernice made up her mind to leave, to run out on Mrs. Burrmann, without notice, and with the kitchen sink full of dinner dishes. Always, her mind was changed for her by the terror of facing a Canadian winter without a job; and also by the comfort and near luxury of her three-room (living-room, bedroom — which were really one room — and washroom) apartment on the third floor, which was part of her wages for working as a domestic. It was her self-contained shelter, against herself and other racial fall-out. It became, in time, her home away from home. This apartment contained more facilities than she had ever known back in Barbados. It was clean; she kept it clean. It was large, for her; she wasaccustomed to sharing a bed with her sister, Estelle, all her life in Barbados. But it was lonely.
    One day, in a pit of depression, Bernice went down to Eaton’s department store and brought back two hundred dollars in dresses plus a ninety-dollar swim suit. She put on the dresses; but she did not wear them out of the apartment. There was nowhere to go. And so she called her friend, Dots, and the two of them alternately dressed themselves in the dresses, and modelled the swim suit which left a mark on the swivelly, jowled and jelly avoirdupois of their behinds. The next day, Bernice telephoned Eaton’s to pick up the clothes. Eaton’s gave her charge account a two-hundred and ninety-dollar credit. Dots had liked the swim suit; and wanted to keep it. But she remembered in time (“Where I would wear this thing, eh, gal? In the backyard in the summer? ’Cause I have never seen
one
Negro person in any o’ these swimming pools they have all over this city!”), she took a final appraisal of her figure; took the swim suit off, and wrapped it in the soft, noisy paper into the box. Bernice cackled as if she was really happy, and said, “You could model it round the house, for Boysie, though.”
    “Look, gal, Boysie only married to me, you hear? And that don’t give him the rights to see my body. And let me tell you something,” she added, laughing, “we does do
that
in the dark.” She laughed so loudly, that she had to put her hand over her mouth. Bernice laughed too. It was like therapy; and it made her feel better. Some of her depression left her.
    But this depression would always come back. And once when it did, she withdrew from the congregation of the Toronto Negro Baptist Church, and transferred her soul and its care to the Unitarian Congregation, on St. Clair Avenue, West. This was a much better