"This plague of their own locusts": space, property, and identity in Dorothy West's The Living is Easy.

The August 2000 issue of Vanity Fair revived the concept of the "it girl," citing Gwyneth Paltrow as the embodiment of "it" for the twenty-first century amongst a retrospective parade of former "it girls." The "it girl" became a part of American cultural grammar during the 1920s: It was a term for a woman who embodied the spirit of her age. Vanity Fair's 2000 spread included socialites, entertainers, and businesswomen with expense accounts and trust funds that underwrote their outrageous, jet-setting behavior. Predictably, all but two (Naomi Campbell and Kidada Jones) of the new face of "it" were white. A few months later, Essence, a popular magazine that targets black professional women, countered with its own interpretation and presentation of "it girls" in an article entitled "Working It." While Essence's assemblage of it girls presented a slew of fabulous black women, it did not challenge the foundation of exclusivity, privilege, and color prerequisites without which an "it girl" could not rebel. Vanity Fair presumes that individual achievement determines admission to the cult of "it," while Essence emphasizes the importance of defining "it" for black women, expanding the definition to include women who would otherwise be excluded. Neither magazine challenges the social structures that make "it" possible. The majority of the "it girls" featured in Vanity Fair are supported by generations of wealth, subsidized by corporations like US Steel or fashion empires like Estee Lauder. Essence's it girls possess a different sort of wealth, one that is dependent on their celebrity status. They are almost exclusively entertainers or entertainers' daughters, and for the most part light-skinned or biracial. Ironically, both magazines situate the it girl as an empowering model for feminist and racial progress; however, the concept of the it girl is in actuality dis-empowering and exclusionary. The it girl remains a decorative accoutrement dependent on and enabled by the masculine authority of her father or husband: She is the princess who can never be king.

The reappearance of the "it girl" ideal in popular culture frames my discussion of Dorothy West's The Living is Easy (1948); "it" draws attention to the way that social institutions, like heteronormative marriage, and cultural productions, like mainstream newspapers, establish and maintain bourgeois class structures through a symbolic, specifically gendered figure of success. West's novel explores the issues of belonging, authenticity, and entitlement implicated in Essence's attempt to apply the terms of "it" to African American society. The "it-girl" persona underscores what is valued in the public sphere for women, namely wealth, beauty, and social status. As such, "it" signals a pathway by which women may acquire limited power in spaces presumably dominated by masculinity and capitalism. Yet it is precisely by blurring the boundaries between private and public, domestic and commercial spaces that West's protagonist Cleo Judson achieves a measure of socio-economic power. Through Cleo's quest for social mobility, self-determination, and self-aggrandizement, West weaves together intersecting social geographies into a feminist interrogation of heterosexual marriage and black bourgeois society. Her novel offers a scathing critique of the most subtle, and not so subtle, forms of intraracial oppression along class and color lines within the African American community of Boston in 1910.

While discourses of authenticity have been crucial in establishing literary traditions in minority communities vis-a-vis mainstream aesthetic concerns, the work of women writers like Dorothy West, Marita Bonner, Helene Johnson, and Ann Petry, who wrote at the edges of African American literary periods such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement, resists the stylistic or thematic assumptions presumed by periodization and other authenticating moves. (1) As the Harlem Renaissance era closed, artists sought alternative ideologies to maintain the spirit of artistic activism heralded by the New Negro era. Periodicals like The Messenger carried a strong radical/socialist message, while Dorothy West's editorial endeavor, The Challenge, was known as a "pink publication." (2) During an interview, West tells Deborah McDowell that in spite of her trip to Russia and her editorship of The Challenge, which published several black Communist writers including Richard Wright, "they tried and failed to make a communist out of me" (291). (3) While some critics assume that West wholeheartedly advocated W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of the Talented Tenth because of her privileged upbringing among the Boston's black middle class, others branded her an ardent socialist based on her tour of Russia in 1932. Neither appellation really captures the complexity with which West engages the function of marriage, space (social, domestic, and commercial), and black participation in the capitalist system. Frequently dismissed by her peers as a "pink" writer, contemporary scholarship often fails to take West seriously. They treat The Living is Easy as merely an autobiographical sketch of early 20th-century black life in Boston, and consider West as a representative of a bygone era, significant only in her ability to relate firsthand interactions with Harlem Renaissance luminaries Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. While West critiques the stratification of the black middle class, she maintains an abiding respect for those crafty enough to assimilate into a system not of their own making. Her consideration of class, labor, and capitalism reveals an astute understanding of the possibilities and limits of black social and economic advancement in the United States.

My spatially inflected reading of The Living is Easy is attentive to ways that social and urban geography informs race, gender, and class conflicts. A preponderance of African American literature deals with the complications of traversing and regulating space. The train motif, for instance, is a common cultural metaphor for socio-economic mobility. Literature that dramatizes the Middle Passage, the Great Migration, Jim Crow, and the antebellum hierarchies of the field and the house frames West's portrayal of how spatial politics govern social life and racial progress. Her fiction complicates the dichotomy of the 19th-century doctrine of "separate spheres" that situates the private sphere as a white, female, upper-class space, and the public sphere as a white, heterosexual, masculine space. Cleo Judson's progressive transformation into a matriarch whose social, economic, and interpersonal machinations manipulate the public and private spheres of urban American culture during the early part of the twentieth century, constitutes an amalgam of race, gender, and class struggles for equality and opportunity in urban America's social economy. The power struggle within Cleo's marriage parallels her attempts to establish her position as a guardian of upper-middle class society through accumulation of property and an irreproachable performance of bourgeois mores. In short, Cleo aspires to the symbolic stature of an "it-girl" without comprehending the inherent contradictions of the role.

Unlike the African American social satires of the previous decade, such as Jessie Fauset's Comedy American Style (1933) or Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry (1929), The Living is Easy diverges from the passing narrative genre popularized during the Harlem Renaissance, introducing a new type of African American heroine. She is not the solitary introspective protagonist of Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), nor does she exhibit the conflict between art and romance faced by the women in Jessie Fauset's subversive sentimental novels. Cleo Judson is a young, vibrant woman whose family revolves around her. As a child, she blooms in the South Carolina woods, and similar to Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eye Were Watching God (1937), is so full of life and mischief that in an attempt to protect her from the dangers that young black women inevitably face in the South, Cleo's mother sends her North. Exiled from her four sisters, but exposed to the social stratification that informs Boston's peculiar combination of philanthropy and elitism, Cleo's wild ways are refined through conventional education. Unfortunately for Cleo, northern drawing rooms prove as dangerous as southern parlors. When the son of her white benefactress begins to covet the light-skinned, green-eyed Cleo, she impulsively marries Bart Judson (a wealthy, older black man known as the "Black Banana King") to avoid a probable rape. Once married, Cleo engages in a battle of wills with her husband, and then with her only child, a daughter named Judy.

At the start of the novel, we find Cleo in the midst of moving her family to Brookline, where they would be the first black family to reside in the exclusive Boston neighborhood. As Cleo and her daughter traverse the city to view their new residence, the description of their expedition illustrates Cleo's desire to be associated with the upper echelons of Boston society: "The trolley rattled across Huntington Avenue, past the fine granite face of Symphony Hall, and continued up Massachusetts Avenue, where a cross-street gave a fair and fleeting glimpse of the Back Bay Fens, and another cross-street showed the huge dome of the magnificent mother church Christian Science..." (38). The reverent language and detailed naming of specific landmarks in this passage reference Boston's history of abolitionism and intellectualism; the diction suggests that Boston is a space where African Americans should be able to achieve social and economic parity. Although this vision of Boston indicates Cleo's admiration of the city, it is peculiarly counter-posed by her idyllic memories of her southern childhood: "All of her backward looks were toward the spellbinding South. The rich remembering threw a veil of lovely illusion over her childhood" (53). Her belief that she can recreate the South of her childhood in a northern space motivates her to bring her sisters to Boston: "Her sisters, with their look of Mama, would help her keep that illusion alive. She could no longer live without them. They were the veins and sinews of her heart" (53). Cleo's veiled memory of the South drives her perception of motherhood and womanhood. As soon as she convinces her husband to move into a new house far too large for her immediate family, she plans a reunion of her sisters. To reconstruct her southern childhood within Boston, Cleo must convince her sisters to leave their husbands and relocate with their children to live with her. She also intends to show her husband that she can rule a domestic kingdom as well as he can manage a commercial business. Through Cleo's quest to improve the social standing of her family and assert her own agency, West explores the tension caused by intraracial and class discrimination among the upper and working class black communities of early 20th-century Boston.

The Living is Easy demonstrates the precarious instability of social, geographic boundaries and the mutability of time and space by "conjuring" the South in a northern locale. (4) This narrative maneuver allows Cleo to manipulate time and space to reconstruct the pecking order of her childhood through her sisters' transplanted bodies. However, despite Cleo's valorization of her southern experiences, she is careful to distinguish her familial past from the violence and poverty of black experience in the South of the novel's present.

Her memories of the South are intimate and insulated; however, her South is not the South that accompanies the majority of southern migrants to Boston. (5) For Simeon Binney, editor of a radical black newspaper modeled after William Monroe Trotter's The Guardian, the southern born residents of the South End fully represent "the colored population of Boston" (143). In The Clarion, Simeon conscientiously reports the disenfranchisement and other racialized atrocities plaguing the Deep South, forcing the black Brahmins to confront realities of the national crises from which they believe themselves to be insulated. According to Simeon, racial unity should transcend the social barricades of convention. During the Harlem Renaissance, periodicals used articles series such as the Messenger's "These Colored United States" to reveal newspapers' potential to provide illuminating investigation of national identity and racial geography. Such periodicals urged the southern masses to "Go North."

However, black-owned publications also read the black public sphere as a space that maintained, to borrow from Houston Baker's application of Jurgen Habermas's formulation of the public sphere, "a nostalgic, purely aestheticized fascination with the narrative of a beautiful time-past" (10). For instance, the black Brahmins tolerate Simeon's newspaper only because he is a member of the Binney Clan. As such, the radical underpinnings of The Clarion are subsumed beneath a black conservative nostalgia based on an erasure that celebrates individual enterprise, and suppresses any challenges to the hermetically sealed world of the black Brahmins. We see this ideology at work in Cleo's spatial re-articulation that neatly dissociates her family from the undesirable occupants of the South End of Boston: "The South End was no longer the colored population at all. All the nice people were moving away along with the whites. Soon it would be solid black" (143). In Cleo's mind, southern migrants are as unrelated to her as "poor darkies" are different from "respectable coloreds" (143). Fixing a place with a specific static identity, an authenticity, as it were, is one of the means by which social boundaries are erected and maintained. The irony underlying West's critique of bourgeois mores is most apparent in her presentation of the black Brahmins. Although the Brahmins have little control over Boston's geography, they police their social boundaries and rally against southern emigrants, with the exception of a select few whose money and/or light skin gains them a grudging admittance to their privileged circles.

The social and urban geography of Boston provides the battlefield for Cleo's private and public power plays. Much as it is today, turn of the century Boston was a city marked by ethnic and economic boundaries. The mid-1890's black Boston society was divided into the "West End Set" and the "South End Set." The limits of Cleo's domestic power reflect the boundaries of African American political and economic influence from the turn of the century into the 1930s and 40s. Her society is marked by exclusion and divisiveness based on color, education, economics, and neighborhood, all of which determine where one falls in the hierarchy of the Talented Tenth. West's novel reveals that W. E. B. Du Bois's theory that the elite of a minority will lift up the whole through exemplary behavior, higher education, and financial success is merely an attractive facade of black capitalism. After a meeting with the Duchess, a notorious West End gambling hostess, Cleo questions what she perceives as the black bourgeoisie's ridiculous distinctions: "What is this business of belonging? A tailor and a stable-owner were the leaders of society?" (113) Cleo does not understand why the Duchess, a black woman with ash-blond hair and imperial blue eyes who "could have crossed the color line and bought her way into any worldly circle, preferred to yearn for a counterfeit of the Brahmin cult" (113). The black Brahmins formed a select community of African Americans whose lives "were narrowly confined to a daily desperate effort to ignore their racial status" (105). Their position had been established by "Boston birth and genteel breeding and they acknowledged no more than a hundred best families" in the Northeast (105). Ironically, although the children of these valets, chauffeurs, and butlers who set the behavioral standards exceed their parents' expectations by attending Harvard, their sons' degrees do not endow them with the keys to the city, but serve further to segregate the burgeoning black population from "true," read white, Brahmins. Instead of welcoming black doctors into research laboratories, white doctors counsel their black counterparts to cater only to black patients, sparing the white doctors the pain of having to work in the "poor ward of the hospital" (193).

West's Cleo perceives that the "counterfeit" world she seeks to infiltrate is built on untenable notions of racial superiority; however, instead of working to dismantle these false distinctions of class and color, she manipulates the social hierarchies of the black elite to serve her own selfish needs. Her constant derision of her husband's thrift and her nickname for him, "Mr. Nigger," speaks to the tendency within the black bourgeoisie to self-segregate according to color, class, and education. Cleo's sisters' husbands also recognize her color prejudice. After Cleo convinces Lily that her dark-skinned husband is out to kill her, he refers to them as "two goddamned color-struck hussies" (182). Boston was known for having the chilliest clique of the black aristocracy, and Lily's husband is scornful of what Willard Gatewood in Aristocrats of Color terms "blue veinism": A system of social stratification that excludes those whose skin is not pale enough to let their blue veins show through (Gatewood 153).

Cleo's attempt to relocate her immediate family across town and her extended family from South to North, a move which ironically sets in motion the ultimate dissolution of her power and income, underlines the elusiveness of social mobility as determined by geographical location. Her obsession with belonging and entitlement prompt her to overcompensate for attributes she lacks. For instance, despite her disappointment with her daughter Judy's dark skin, facial features, and timid nature, Cleo believes that through molding her daughter into a lady, she might access the belonging and entitlement of a true Bostonian. As such, Judy's welfare is a partial motivation for the move: "[T]he prospect of Judy entering school in Brookline filled her with awe" (6). In order to reinforce the illusion that she and her family are part of the select black Brahmin society, Cleo employs Thea Binney to teach her daughter proper deportment, even though her husband believes Thea's tutelage is reiterative since "two expensive doctors of Cleo's uncompromising choosing could bear witness to [Judy's] tranquil Boston birth" (7). In spite of Thea's financial ruin, she is the "it-girl" of the Black Boston elite by virtue of "being born a Binney." Together with her husband's family, the Hartnetts, the Binneys are one of the city's first families. Although Thea's husband, a struggling doctor, was poor, "as a Hartnett he belonged to a family even older than the Binneys" (111). Furthermore, "The Hartnetts had been freemen for five generations, and no one of them in those hundred years had been born or schooled outside of Boston" (111). Even more telling is the story of Cole Hartnett's father: When "Mr. Hartnett failed in business, and blew his brains out just like a white man," all of black Boston "was a little proud of his suicide" (112). The black elite's valorization of Mr. Hartnett's suicide as a mark of prestige is characteristic of their grotesque investment in the appearance of wealth and the emulation of white Bostonians.

As the black Brahmins carefully distinguish themselves from the undesirables of their race, white Bostonians, the "real" Brahmins, actively reconfigure urban space to maintain racial and ethnic segregation. According to Gillian Rose, any dominant claim to public space must contend with repeated challenges; bodies must be policed to ensure that they conform to set spatial restrictions (118). If we place Rose's hypothesis in the context of West's novel, we observe that the violence applied can be meted out without regard for the tenuous class standing that the black bourgeoisie believe affords them security. A case in point: The racially motivated beating of Thea's brother Simeon, editor of The Clarion, indicates the insidious nature of such policing. A group of white freshmen accost the dark-skinned Simeon as he escorts his light-skinned sister Thea across Harvard yard; they threaten: "Watch your step, nigger. Let go that white girl" (130). Thea runs quickly home while Simeon eagerly engages the fight, which results in his imprisonment. This incident illustrates that in spite of their abolitionist roots, when it becomes "necessary," white Bostonians do not hesitate to resort to violence to reinforce racial boundaries; the whims of the dominant society always circumscribe blacks' spatial negotiation. Although the perpetrators later bestow a "Harvard gentlemen's" apology to Simeon after they discover that Thea is his sister, it is merely a tactic to prevent him from publicizing the event. In this way, they privately enforce social restrictions against interracial dating while at the same time suppressing an incident that would unveil the public pretense of Bostonian liberalism.

As a direct result of her acquaintance with the presently poor but still illustrious Binneys, Cleo intercepts an advertisement for a house before it is printed, a house "on a street abutting the Riverway, a boulevard which touched the storied Fens and the arteries of sacred Brookline" (5). Although the house is advertised in the Clarion as a Brookline address, it is actually in Roxbury (now a predominately black neighborhood), the border of Brookline begins directly across the street. Upon discovering this misrepresentation, Cleo swallows her disappointment and continues to refer to her residence as Brookline because "Several colored families were already living in Roxbury" (49). Her acquisition of a house in an affluent neighborhood from which white residents are fleeing (because of Irish influx) points to the slipperiness of societal divisions and underscores the necessary policing that maintains them. As she approaches the class status she desires, the rules, and the geography, continually shift and reconstitute themselves out of her reach; the house formerly advertised as a Brookline address reverts to Roxbury as soon as a black family inhabits it. Cleo abandons the South End in an effort to escape the influx of black southern migrants, which the "nicer colored people" perceive as a "plague of their own locusts" (5). This description likens black "cotton-belters" to a biblical scourge. At the same time, it implies kinship through the naming of the epidemic as "their own," suggesting that Cleo's attempted escape is undermined by a kind of unconscious racial self-sabotage. To make this case, West has Cleo convince her husband that they will be able to sustain such a large home by taking in boarders, at the time he does not know that the boarders will be her sisters. Cleo's "scheme," the common practice of taking in recently emigrated boarders, was one of the primary factors that presumably reduced the value of working-class neighborhoods in Boston. (6) Thus, West mocks the paradox that the stability of race and class structures resides within their elasticity; these structures maintain their boundaries even as the borders are crossed, undermining any attempts at subversion.

While the social spheres of the black elite are for the most part insulated and separate from white Boston, there are a few intersecting areas where partial tolerance coexists with the tension present in these border spaces. (7) For instance, as Cleo and her daughter ride a public, integrated trolley, white passengers respond positively to their presence: "Boston whites of the better classes were never upset nor dismayed by the sight of one or two Negroes exercising equal rights. To them the minor phenomenon of a colored face was a reminder of the proud role their forebears had played in the freeing of the human spirit for aspiration beyond the badge of the house slave" (40, emphasis added). Indeed, when Cleo fears that her new landlord is prejudiced against African Americans, he reminds her proudly that his father was a leader in the Underground Railroad movement and that her accusation of color prejudice is "grossly impertinent" (46). This same landlord is relocating to the "real" Brookline, "the last stronghold of [his] generation" because of a "thundering herd of Irish immigrants that have overrun" his side of Roxbury (48).

West's exploration of the positionality of various ethnic groups, particularly newly arrived Irish, further perplexes the black Brahmins who hoped that "undesirable immigrants" would replace them as the underclass necessitated by capitalism. While Irish and Italian immigrants appear in fiction by Marita Bonnet, West's contemporary, as equally oppressed members of a multiethnic community, in West's novel the relationship between blacks and Irish is fractured. (8) In contrast to other ethnic groups or immigrants, Boston blacks

   did not consider themselves a minority
   group. The Irish were a minority
   group, the Jews, the Italians, the
   Greeks, who were barred from belonging
   by old country memories, accents
   and mores. [The black Brahmins] felt
   that they had nothing in common
   except a facial resemblance. Though
   they scorned the Jew, they were secretly
   pleased when they could pass for
   one. Though they were contemptuous
   of the Latins, they were proud when
   they looked European. (105)

While colorism is a significant arbiter of intraracial class division, to reduce the class stratification in the black community to light color privileging is to oversimplify. In the cited passage, West illustrates that skin color and ethnic identification can be manipulated and recapitulated to gain advantage within the competitive social and industrial economies of Boston. And despite their efforts to self-segregate, blacks and Irish continue to brush up against each other. Cleo's daughter Judy and her cousins walk to school through a largely Irish neighborhood--an adventure that results in daily battles and insult wars. "Nigger, nigger, pull the trigger," is rebuffed by "Yah, yah, yah, go wash your paddy face in the frying pan" (209). Despite these frays, the black children realize they are financially superior. Some, like Vicky, are free of prejudice against Irish neighbors. Others absorb an Irish dialect: " 'I'd liefer let them look, too,' said Penny. She had a penchant for picking up Irish expressions" (205). The children's interactions illustrate Cleo's inability to insulate them within the small sphere of acceptable Brahmins. The complexly prejudicial relationship between blacks and Irish is further complicated by the fact that while lower working class blacks referred to their Irish neighbors as "nice white people," the upper class blacks exploit the labor of "young untutored immigrant girls" who "held their jobs until their more sophisticated countrymen explained the insurmountable distinctions between a man who looked white and a man who was white" (101). (9) Once granted opportunities for racialized socioeconomic advancement, Irish transition from outsiders to insiders by establishing their "whiteness" through political alignment with their Anglo oppressors, a shift that the black bourgeoisie are never able to effect, no matter how hard they try.

E. Franklin Frazier's landmark study of the black middle class, Black Bourgeoisie (1957), discredits the possibility of a separate, functional black economy under capitalism, and condemns the black aristocracy for replicating white blueblood society with its inherent class hierarchy of insiders and outsiders. According to Frazier's analysis, the small financial and educational gains of the black middle class are so minuscule that they have no real effect on the American economy. From his perspective, the black bourgeoisie has no actual power; it is dependent on an ideology of intraracial exclusion, rather, perpetuated by cultural institutions, including the black press, to maintain the fiction of the black bourgeoisie's imagined community (153). (10) In Frazier's words, "The Negro newspapers help to create and maintain the world of make-believe in which Negroes can realize their desires for recognition and status in a white world that regards them with contempt and amusement" (25). Although in West's novel Simeon Binney's The Clarion theoretically advocates progressive politics and a radical social agenda, in practice Binney is restricted to reporting pleasant, uplifting subjects that did not remind the readers of the severe racial oppression or heightened racial violence they suffered, particularly in the South. When The Clarion's reports failed to support the facade of black progress, the readership waned. From the perspective of the black elite, outside of his sister's social column, "nothing else in the paper met with their approval. Every other word was colored.... Had [the editor] used the word Negro, they would have refused to read it altogether" (135). (11) Given the fragile distinctions by which the Brahmins separated themselves from those presumed to be lower in status, semantic debates such as "Negro versus colored" take on a vital signification. While West's novel predates Frazier's study, her characterization of the black aristocracy resonates with Frazier's critique of the tenuous foothold that the black middle class struggles to maintain in the American economy.

Cleo's marital problems appear to dramatize another one of Frazier's observations: "[I]f the husband has risen in social status through his own efforts and married a member of an 'old' family or a 'society' woman, the husband is likely to play a pitiful role" (221). West's juxtaposition of the Judson family's marital struggles with the Binneys' provides an interesting opportunity to critique the role that heteronormative marriage plays in social stratification. Although Cleo is not born a society woman, she aspires to that status and competes with the other women in the novel to be the it girl, relegating her husband to the compromised role suggested by Frazier. At the commencement of the novel, Thea Binney is Cleo's "model of perfection" and the "it girl" du jour:

   She had been a day pupil at private
   school, and later a boarding student at
   a select academy, an institution which
   had taken her natural airs and graces
   and cast them in the same impeccable
   model that produced the young ladies
   who were to take their inherited places
   behind the tea-tables of Boston. These
   young ladies were now the young
   wives of wealthy businessmen with
   old if not illustrious names. They lived
   on fashionable streets and were served
   by butlers who were, as often as not,
   old friends of Thea's father. (92)

The last line of this passage undermines the apparent innocuous comparison between "she" and "they" by pointing out the irony of Thea's position as a black "it-girl." Though the narrator reveals that Thea began life with the same opportunities as the other young ladies of Boston, we are reminded of the relationship between her father and her schoolfellows' butlers. This last line interrupts Thea's future; she has been groomed for a position that she cannot hope to fill because her father's newly acquired wealth is easily lost and cannot compete with generations of financial security. Despite the tenuousness of Thea's situation, Cleo's desire for Thea's coveted social status is a source of discontent between Cleo and her husband, who unlike Cleo, is contemptuous of black elitism and strives to amass sufficient funds to secure their daughter's financial independence, rather than her social position.

Cleo intends to infiltrate the black aristocracy and then rule as the new "it-girl," displacing the current reigning "it-girl" her friend, Thea Binney. Her only other inadvertent competitor in the "it-girl" race is Lenore, an infamous gambling hostess known among the Brahmins as the Duchess. Lenore hosts a gambling den in her West End home, where the husbands of women too "civilized" to receive her regularly lose money while young black men working their way through college invariably win. (12) Each of these three women is missing a vital part of the it-girl profile, yet they all aspire to "it." Thea has manners, beauty, and breeding, but no money. Cleo has beauty, means, and the will to assimilate, but no elite ancestry. Lenore has money and beauty, but no aptitude for social leadership; in addition, she suffers from a tarnished childhood. Together, their calculations for happiness, fail miserably because they are built on a shifting foundation fractured by class elitism, intraracial discrimination, and black valorization of white social hierarchies.

According to Ruth Randolph and Lorraine Roses, Marita Bonner's short story "On the Altar" is a precursor to the marriage conflicts in The Living is Easy. In Bonner's story, a grandmother annuls the marriage of her grand-daughter to an unsuitable, dark-skinned man and forces her to abort their child so that she will be free to marry a doctor. Thus, Bonner reveals the type of sinister social maneuvers necessary to maintain the exclusivity of the black aristocracy. "On the Altar" also reflects Frazier's thesis concerning the prominent role of the black press in perpetuating delusions of black material success. It is through the society column of the local paper that Elizabeth's rejected, dark-skinned husband discovers that his wife has left him: "Mrs. Blanche Kingsman Breastwood and her granddaughter, the lovely Elizabeth Grey, dainty blonde replica of her mother, Mrs. Louise Grey--are circling the states" (233). While the black press implies that Elizabeth is on a grand tour, in reality her grandmother sequesters her in a cabin where she is visited daily by a doctor who gives her injections to ensure that her child will be stillborn. The subsequent press release of Elizabeth's second marriage underscores Bonnet's critique of the speciousness of black bourgeois society: "The society columns burst forth into a hysteria of redundancy, bad taste and worse writing. They listed the showers and the parties and the details of every gift and every garment and every scrap of food served ... things, things, things" (243). The catalogue of items listed in this passage satirize a performance of aristocracy that resonates with West's derisive portrayal of bourgeois vacuity in The Living is Easy.

Similar to Bonner's tale, West's novel destabilizes the perception that an advantageous marriage is the key to social stability or personal happiness. Cleo functions simultaneously as a matchmaker and marriage-dissolver: The marriages she engineers have equal potential for social progress or spiritual death. In exchange for arranging the Duchess's marriage to Simeon Binney, Cleo acquires the Duchess's "graceful Chippendale" furniture for her new home. One by one, Cleo convinces her sisters to come to Boston on a long holiday. Once they arrive, she poisons their minds against their hard-working, but certainly not rich, husbands who abandon them for other women, leaving them dependent on Cleo's generosity. Charity's transformation, for example, demonstrates Cleo's manipulation of her sisters. When she first arrives in Boston, Charity is a happy mother with a sexually fulfilling marriage. Her relationship with her husband Ben is the antithesis of Cleo's nearly celibate marriage. Unfortunately, because she over-stays in Boston due to Cleo's feigned illness, Charity's husband divorces her. In response to her grief, Cleo tells her, "[All] you lost was a nigger who didn't have a dime when you married him and's got no more now." Charity responds, "You married money. I married love" (177). As a result of her divorce, the once shapely Charity begins to eat herself into numbness until she becomes a "grotesque creature" who in "painful consciousness of her obesity no longer left the house" (211). Bereft of her husband, Charity's passionate marriage is no longer a threat to Cleo's frigidity; instead, Charity embodies the tragic opposite of the "it-girl," serving significantly as powerless, unattractive, sacrificial (or "charitable") backdrop for her sister. Cleo is unable to look directly at the new Charity, who no longer reminds her of their mother. Her disregard for her sister's well being as well as her myopic selfishness proves the narrator's early assessment that "her yearning for her sisters was greater than her concern for them" (53). Ultimately, Cleo convinces each of three of her sisters to leave a fulfilling marriage to live under her thumb while at the same time orchestrating Thea Binney's marriage to Cole Hartnett with disastrous results for both. Desperate to maintain Thea's standard of living, Cole uses his medical training to perform abortions on Irish immigrants. When an operation results in a fatality, he is arrested while Thea remains oblivious: "[T]he fact that she wore furs, and could afford a maid and a child, simply meant that Cole was doing his duty by her. His disgrace simply meant that he failed that duty" (318). (13) Thea has no qualms about how Cole privately acquires their income; she summarily abandons him to avoid public shame, with its implications of interracial interaction, that results when he is caught. (14)

Cleo's own marriage mirrors the fateful outcomes of those she orchestrates. After she arrives in Boston as the ward of an elderly lady, her employer/benefactress's nephew buys her a new bicycle upon which Cleo "pedaled away as easily as if she had been cycling her entire life" (31). Cycling, with its enhanced individual mobility, epitomized the independence of New Womanhood. Just when she is on the brink of adulthood, and anticipating an exciting career on the stage, Cleo collides with Bart Judson: "[T]he impact sent them sprawling on either side of the path, with the shiny new bicycle rearing like a bucking horse, flinging itself against a boulder, and smashing itself to pieces" (31). The destruction of the bicycle ends Cleo's dreams of independence and catapults her into marriage with Judson. In "rescuing" her from the clutches of Mrs. Boorem's nephew, Bart raises her social status from that of a sexually vulnerable ward to an asexual middle class matron. Though Bart vows to replace the bicycle, he never fulfills that promise. Instead, he substitutes the security of his surname for Cleo's ability to negotiate the city on her own. Carol Allen affirms that "empty marriages also help maintain segregation by channeling sexual forces (which can challenge segregation when they extend across racial and ethnic lines) into a craving for material goods and money" (97). Love does not enter into Cleo's marriage; again, her daughter Judy was conceived "on the one night her body's hunger broke down her controlled resistance" (35). The paradoxically chaste role of the middle class wife diverts Cleo's sexual energy into individualist consumerism. In this respect, The Living is Easy functions as a cautionary tale: Marriage can be a fatal, suffocating institution if it is undertaken purely for financial or social gain.

According to Sarah Deutsch's Women in the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston 1870-1940, the exact time frame spanned by West's novel, just as the working-class spaces of the city became sexualized, the middle-class home was implicitly desexualized (55). The desexualization of the middle class matron clarifies both Cleo's reluctance to engage in recurring sexual relations with her husband and her inability to honor her sister's impoverished but sexually fulfilling marriage. It also explains her interest in preventing her sisters from finding employment. As working girls, her sisters would achieve a measure of autonomy that Cleo finds threatening to her domestic domain. She realizes too late that her machinations have ruined her sisters' lives, alienated her daughter, and destroyed her marriage: "It had never occurred to her in the ten years of her marriage that she might be his helpmate. She thought that was the same thing as being a man's slave" (71). West intimates that Cleo's family life would have run smoother if she and her husband had formed a marriage based on an equal partnership, rather than a contest of wills in which either patriarchy or matriarchy wins out. Unfortunately, this equality is impossible for Cleo, who remains frustrated by the lack of control allowed by the institution of marriage:

   Her despotic nature found Mr. Judson
   a rival. He ruled the store and all the
   people in it. Her sphere was one
   untroublesome child, who gave insufficient
   scope for her tremendous vitality.
   She would show Mr. Judson that
   she could take a home and be its heart.
   She would show him that she could
   bend a houseful of human souls to her
   will. (70-71)

Littered with language that emphasizes Cleo's desire for control, with words like "despotic," "ruled," "bend," this passage illustrates how spatial distinctions of power form the bedrock of Cleo's marital conflicts. She wages her battle on two fronts: The domestic space of the home and public space of the market. (15) Portraying Cleo's visit to her husband's place of business, West inscribes the protagonist's abhorrence of the market's overwhelming masculinity:

   Here in the market was all the maleness
   of men. This was their world in
   which they moved without the command
   of women. The air hung heavy
   with their male smell and the pungent
   odor of their sweat.... As she neared
   them, their eyes approved and dismissed
   her, because they were too
   busy for the long appraisal of anything
   that could not be bought and sold in
   the Boston Market. (70)

The final wry observation emphasizes the source of Cleo's frustration and fear, that she "could not be bought and sold" because she was already the property of Mr. Judson. In contrast to the masculine space of the market, where Cleo feels impotent, she competes with her husband and achieves total control over their home.

Unfortunately, the domestic sphere provides "insufficient scope" for her ambitions and "despotic nature." Her husband's desire to amass a comfortable savings directly conflicts with her desire for luxury, and her excessive spending provokes frequent clashes that occur within or about their living space. Her resentment of her financial dependence leads her to transform their home, a private space, into a hybridized public space: A domestic corporation in which the employees are her family members. Unfortunately for Cleo, the collapse of public and private dichotomies that signify dominance does not result in liberation for herself or her sisters; instead Cleo is obsessed with maintaining control. According to Doreen Massey, "Power accrues to those who exercise control over the environment; similarly, power adheres to those who produce narratives that sustain and naturalize places as opaque, natural, or fixed--and thus beyond contestation or negotiation" (118). Only the children in the novel perceive Cleo's vulnerability and the fragility of her chokehold on her family. As her daughter Judy observes: "Cleo was the boss of nothing but the young, the weak, the frightened. She ruled a pygmy kingdom" (308).

The spatial dimensions of Cleo's complex matriarchy are unlike any other in early modern black fiction; they serve as precursor to the mother-daughter relationship portrayed in Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brown Stones (1959). (16) Ann duCille aptly describes Cleo in The Coupling Convention as the "Scarlett O'Hara of black fiction," citing Cleo's narcissism, which motivates her to lie, cheat, and steal from those she claims to love in order to remain at the center of their world (112). Yet she is extremely vulnerable, and occasionally performs small acts of kindness, though her so-called "acts of mercy" frequently have an underlying selfish objective. Short for Cleopatra, her first name invokes that scheming last ruler of Egypt, while her maiden name, Jericho, references the city destined to fall in spite of its impenetrable walls. Unfortunately, Cleo's namesakes foreshadow the tragic outcome of her plans. In instructing her daughter about race, she relates the history of her foremothers: A cadre of women who commit suicide in response to insults to their pride. Unlike the conventional African American matriarch whose suffering, sacrifice, and survival ensure her offspring of a better future, "the old time Jericho women lived proud as long as they could. When they couldn't live proud, they preferred to die" (91).

Not content simply to rule her family and friends through her matchmaking endeavors, Cleo wants to be "accepted as an integral part of Boston's society" (266). To accomplish this goal, she seizes the throne of the it-girl with disastrous results. Many of the scions of the black elite in West's novel are on the verge of bankruptcy, including Cleo's husband; however, imminent financial ruin does not deter them from hosting weddings, parties, and other social events that reinforce the semblance of exclusivity and superiority within the black aristocracy. The event that solidifies Cleo's position among the black elite is the party she gives at her "Brookline" home; the turnout of black Brahmins ensures that she now "belongs." The legitimacy of Cleo's insider status rests partially on the attendance of Thea Binney, the "it-girl" of black Brahmins, who in spite of her actual impoverished status is so certain of her supposedly aristocratic bloodline that she wears an old frock to the party. Thea encapsulates Vanity Fair's it-girl's "ability to change the chemistry of the room just by walking into it" (Vanity Fair 314). Upon arrival, she shares an embrace with Cleo that "served as public proof of the intimacy between her and Mrs. Cole Hartnett, born Binney" (245, emphasis mine). The language that describes their relationship encodes the ease with which public and private delineations become enmeshed in black society.

Thea arrives at the party prepared to shun the infamous Duchess, only to discover that an advantageous marriage, pioneered by Cleo, has transformed her infamous new sister-in-law into the highly respectable Mrs. Simeon Binney. The Duchess agreed to marry Simeon to avenge black society's shunning of her mother's interracial liaison, while Simeon weds the Duchess out of financial necessity. West satirizes the vacuity of the society patrons through their reception of the Duchess: "They had been praying for a cheap blond with some betraying Negroid feature. They were overwhelmed with what God had given them instead. In an acute rush of color-consciousness each wondered nervously if it was she who had caused Mrs. Binney's undisguised disappointment in a gathering of the best people" (250). Following Cleo's lead, the women in their circle accept the Duchess as one of their own. A remarkable scene of social reconstitution follows the Duchess's entrance: The society leaders abandon Thea and swarm around the Duchess. Although within seconds the Duchess has become the new "it girl," she feels no pleasure in their acceptance: "She had no longer wanted the rights she had won by her marriage. She had paid too high a price for the privilege of pouring tea" (249). The "cost" of her decision to marry Simeon outside the Catholic Church results in a spiritual bankruptcy that corrupts the love that she and her husband eventually develop for each other.

Another significant move that establishes Cleo's earned pre-eminence is her foreclosure of the possibility of aid to Dean Galloway, the headmaster of a black college who travels to Boston to enlist the support of the black elite in an unfair court case in the South. Gatewood implies that philanthropy and uplift have always been a cherished duty of the black middle class; however, West's novel disputes Gatewood's claim through Cleo's insistence that any attention she and Judson might pay to the Dean's cause would damage their acceptance into white mainstream society by drawing attention to racial difference. Furthermore, Cleo publicly threatens to withdraw her support of The Clarion and of the black aristocracy, should Simeon publish anything regarding the trial of the "unfortunate," but socially undesirable, southern black man.

Unbeknownst to Cleo, the black defendant turns out to be her brother-in-law, and her refusal to garner communal support results in further extension of her husband's already diminished resources. This particular plot twist illustrates that without a coalition of pooled resources or the recognition of a shared black kinship that crosses class, color, and regional boundaries, the exclusionary practices of the black middle class precipitate its own self-destruction.

Cleo's actions demonstrate the price of preserving a black middle class "paradise," an aspiration that West revisits in her second novel: The Wedding further deconstructs this notion of an insulated, idealized community that replicates social geographies of mainstream culture. I apply the concept of a false or decaying "paradise" as Toni Morrison uses it to underscore the mythos of the black bourgeoisie in her novel of the same name. Paradise (1998) builds on West's critique, exploring colorism, elitism, and patriarchy as structures that (de)compose the black bourgeois ideal. (17) While Morrison suggests that it is human nature to create hierarchies, to exclude, and even to oppress, she bears enormous sympathy for the "8-rock" families, inscribing respect for the innate human desire to construct safe, thriving communities. Paradise illustrates the dreadful price that a hierarchical society built on sacred and secular myths of race and gender superiority must pay to preserve its insularity. Cleo's climactic party marks her triumph, her entry into paradise, as it were. Yet neither her husband nor her sisters attend. To maintain the appearance of entitlement and gentility, Cleo must dismiss her southern family and banish her dark-skinned husband from the party provided by his labor. The tenuous, illusory community of the elite substitutes for a true community of family, and thus signals Cleo's inevitable downfall. Cleo's light skin and eastern education, along with her husband's money, admit her to the society that "took it for granted that [she and her sisters] were the cream of the South because they were the right color," even though "their accents distressed" at least one society matron (171). Shortly after the party, Cleo's broken sisters abandon her, and her husband goes bankrupt as a result of her excessive spending. Cleo is no longer where "the living is easy"; she has forsaken the accoutrements of that space--power, youth, and pleasure (154). According to Ann duCille, "For black women writing in the 1930s and 1940s, claiming subjectivity and female authority meant disentangling the categories of woman and man from the shackles of patriarchal ideology and restrictive gender roles, as well as from what white psycho-analytical feminist Jessica Benjamin calls 'the bonds of love'--bonds Cleo Judson fiercely resisted" (115). Even after her husband finally leaves her, she confuses financial loss with familial love.

The Living is Easy is a fascinating exploration of class and marriage among the black bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century. Focusing on one American family, it chronicles the black middle class's attempt to create a separate social sphere beside mainstream American culture with the hopes of eventually blending seamlessly into the Brahmin fold, leaving behind those who, for lack of education, culture, color, or economics, could not convert their imagined community into a material reality. In his 2002 review of Stephen Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park, Ward Just pronounced Carter the Theodore Dreiser of the African American middle class, citing the novelty of the subject matter and the incisive critical eye of the narrator (11). In his laudatory review Just might have situated Carter's fiction in the tradition of African American novelists like Dorothy West, writers attentive to class and race clashes nearly 50 years earlier. It is vital that reviewers and multiple audiences become aware of the long tradition of socially and spatially conscious black writing in the US, and that they see Stephen Carter's cynical exposure of an affluent "darker nation" not as a (re)invention of the wheel, but simply another link in a long chain that stretches back through the Civil Rights movement, the Harlem Renaissance, Reconstruction, the Civil War, slavery, the American Revolution, the Middle Passage, and across the Atlantic.

Notes

(1.) See Wall and Hull on how scholars' periodization of Harlem Renaissance literature often excluded women artists. Ironically, Wall does not include Dorothy West in her landmark study, Women of the Harlem Renaissance.

(2.) During the Harlem Renaissance, female journal editors came under harsh scrutiny. Just as critics attempted to undermine Jessie Fauset's authority while she was editor of the Crisis, Wallace Thurman detracted from West's editorial efforts: "Challenge lacks significance or personality--it is too pink tea and la de da" (qtd. in Cromwell 355). West weathered the storm, however, by standing up to the leadership of the Communist Party who sought to use the New Challenge as an organ of the party.

(3.) Richard Wright's "Blueprint for Negro Writing"--a blanket call for black writers to manifest a working class perspective and embrace socialism--appeared in West's journal.

(4.) For additional discussions that challenge definitions of time and space as static categories, see Massey.

(5.) See Griffin's discussion of migration narratives in "Who set you flowin'?" See also Williams, "The South in the City," which examines the cultural adaptation of migrants to a new locale: "Migrants bring to cities an expressive culture deeply rooted in another place. Because expressive culture is crucial in defining place, they must revise the often-inappropriate aesthetics of home and join them to the more embracing commercial and popular media" (206).

(6.) In some parts of the West End, fourth-fifths of the households took in relatives or lodgers in early 20th century Boston (Deutsch 28).

(7.) See Anzaldua.

(8.) The interaction between black (im)migrants and Irish and Italian immigrants is central to Marita Bonner's "A Sealed Pod," a story in Frye Street and Environs that inverts conventional assumptions about phenotypes of race and ethnicity. In this story, after a resident of black Frye Street is murdered by her Italian American lover, the black community agrees that Davy, Violette's black love, killed her. Meanwhile Joe Tamona, her true murderer, escapes to the outskirts of the city among the "old country Italians," where he" 'forg[et]s' to speak English (143).

(9.) According to Ignatiev, Irish people, who had formed an oppressed race in England, were initially supportive of racial equality and class solidarity with black workers with whom they were first lumped by "established" whites when they arrived at the end of the nineteenth century. At one point Irish were referred to as "niggers turned insider out." Conversely, blacks were deemed "smoked Irish" (41). As early as the Census of 1850, which first included mulatto as a racial category, there was indication of black-Irish intermarriage.

(10.) Cf. Anderson.

(11.) Circa 1890, the majority of black upper-middle class Bostonians, who were overwhelmingly light-skinned, objected to the term Negro; they saw themselves as a kind of in-between group, somewhat ambiguous, certainly a better class of "coloreds" (Gatewood 110).

(12.) Gambling in the West End was predominately run by African Americans. See Lane 214.

(13.) The references to abortion in Bonner's and West's fiction denote their concern with women's reproductive rights. Cleo conceives her only daughter Judy five years into her marriage only after "her body's hunger broke down her controlled resistance," and Beth's pregnancy in "On the Altar" impedes her social mobility (35).

(14.) See Lane on public outrage at abortionists in 1870's Boston (p.186).

(15.) Rose argues that in 1980s "spatial structure [was] seen not merely as an arena in which social life unfolds but as a medium through which social life is produced and reproduced" (19). Rose also discusses ways that time-geography presumes a transparent, universal space based on white western heterosexual concepts that "violently [police]" the boundaries of public space to exclude women and Others (62). She asserts that "concepts of place and space are implicitly gendered in geographical discourse," and I would add, explicitly raced (62). A critical illustration of this kind of policing in The Living is Easy is exemplified when the bronze-skinned Simeon Binney is accused of interracial dating when in fact he is chaperoning his fair-skinned sister in Harvard Square.

(16.) See Washington.

(17.) In Paradise, 15 families who share the coal black skin known as "8-rock" (193) found a town called Haven, later reinvented as Ruby. These dark-skinned southern migrants had been banned in 1890 from a settlement in Oklahoma: light-skinned blacks had warned, "Come prepared or not at all" (13), in an event recorded in their town annals as the "Disallowing" (195). In response to their exclusion, the town fathers established an exclusive community in which they were the privileged, the chosen, and the patriarchs.

Works Cited

Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family and Neighborhood in the Works 1 of Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset and Marita Bonner. African American History and Culture. New q York: Garland P, 1998.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters, 1987.

Baker, Houston. "Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere." Public Culture 7 (1994): 3-33.

Bass, Patrick Henry. "Working It!" Essence. Dec. 2000: 120-27.

Bonner, Marita. Frye Street and Environs. Boston: Beacon, 1987.

Cromwell, Adelaide M. "Afterword." The Living is Easy. 349-64.

Deustch, Sarah. Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Frazier, E. Franklin. Black Bourgeoisie. New York: Free P, 1957.

Gatewood, Willard. Aristocrats of Color. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.

Horton, Lois and James. Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979.

Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Just, Ward. "How the Other Half Lives." Rev. of The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen Carter. New York Times Book Review 9 June 2002:11.

Lane, Roger. Policing the City: Boston 1822-1885. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1967.

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.

McDowell, Deborah E. "Conversations with Dorothy West." Harlem Renaissance Re-examined: A Revised and Expanded Edition. Eds. Robert Russ and Victor Kramer. Troy, NY: Whitson, 1997. 265-82.

Peretz, Evgenia. "The 'IT' Parade." Vanity Fair. Sept. 2000.

Randolph, Ruth Elizabeth, and Lorraine Elena Roses. "Marita Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers' Gardens." Black American Literature Forum 21 (1987): 165-183.

Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Washington, Mary Helen "I Sign My Mother's Name: Alice Walker, Dorothy West, Paule Marshall." Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners. Ed. Ruth Perry and Martine Brownley Watson. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984. 142-63.

West, Dorothy. The Living is Easy. 1948. New York: Feminist P, 1996.

Williams, Bret. "The South in the City." Journal of Popular Culture 16 (1982): 30-41.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches 19th- and 20th-century African American and Caribbean literature. Her research is primarily focused on black female representation and the intersection of visual culture and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Dr. Sherrard-Johnson would like to thank Lisa Woolfork, Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson, and Bethany Schneider for their generous feedback.