“Yeah—the fitter we got,” Sylvia mumbled as she bit deep into a sandwich.
“Oh—she’s very nice.”
“You don’t know her, kid. She’s a pain—just wait until you do something wrong—you’ll want to jump down her throat when she bawls you out with all the other girls grinning at you behind her back.”
“I hope then I’ll never make any mistakes,” Mimi murmured.
“Don’t worry, kiddo. You’ll make ’em. And the best way to handle Old Faithful is to keep your mouth shut and let her gab on until she runs out of breath. The one we had before she came was a coloured girl—she knew her stuff and we didn’t try no monkey business with her, either. But she treated us like we were human—”
“A coloured girl?” Mimi asked, alarm creeping into her voice.
“Yeah. Say, where you from?”
“New York, now. New Orleans was where I was born.”
“Oh—I thought you talked like you was from the South. Well, up here being coloured don’t count as much as it does down your way—”
Mimi hastened to disclaim the imputation in Sylvia’s voice.
“That’s all right, dearie. I wasn’t accusing you of prejudice.”
“No—no, I’m not prejudiced,” was Mimi’s reply. She felt a sense of guilt at her duplicity, but at the same time Sylvia’s words gave her assurance that the task of passing would not be as difficult as she had feared.
“Race prejudice is a lot of bunk,” Sylvia was philosophizing. “Take me, for instance. I went to Manhattan Trade, too. My real name’s