Harlem and who might start talking. She had often heard, without giving much thought to the matter, that usually when coloured persons went white, in order to prove their whiteness, they were more anti-Negro than anybody else. When she was faced with the problem herself she understood more fully what lay back of that feeling—she was not altogether free from it herself. But she had employed them and there had been none who had told that she was coloured, though one of them had, on leaving Francine’s, privately told Mimi she knew who Mimi was.
In the early years after she had left Harlem she had on numerous occasions met former acquaintances of hers on the street. Sometimes she had bowed and spoken a few words, sometimes she had passed rapidly by and hated herself for doing so for days afterwards. Six years and more had apparently wiped all trace of her former days from the slates of Harlem, the ever-changing population either too busy or too uninterested to continue their concern with her and her affairs. Though she denied it to herself, sometimes with a trace of bitterness that her own people had forced her to live a life of duplicity and deceit, nevertheless she felt frequently a yearning for contact with her own people, for whom she had the same passionate love of the days following the riot in Atlanta despite all she had suffered at their hands.
She was lonely, for despite her success she had no intimates, none she could call friend, though she might have had them had she chosen. She missed the warm colourfulness of life among her own, she had never been able to shake off the chill she felt even when her present-day associates sought to be most cordial. And she resented bitterly the airs of superiority they assumed. Frequently when she heard contemptuous remarks about “niggers,” “coons,” “darkies,” from those who showed by their words their complete ignorance of Negroes, she felt like reminding them that to her there were two ways of achieving and maintaining superiority: one, by being superior; the other, by keeping somebody else inferior. And she felt no better that her life made her keep silent when