“What can I do for you, young man?” Emma Lou was dismissed.
She looked for a place to sit down, and, finding none, walked across the narrow room to the window, hoping to get a breath of fresh air, and at the same time an advantageous position from which to watch the drama of some one else playing the role of a job-seeker.
“R-r-ring.”
“Whadda want? Wait a minute. Oh, Sadie.”
A heavy set, dark-brown-skinned woman, with full, flopping breasts, and extra wide buttocks, squirmed off a too narrow chair, and bashfully wobbled up to the desk.
“Wanta’ go to a place on West End Avenue? Part-time cleaning, fifty cents an hour, nine rooms, yeah? All right? Hello, gotta girl on the way. ’Bye. Two and a half, Sadie, Here’s the address. Run along now, don’t idle.”
R-r-ring. “’Lo, yes. What? Come down to the office. I can’t sell jobs over the wire.”
Emma Lou began to see the humor in this sordid situation, began to see something extremely comic in all these plaintive, pitiful-appearing colored folk, some greasy, some neat, some fat, some slim, some brown, some black (why was there only one mulatto in this crowd?), boys and men, girls and women, all
