JIMSELLA
No one could ever have accused Mandy Mason of being thrifty. For the first twenty years of her life conditions had not taught her the necessity for thrift. But that was before she had come North with Jim. Down there at home one either rented or owned a plot of ground with a shanty set in the middle of it, and lived off the products of one’s own garden and coop. But here it was all very different: one room in a crowded tenement house, and the necessity of grinding day after day to keep the wolf—a very terrible and ravenous wolf—from the door. No wonder that Mandy was discouraged and finally gave up to more than her old shiftless ways.
Jim was no less disheartened. He had been so hopeful when he first came, and had really worked hard. But he could not go higher than his one stuffy room, and the food was not so good as it had been at home. In this state of mind, Mandy’s shiftlessness irritated him. He grew to look on her as the source of all his disappointments. Then, as he walked Sixth or Seventh Avenue, he saw other coloured women who dressed gayer than Mandy, looked smarter, and did not wear such great shoes. These he contrasted with his wife, to her great disadvantage.
“Mandy,” he said to her one day, “why don’t you fix yo’se’f up an’ look like people? You go ’roun’ hyeah lookin’ like I dunno what.”
“Whyn’t you git me somep’n’ to fix myse’f up in?” came back the disconcerting answer.
“Ef you had any git up erbout you, you’d git somep’n’ fu’ yo’se’f an’ not wait on me to do evahthing.”
“Well, ef I waits on you, you keeps me waitin’, fu’ I ain’ had nothin’ fit to eat ner waih since I been up hyeah.”
“Nev’ min’! You’s mighty free wid yo’ talk now, but some o’ dese days you won’t be so free. You’s gwine to wake up some mo’nin’ an’ fin’ dat I’s lit out; dat’s what you will.”
“Well, I ’low nobody ain’t got no string to you.”