and demanding conditions that domestic servants,
butlers, and maids faced in the workplace. Pub-
lished in the May 1923 issue of OPPORTUNITY,the
piece chronicled a day in the life of a harassed and
hardworking houseman in an unidentified lodging
that may be an upscale boardinghouse or hotel.
The piece is narrated in the first person and
includes sobering comments on what it means to
be a domestic laborer. According to the protago-
nist, this work is “low, mean, degrading,” “thrives
on chicanery,” and “dams up the [Negro’s] foun-
tains of feeling and expression.” The unnamed
houseman concludes that “It is hell, I say, to be a
domestic.”
Bibliography
Parascandola, Louis, ed. Winds Can Wake Up the Dead:
An Eric Walrond Reader.Detroit: Wayne State Uni-
versity Press, 1998.
“On Being Black”Eric Walrond(1922)
A pointed narrative by ERICWALRONDthat docu-
ments the nature of enduring racism in the public
sphere. Published in the 1 November issue of THE
NEWREPUBLIC,the piece is divided into three sec-
tions and represents three different alienating ex-
periences. All three protagonists are anonymous
and recall their interactions in understated first-
person narratives.
The first narrator recounts an insulting en-
counter with a Jewish optician who assumes that
the African-American man before him is a colored
chauffeur. When the nameless protagonist corrects
him, the optician responds with an “atrociously
cynical smile” that forces his would-be patron to
leave the store. The second narrator is a stenogra-
pher in search of work. The narrator is extremely
diligent and makes a systematic effort to seek out
each and every office on lower Broadway. Despite
these efforts and a record of prior achievements,
however, the self-confessed “ignorantly optimistic”
job seeker is unable to secure work. The third nar-
rator is a husband who wants to send his wife to
the tropics in order to improve her health. When
he calls a steamship company, he receives one set
of fares. When he appears in person, the rates have
increased, and suddenly there is a limited availabil-
ity. Although he is shocked by the blatant racism
of the desk clerk, the husband does his best to
challenge the exorbitant fees. Forced to leave the
office because it is closing, he vows to return, and
because he is determined to improve his wife’s
health, he also intends to pay the higher fee. “It
pays to be black,” he notes, in the searing last line
of the narrative.
“On Being Black” is one of Walrond’s most
memorable and scathing sketches of urban life and
its challenges for middle-class African Americans.Bibliography
Parascandola, Louis, ed. Winds Can Wake Up the Dead:
An Eric Walrond Reader.Detroit: Wayne State Uni-
versity Press, 1998.“On Being Young—a Woman—and
Colored”Marita Bonner(1925)
A prize-winning essay by MARITABONNERthat
was published in THECRISIS.Judges Edward Bok,
JOELSPINGARN, and BENJAMINBRAWLEYawarded
Bonner’s essay first prize in its literature and art
contest and chose essays by LANGSTONHUGHES
and G. A. Steward for second and third place, re-
spectively.
Bonner wrote the essay while she was living in
WASHINGTON, D.C., and part of the dynamic liter-
ary circle that her friend the poet GEORGIADOU-
GLASJOHNSONhosted regularly in her Washington,
D.C., home. The essay, with its unabashed second-
person narration, is immediately engaging. “You
start out after you have gone from kindergarten to
sheepskin covered with sundry Latin phrases,” re-
marks the narrator in the essay’s opening lines.
Over the course of the essay, the narrator seems to
talk directly to her female audience, one she imag-
ines as insightful and ambitious. “At least you know
what you want life to give you,” she notes before
probing away at the psychological turmoil that be-
gins to emerge in the face of social limitations and
racism.
Bonner charts the effects of racism over the
course of the essay. She calls attention to the ways
in which both the body and psyche are affected
and threatened by the “Jim-Crow train” and the
“petty putrid insult dragged... like pebbled sand
on your body where the skin is tenderest.” Yet,
Bonner suggests that enlightenment is within402 “On Being Black”