I will keep them for you here Miss Mathilda. Miss
Annie died easy, Miss Mathilda, and sent you her love."
FINIS
MELANCTHA
EACH ONE AS SHE MAY
Rose Johnson made it very hard to bring her baby to its birth.
Melanctha Herbert who was Rose Johnson's friend, did everything that
any woman could. She tended Rose, and she was patient, submissive,
soothing, and untiring, while the sullen, childish, cowardly, black
Rosie grumbled and fussed and howled and made herself to be an
abomination and like a simple beast.
The child though it was healthy after it was born, did not live
long. Rose Johnson was careless and negligent and selfish, and when
Melanctha had to leave for a few days, the baby died. Rose Johnson had
liked the baby well enough and perhaps she just forgot it for awhile,
anyway the child was dead and Rose and Sam her husband were very sorry
but then these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint,
that they neither of them thought about it very long.
Rose Johnson and Melanctha Herbert had been friends now for some
years. Rose had lately married Sam Johnson a decent honest kindly
fellow, a deck hand on a coasting steamer.
Melanctha Herbert had not yet been really married.
Rose Johnson was a real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid,
childlike, good looking negress. She laughed when she was happy and
grumbled and was sullen with everything that troubled.
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