The Living Is Easy



My copy from grad school...with tabbed pages

The Living Is Easy by Dorothy West

Category: I first read this book in 2005, when I wrote about the works of the spectacular and underrated Dorothy West for my master’s thesis.

My thoughts: This is such an intriguing and thought-provoking read. The Living Is Easy is about the life and machinations of Cleo Judson, a member of Boston’s black elite in the early 20th century. This is a precarious world, which one enters by being rich or light-skinned or from being a member of a handful of old families. When I first read this novel, it reminded me of the world of Edith Wharton, and Cleo Judson reminded me of Wharton’s intriguing and frustrating heroine, Undine Spragg. Like Undine Spragg, Cleo is full of ambition, cunning and manipulation. She is married to Bart Judson, a well-off man known as the Black Banana King, and plays him and their daughter Judy like a fiddle. Cleo seems to want more people to rule over, so she sends for her three sisters and their kids (but not their husbands) in order to be surrounded by people of whom she could be the leader.

Also like Undine Spragg, I can’t bring myself to completely hate Cleo Judson. According to the liner notes of the book, critics believe that Cleo is loosely based on West’s mother, Rachel. I admire the fact that such a woman (fictional or otherwise) could carry herself with the enormous amount of pride that Cleo has at a time when, all over the United States, blacks had to swallow their pride and lived in fear of death.

I love West’s dry humor when documenting the skewed belief system of this social group. For example: “Mr. Binney could say with pride, right up to the day of his death, that he had never lived on a street where other colored people resided”. The entrenched black middle and upper classes look down (way down) on Southern blacks who are migrating to the northern city (as seen in The Warmth of Other Suns). Cleo herself has a negative attitude toward the recently arrived Southern blacks—although she is from South Carolina. Also, West writes about the intraracial discrimination based on skin shade. Cleo is blatantly disappointed in her daughter Judy’s coffee brown skin and unpointy nose.

Another interesting element is the sense of place in the novel. The Boston of this novel was a “melting pot” of WASPs, the Irish (who were looked down on by some WASPs), black middle and upper class families (who, no matter how wealthy or educated, were living under Plessy vs. Ferguson), and the recent Southern black migrants (who were looked down on by the upper-class blacks). As one can imagine, they all move around each other uneasily.

Although Cleo is a very compelling character, the novel also has compelling secondary characters—one of whom is Vicky, Cleo’s niece, who is scrappy and shrewd (Cleo in miniature) and who answers the Irish kids’ racial taunts with her fists. As I said before, Cleo may be based on West’s mother, and autobiographical overtones abound in this book. West’s father, Isaac West, was actually known as the Black Banana King. West, like Judy, grew up surrounded by an extended family of aunts and cousins. Dorothy West wrote a dear little essay called “Rachel,” about her mother (which is in a collection of her writing called “The Richer, the Poorer.”) She wrote, “My mother had done what she felt she had to do, knowing the risks, knowing there would be no rewards, but determined to build a foundation for the generations unborn.” This is why I can’t completely condemn Cleo…although she makes it hard. Cleo wanted the children to be proud of themselves in a world where that was pretty much forbidden. There’s so much more I could say, but brevity is the soul of wit!

Great passage (that, if this is an autobiographical novel, shows how West felt having such a mother): There were times when [Cleo] was thoroughly disconcerted by the fact that her child was a separate being with independent emotions. To her a child was a projection of its mother, like an arm which functioned in unison with other component parts and had no will that was not controlled by the head of the woman who owned it.

Next up, Washington Square