Anyway, what I suggested to Westcott was a picture showing me giving reading lessons to Mary Alice and some of the other girls in Colored Town. “I think it could be a good civic project,” I said. “Maybe if you did a picture and the paper ran it, we’d drum up some interest and some volunteers.” He liked the idea, and he agreed to meet me at the colored recreation hall. So when the bus driver asked me why a white woman was heading into Colored Town on a Saturday night, I told him Mr. Westcott was coming to take a picture of me teaching colored girls to read. That seemed to be a good enough reason.
Colored Town was officially called the “colored hutment area” on the map. Hutments were shabby, prefab plywood shacks, sixteen feet square. They were trucked in by the thousands and shoehorned together, about ten feet apart. There was a hutment area for whites, too, but the white hutments were better. The colored hutments didn’t even have real windows, just screened-in openings covered with hinged panels of plywood. If the people inside wanted daylight, they’d swing up some of the hinged panels and prop them open. That might have been okay in decent weather, but when it was cold, the choice was between warmth and light, and even the warmth wasn’t all that warm—every hutment had a cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the room, but as drafty as the buildings were, and as scarce as coal rations were, people in the hutments were miserably cold in the winter. The other thing about the colored hutments was that there were men’s hutments and women’s hutments, four people per hutment. Black couples who were married got split up so the army could cram four people into every one of those dreadful little shacks.
Colored Town had its own rec center, too, and the story there was the same—it was cheaper and crummier than the white people’s version. No Ping-Pong tables or pool tables or piano; just a few tables and chairs. Even so, when Mary Alice and I walked in that night, the place was crowded and lively. Couples sat at some of the tables playing bridge; groups of men with poker chips at others. At one end of the room, somebody had a radio, and couples were jitterbugging to the music. The instant I walked in the door, the noise died down and every head turned in our direction. Thousands of black people crammed in a shabby ghetto, and in walks a lily-white woman.
“You in the wrong place, white girl,” said a man just inside the door, but then Mary Alice called him by name and told him to mind his business. “She’s all right,” Mary Alice said. “She’s with me.” She led us to a distant corner of the room where a middle-aged man and woman sat in straight-backed chairs angled toward each other. “Mama, this here is Beatrice, that I told you about.” Her mother looked me up and down. The man looked away, as if to give us a measure of privacy, and I was grateful.
“You sure this is what you got to do?” I nodded. “You got the money?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said, and took two ten-dollar bills out of my skirt pocket. She smoothed and folded them, then tucked them into her blouse.
“Mary Alice,” she said, “you come with me and this white girl.”
She led us through a doorway into the women’s restroom. The restroom held one sink and three toilet stalls, none of them with a door. It smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned lately. She must have seen the look of revulsion on my face, because she said, “You want a nice doctor’s office, you come to the wrong place, white girl. You want to change your mind about this?”
“No ma’am,” I said. “I’m just scared.”
“Ought to be,” she said. “This is scary business. Sad, too. How come you not want to have this child?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t.”
“Course you can, baby,” she told me. “You just won’t. ‘Can’t’ not the same thing as ‘won’t.’” She pointed at the third stall. “You need to pull off your panties and raise up your skirt. Sit on that toilet and scootch up to the front of the seat. You got to spread your knees wide and hang your bottom off the front edge so I can get in there. But you ought to pee first, if you can.”
I stared from her to Mary Alice and back again. “It’s all right,” said Mary Alice. “She’s done this a hundred times. She knows what she’s doing. I’ll be right there beside you. You go on and use the bathroom, and I’ll come in when you flush.”
I sat down on the toilet and bent over to hide my face while I peed, then reached back and flushed the toilet. Then I pulled off my underpants, and Mary Alice squeezed into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall.
“Now scoot on up here and open up your legs,” said Mary Alice’s mother. “I know you know how to do that.”
“Mama!” Mary Alice sounded shocked.