"The Living is Easy" - highly recommended

     Jackie Onassis spent some of her final years encouraging Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West to finish her second novel, The Wedding. She would visit West at her home in Martha’s Vineyard almost weekly.   The first 3/4 of the novel is a marvel. But Onassis died before West completed it and West lost her will to do so after the loss of her friend. An editor completed it – and did so poorly.

     So, if you want pure Dorothy West you have to read her first novel, The Living is Easy. This novel, set circa 1915 Boston, features the shenanigans of a married black woman, Cleo, who was born in the south and wants more than anything to become a Bostonian and live the good and mannered life. It shows a panoply of black society, and is a comedy of manners, a black “Middlemarch”, if you will. It captures black people at a time when they were figuring out who they could become and how they were going to fit into America. Early 20th century black high society stretched to include anyone with a non-agricultural or domestic job to Harvard-educated doctors. 

     At this time in Boston, black people were able to ride on the trolley without taking the back seat and could go into any movie theater, but they faced challenges as they tried to outrun the shadow yet cast by slavery. How to get acknowledged and financially rewarded for your achievement? What is the obligation of the freer northern black population to those still in the south? Should your black newspaper publish events of discrimination or only the successes? Should there be a black newspaper? How should rich black people engage with poor ones? Should people born out of a mixed-race union be given a high status or derided?  Should you accept your classmates’ apology for beating you up because they thought you were walking with a white woman who is actually your paler sister? Should you stay in Boston or push to be the only black family in Brookline? Needless to say, these questions can all be asked today. Here they are answered by the funny and devious, yet tragic, character Cleo. 

     This book is a wonderful time capsule and is written with exquisite skill.  It is more of a slice of life than a good story, but it’s a juicy slice.