Sublime

Even now, at seventeen—high school graduate, mistress of her fate, and a ten-dollar-a-week file clerk in the very Forty-seventh Street lawyer’s office where Helen was a fifteen-dollar-a-week typist—as she sat on Helen’s bed and watched Helen primp for a party, the memory hurt. There was no consolation in the thought that not now and not then would

The night is so thick she can tell she is there only by the scraping of her feet and the tap, tapping of the stick in the loose gravel. A moonless night with only the call of the katydids and marsh frogs. A night to swallow you up, the stars hid by clouds, and memory guiding her tired feet home.

And these things—roaches, and having to be satisfied with the place as it was—were not the only annoyances that had to be reckoned with. She was becoming aware of an oddness in color and sound and smell about her, the color and sound and smell of the kitchenette building. The color was gray, and the smell and sound had taken on a suggestion of the

Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one’s gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood.

Unlike most of the village women who embark on careers with foreign men, Noelline is educated, has completed two years at the lycée run by the sugar refinery at Ankazobe. She writes a fair hand in French orthography, can use a computer, and speaks good French and Italian. Besides her intelligence, her undeniable energy, and a reputed genius for sex

Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.

Here was the theory of racial equality about to be put into practice, and she only hoped she would be equal to being equal.