Free Moving Pictures by Schulberg

prettier color than pale white or pink. It seemed exactly the right color for skin to be. Hadn’t we spent the summer in Far Rockaway where my own very white skin had finally tanned and my mother had announced happily, “Look at little Buddy—he’s brown as a berry!” Why was it nice for me to be brown as a berry, but not nice for me to mention Wilma’s coffee-and-cream color?
    When my mother saw me brooding on the balcony, not playing with my tin soldiers (I had a big set of American doughboys and they were always destroying the rival set of dirty Huns), she asked me what was thematter, and when I told her, she did her best to explain, in the limited vocabulary of 1918. She said it might offend Wilma because white people considered Negro people their inferiors. They had come over from Africa as slaves and did not have the advantages of education or the cultural background that we enjoyed. Of course Wilma was something of an exception. Her father had been a minister or a teacher or something and she seemed to be far better educated than “most of them.” We were very lucky to have someone like Wilma to take care of Sonya and me, Mother said. And this whole color thing—I was much too young to worry about it. My mother knew a great deal about psychology from books (I think she was then in her Behaviorism period, a disciple of Watson), and for her age and time she was unusually well-read in this field, but I don’t think even Ad could comprehend the deep impression that Wilma and her color and the “problem” of her color were having on me.
    I finally went to the source that day, to Wilma herself. When I asked her what I had said that was wrong, she took me up on her lap and kissed my cheek and I held her smooth coffee-colored earlobe. “Buddy, you’re awfully little to understand this. But maybe some people can understand things at four that other people can’t understand when they’re a hundred-and-four. There’s nothing wrong with saying what color a person is. I don’t mind my color. I think it’s a nice color, just like you said. The reason why your daddy said it isn’t nice to mention it is because most people are glad that they’re white and most of the colored people know it would be a lot easier for them if they were white. But there’s nothing wrong with being my color, or chocolate brown or coal black. The only thing wrong is the way some people feel about it.”
    “But w-why do they f-feel that way about it?”
    Wilma hugged me. “Maybe the time will come when people will all be just people and won’t pay no mind as to whether they’re white or brown or peppermint stripe.”
    That made me laugh. Peppermint stripe would be fun.
    Wilma kissed me again. “Children just seem to start out knowing all the things that big people forget.”
    A fire in the middle of the night! My father and mother jumped up and threw their clothes on. I heard frantic cries: “My god! We’ll be ruined! We’ll lose everything!” I can still remember the fear, the sense of a terrible threat to our existence. No, the fire was not in our RiversideDrive apartment, but at the studio: the old Famous Players studio, a four-story building on 26 th Street and Eighth Avenue where all my father’s hopes and dreams, current activities and professional future lay. While B.P.’s salary was still a relatively modest two hundred dollars a week, the shrewd and benevolent Mr. Zukor also paid his key young employees one share of stock per week, so that we had an equity in the company. An equity that was literally going up in flames.
    The Famous Players Film Company had not been using the entire building, only the top two floors, and the roof where sets had also been constructed. It was a rundown neighborhood with a junk shop and a Chinese laundry across the way. Twenty-sixth Street was very narrow, and cumbersome horse-drawn wagons parked along the curb made access by the huge firetrucks extremely difficult.
    Father and Mother