Now I didn't mind thinking about her-who she was; her position as supervisor of case work in the city welfare department. Her father was a doctor-Dr. Wellington L.-P. Harrison. He was the kind of pompous little guy you'd expect to have a hyphenated name, one of the richest Negroes in the city if not on the whole West Coast.
I jumped out of bed and went over and picked up the picture. It set me up to have a chick like her. It gave me a personal pride to have her for my girl. And then I was proud of her too. Proud of the way she looked, the appearance she made among white people; proud of what she demanded from white people, and the credit they gave her; and her position and prestige among her own people. I could knock myself out just walking along the street with her; and whenever we ran into any of the white shipyard workers downtown somewhere I really felt like something.
I didn't want to think about her breaking our date. She'd called and said she ought to attend a sorority meeting she'd forgotten all about-she was president of the local chapter. And would I really mind? Of course I couldn't mind; that was where the social conventions had me. If she'd been Susie I could have said, 'Hell yes, I mind,' but I had to be a gentleman with Alice. And I really wanted to be. Only thinking about it now gave me a tight, jealous feeling. Started me to wondering why she'd want to marry a guy like me-two years of college and a shipyard job-when she could pick any number of studs with both money and position. But she was trying so hard to make me study nights so I could go back to college after the war and study law, she had to be serious, I reassured myself.