“Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light colored girl. Must be neat and obliging.”
“Well, Lydia,” said the woman seated at the desk, “what’s happened? Didn’t that job do?”
The young coloured girl stood before her, quietly dressed, straight and tall, her colour light as a Spanish beauty’s.
‘Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I didn’t take that job. I just didn’t take it. That’s all.”
The woman rapped the desk with the end of her pencil.
“You know you can’t pick and choose in times like these,” she slid sharply. She picked up a card from the box-index, and read it out with bitter emphasis: “Doctor, connected with hospital, requires in private practice, light coloured girl. Must be neat and obliging. Now what,” she said impatiently, “did you find to object to?”
“Nothing,” said the tall girl. “I didn’t do no objecting at all. He wanted a girl to sleep there at night. I likes to go home. That’s all.”
“Well,” snapped the woman at the desk, “if you want work, Lvdia, you’ll have to make some concessions.”
“I makes concessions every day I lives,” said Lydia, “but I do like to sleep the night alone. This doctor, he don’t want to sleep alone. That’s what the neat and obliging means.”
The woman’s face flushed dark with anger.
“You people have no sense of truth!” she said. “Don’t come here talking about an eminent man like that! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, making such an excuse!”
This sketch, from the the story-a-day anthology 365 Days that Kay Boyle edited with her then-husband Laurence Vail and her friend Nina Conarain, is one of the most powerful in the entire book. Pregnant with her third child, Boyle found herself with the burden of filling the many gaps in the collection left by contributions that were never submitted and contributions fundamentally out of keeping with the design and spirit of the anthology, which aimed to portray the year 1934 imaginatively through 300-word stories inspired by a particular news story headline from each day. And so, perhaps in desperation as pieces failed to arrive in response to requests, she began reaching out to everyone she knew — friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and in this case, her mother, Katherine.
It makes me long for the book Katherine Boyle never wrote. “I makes concessions every day I lives” is such a stunning statement. Matter-of-fact, resigned to the situation yet never failing to bear witness to its fundamental injustice. It’s a perfect example of the kind of breathtaking writing that jumps out of the pages of this remarkable collection.