The Black Dress

Dorothy West (1907–1998)
From American Flash Fiction: An Anthology

Interesting Links

Documentary: “As I Remember It: A Portrait of Dorothy West, 1991” (Salem Mekuria, Vimeo)

“Whatever Happened to Author Dorothy West?” (Diana Evans, The Guardian)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Spunk,” Zora Neale Hurston
• “Harlem,” Ann Petry
• “The Rockpile,” James Baldwin
• “Colored Men and Women on the Stage,” Aida Overton Walker

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American Flash Fiction
100 short short stories | 371 pages
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Dorothy West in her New York City apartment, c. 1935. (Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)

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One of the youngest of the Harlem Renaissance writers, Dorothy West was given the nickname “The Kid” by Langston Hughes, and she counted among her closest friends and peers Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Richard Wright. Yet she was largely regarded by literary historians and critics as a footnote to the era—until a chance encounter with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis helped make her famous at the age of 88.

Onassis, a prominent editor at Doubleday, was charmed by the weekly columns in the Vineyard Gazette written by West, who had been on Martha’s Vineyard for more than half a century. West’s father, freed from slavery at the age of seven, had moved to Boston and had risen in status as the proprietor of one of the region’s largest fruit wholesalers. Like many Black families of their class, the Wests purchased a vacation getaway in Oak Bluff on the Vineyard, and in 1943 Dorothy moved permanently from New York City to what had been her family’s summer residence. There she lived, writing short stories twice a month for The New York Daily News until 1960, followed by her column in the Gazette.

Through a mutual friend, Onassis heard about West’s unfinished novel, which she had begun writing in the 1960s. The two women were introduced, and Onassis told West she would very much like to consider the finished book for publication. They subsequently spent several weekend afternoons in West’s home discussing, rearranging, and editing the manuscript into shape. “Those who visited Ms. West knew she had papers and books everywhere except the ottoman or rocker, where she sat,” recalls Bettye Foster Baker, a neighbor and fellow Gazette columnist. “And so Dorothy West worked on her edits with Jackie Onassis sitting on the floor and the rest is history.”

Promoted as West’s first book in forty-seven years, The Wedding appeared in 1995 and became an instant best seller. Hundreds of people, including then–First Lady Hillary Clinton, opera singer Jessye Norman, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. attended an event celebrating her ninetieth birthday in 1997. A television adaptation, produced by Oprah Winfrey and starring Halle Berry, followed in February of 1998. Onassis, unfortunately, did not live long enough to see the book’s success, and West added the following dedication before it went to press: “In memory of my editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Though there was never such a mismatched pair in appearance, we were perfect partners.”

West’s sudden triumph was a fitting end to a storied life. Three quarters of a century earlier, as West entered her teens, she sent short sketches and stories to the Boston Post—and several were published. She moved to New York in the mid-1920s and, when she was eighteen years old, her unpublished story, “The Typewriter,” tied with Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk” for second place in a writing contest sponsored by Opportunity magazine. West’s story was among the fifteen selected for The Best Short Stories of 1926, alongside Opportunity’s first-place entry, Arthur Huff Faucet’s “Symphonique,” as well as such stories as Ernest Hemingway’s “The Undefeated” and Ring Lardner’s “Travelogue.”

At the Opportunity awards dinner in April 1926, West met Hurston and the two women became friends. Still new to the city, she briefly stayed in Hurston’s apartment and later sublet it when the latter was in Florida doing anthropological research. Much like the fortunes of many of the Harlem Renaissance writers, Hurston’s literary career and reputation fizzled after the 1930s. “She became well known” years after her death, West reflected in a 1995 interview with the Los Angeles Times:

That’s why I say, I’m very lucky to be alive, . . . to be recognized, because so many other young people died—because they had tuberculosis, or you bought liquor and sometimes it wasn’t any good. Sometimes you died from it. So whenever we talk about the Harlem Renaissance, I’m always a bit moved. My voice is even choking now.

In 1934 West moved back to New York after a brief interlude as an actress in a touring company for the hit play Porgy. The Depression-era failure of the family business and the death of her father in his late 70s left her without a dependable means of support, and she resumed writing stories, including “The Black Dress,” which appeared in Opportunity and which we reprint below. That year she also founded and edited a new magazine, Challenge, which lasted three years before folding. She then worked for a couple of years as a welfare relief worker and was briefly employed by the Federal Writers’ Project. After returning to the Vineyard, she finished her first novel, The Living Is Easy, and it was published in 1948. As she recalled to the Los Angeles Times interviewer, her debut book was initially expected to be a lucrative and groundbreaking literary event:

The phone rang and [my agent] said to me, “Are you sitting down?” And I said, “Yes, I’m sitting down.” Dorothy, he said, a magazine well known across the country, The Ladies Home Journal, is taking your book and they’re going to give you what—I don’t remember what, but it was quite a sum of money for the book. And it was to be serialized. A month later, my agent called me, very disappointed. [The magazine was] afraid they would have canceled subscriptions. That was the end of that.

Although well received by critics, the book’s sales were modest, undercut somewhat by reduced publisher expectations after the loss of its magazine serialization. The Living Is Easy was reissued by The Feminist Press to much broader recognition in 1982.

The last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, West died in August 1998, three years after The Wedding unexpectedly made her a celebrity; over four hundred people attended the memorial service. Today, the Dorothy West home still stands on Myrtle Avenue, half a block north of Dorothy West Avenue, in Martha’s Vineyard.

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For this week’s selection, we reproduce Bulosan’s story in its entirety below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

The Black Dress

They sent me word that morning that old Mr. Johnson had died in the night. It was not really a surprise to me. I knew he had been lingering for weeks.

That was my chiefest reason for writing to Margaret. Deep in his heart old Johnson, her father, loved her very much. It would not be so hard for him to go with her hand in his. Margaret I knew had forgiven him his early injustice. I felt she would be glad to brighten his last pain-black days. They would not be many. He could not live beyond the year, and it was Christmas week when I wrote her to come.

I did not mention her father’s hopeless illness. I simply asked her, for old times’ sake, to come and hang up her stocking with mine, as we had done when we were very young.

Her acceptance came in a day or two. She was between shows and husbands. It would be good to see me again after twelve long years. Did I still have dimples? Would I find her changed? For better, for worse?

I wondered. Margaret and I had been like sisters all our growing years. I suppose she loved me more than she loved anyone else. She had only an impatient tolerance for her bigoted father. But the years had probably softened this into something nearer affection. After all, he was her only living relative.

To my knowledge she never wrote him. Nor did she write me. Occasionally I would get a telegram of extravagant endearment, and very often a generous check. My babies, who had never seen her, spoke of her as Aunt Margaret.

I wrote her regularly. She had always seemed hard to the home folks, but I felt I understood her. She was not hard. She was simply unsentimental. She had one goal, the stage. She had had to fight the whole community, beginning with her father, to make them accept the theatre as a legitimate profession. The fight with her father had been long and bitter. The neighbors had taken his side. Naturally that did something to her spirit. When she left home at eighteen, it was not a girl but a bitter woman who said good-by to me, the only one to bid her good-by and God-speed.

I hoped the years had taken the edge off her bitterness. I always mentioned her father in my letters. Toward the last I would say he sent love. For old Johnson did love Margaret. And I am sure, on the lonely nights, he wished very much he could unsay the things that had sent her from him. Well, while there is life, it is not too late. At least he could say he was sorry he had said them. That was in my mind, knowing the time, his time, was so short, when I wrote to Margaret.

The hospital called me the morning of Christmas eve. They asked me the address of old Johnson’s nearest of kin. I gave them Margaret’s before I realized she would be in town that evening. After I hung up I hoped she had already left. For I could tell her more tenderly than a cold telegram.

Someone rang my bell. It was the boy with the tree my husband had bought on his way to work. The children were wild. And when I saw their excited faces, I suddenly and selfishly decided that I could not bring death into my house to mar the happiest day of their year.

No, Margaret must wait until tomorrow evening to be told. I would tell her after the last tired child had been tucked into bed. In the meantime I would make some arrangements with an undertaker.

I knew this was the most wicked thing I would ever do in my life. But, oh, she would understand when we stood and smiled down at the sleeping children that it would have been cruel to spoil their day with our grown-up grief.

Early that evening a taxi rolled up. A woman got out. I flew downstairs to open my door with words of gay greeting or solemn condolence ready on my lips. Margaret’s dear familiar face was radiant. She did not know. I held her fast in my arms.

I shall never forget our happy evening. She was like a sprite, never still. She fell in love with small Margaret. Once she said fiercely to the shining faces, “Be happy. Let nothing stand in the way of your being happy.” I thought, How hard her beautiful face is. It is only I who know she is not hard.

We were tired at last. Sentimentally we were going to sleep together. My husband was banished to a cot in the dining room, and sometime during the night he would fill our stockings.

Margaret and I were in my room together. She opened her bag to fetch out the stocking. On the top lay a black dress, looking as if it had been stuffed in hastily. I caught my breath sharply. She followed my glance.

She said indifferently, “This went in at the last moment. It’ll have to be pressed before I wear it.”

My throat went dry. For the first time in my life I was going to sleep with a stranger.

First published in the May 1934 issue of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life.