The Collected Stories, Volume 1

By Worth Tuttle Hedden

These are all stories of race. Written between 1917 and 1947, they are the author's attempts to describe the racial situation in the South in the early part of the 20th Century. Like her award-winning novel, "The Other Room," the stories are sensitive, original, and important.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Bay Books
• Release date: Jan 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476321684

Worth Tuttle Hedden

During her lifetime (1896-1985), Worth Tuttle Hedden published three full-length novels and a family memoir in addition to many short stories, essays, and book reviews. She was a pioneer in both feminism and race relations and is one of America's great but forgotten writers.

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The Collected Stories, Volume 1

(The Negro Stories)

By Worth Tuttle Hedden

Edited, introduced, and annotated by P. V. LeForge

Copyright 2012 P. V. LeForge

Published by Black Bay Books at Smashwords

This book is not available in print.

Cover Art by Jose Pico

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Table of Contents

Introduction by P. V. LeForge

Cleobalus the Great

Charity

The Tree in the Forest

The Mask

Color

Coat of Many Colors

Around the Back Way

The Pink-Checked Gingham

About the Author

Introduction

Ella Worth Tuttle was born on January 10, 1896, in North Carolina, the sixth child of D. H. Tuttle, a Methodist minister and Ella Westcott, a local beauty. She learned about the South’s own particular racial caste system at early age because her father was the only minister in the area who would preach in Negro churches or visit Negroes in their homes, and he often took his next-youngest daughter with him. She became fascinated with the families who lived in these beaten-down country shacks, and also with the Negro servants assigned to the parsonage. She was an introspective girl with keen observation—the exact sensibilities she would need to become a storyteller.

In a later journal she writes,

"In 1910, we were coming home from the mountains and my sister Carey pulled me to the window and told me to look—there were the men who killed that farmer and his wife. And I began, half asleep, to work out a story; a little colored boy, running in fright past that tree for years afterwards when only the tattered ends of the rotten rope were left to mark it . . . and when he’s grown he begins to see the wrong in what at the time he accepted as right . . . "

Worth enrolled at Trinity College (now Duke University), in 1913, where she was first exposed to feminist ideas—ideas that would influence both her thinking and her way of living. At Trinity she began writing her first stories for campus publications. They were light and airy stories about college life, but she had not yet found her voice or her subject. What she really wanted to write about was the plight of the Negro in the South.

In 1917 she moved to New York and got a job as a social worker. At the same time, she enrolled in writing classes at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she dropped the Ella from her name. At Columbia she met and was influenced by Walter Pitkin (later the author of Life Begins at Forty) and Dorothy Scarborough, a well-known editor and folklorist. Both of these teachers admired Worth’s work and encouraged her to keep at it. In a letter to her sister Emeth she writes, I am beginning to see that to write one must get under the skin, see intensely rather than objectively as I have always seen. She also mentions that Pitkin suggested that she should specialize.

She had taken a room at Neighborhood House, an establishment directed by Socialist civil rights leader Norman Thomas, and it was there that she met her future husband Walter Hedden, a college student more than two years her junior. When her job came to an end in 1918, she returned to North Carolina but wrote often to Walter. In a letter dated June 13, 1918, she mentions a novel she is planning. It obviously deals with race because she writes This is a good place to study the Negro en masse and in intimate home scenes . . . Two weeks later, she writes, The only way to know them, I ’spose, is to go to their churches and places in which they run things themselves. She had obviously decided to specialize in fiction that dealt with color, but she felt stifled living at home with her family.

Then something happened that changed her life completely and gave her the freedom to pursue her writing goals. In a letter from Walter, dated March 16, 1920, he writes,

"Yesterday there blew in upon us Brother Briggs, the president of Strait College (maybe it is Straight) New Orleans, looking for teachers for his Negro boys and girls. He is to be in New York on Friday so I gave him your name and address."

This chance meeting provided the exact opportunity that Worth had been looking for and, despite some trepidation, she signed up immediately. Straight College was overseen by the American Missionary Association, but Worth’s childhood had prepared her well for this environment. She was familiar with northern missionaries who came south to proselytize former slaves and to establish schools. But what she found in New Orleans was not exactly what she expected—it was much more.

At Straight, Worth had the opportunity to encounter her own prejudices, to test her theories about racial interactions, and to observe firsthand black and white teachers working together. She found that she despised many of the white missionary teachers, who had the idea that it was the white race’s duty to help—not the less fortunate—but the less intelligent. One of the black teachers, on the other hand, fascinated her. Almost from her first day at Straight (which is now Dillard University), she was attracted to an African-American teacher named William Leo Hansberry—a young man on leave from his studies at Harvard who would later become known to some as the father of Africanist studies. Drawn together because of their intelligence and common love of books and ideas, Worth and Leo spent a good deal of time together. Worth wrote in a letter to Walter:

"If P. A. [a friend of both Worth and Walter] knew that I sit at a dinner table and discuss sex and Havelock Ellis across it with a negro, what would the poor scandalised youth say?"

She also made friends with a young black woman who taught art, but despite Worth’s friendship with these two, she makes no bones about what she came to New Orleans to do.

"The fact that I sit across table from the hero of my novel and am working up friendly relations with my heroine, cheers me somewhat."

She ended her teaching job at Straight in 1921. Although she was anxious to begin the the novel about her experiences there, marriage and children kept her away from that task until 1947, when The Other Room, her most well-known novel, was finally published. In the meantime, Worth kept busy writing the stories in this volume. She called them her Negro stories, so that is what I have called them in the subtitle.

As far as I can determine, most of them were finished between 1920 and 1923, although some may have had their genesis in her Columbia days a few years earlier. She was fortunate enough to place three of them in Pearson’s Magazine in 1923.

All of these stories were written under the name of Worth Tuttle except The Pink Checked Gingham,—the manuscript of which had no name at all. Her three novels, on the other hand, used her married name of Worth Tuttle Hedden. Oddly, she used the pseudonym of Winnifred Woodley for her family memoir, Two and Three Make One.

I tried to unearth all of Worth’s stories but it is possible that some have been lost. In a 1923 letter to her sister Emeth, she writes that, after Cleobalus the Great (the first story in this volume), her next story was to be about Northern prejudice against negroes. If she actually wrote this story, I have not been able to find it.

In the same year, Walter Pitkin, one of her mentors at Columbia, mentions Worth’s six larger stories, all of which he had seen and probably given her feedback on.

The first four are obviously the first four published here: Cleobalus the Great, Charity, The Tree in the Forest, and The Mask. The unpublished Coat of Many Colors was probably among the stories that Pitkin had seen. Color, however, was probably not. Not only is it quite short compared to the others, but it is technically an essay turned into fiction. The Pink-Checked Gingham was probably written much later. That leaves only Around the Back Way," which may be her most accomplished story. It is hard to believe that the editors of Copy and Pearson’s would have not chosen this story over others that they published, but there you are.

This introduction is not only to Worth’s writing, but to scholarly study on her works. Although I may correct obvious misspellings and typos, I have tried to retain as much of Worth’s original words and punctuation as possible. As with all e-books, however, there may be unintentional errors. If so, they are my fault and can be corrected. Just let me know.

At the same time, I provide no critique of any of the stories in my end notes. The stories are presented for the use of casual readers and scholars alike to be read, studied, and hopefully, discussed.

As of this writing, conversations are ongoing about the possibility of getting Worth Tuttle Hedden’s papers transferred to the Dillard University Library Archives, where they can be studied by any interested scholar.

P. V. LeForge,

Black Bay Farm,

February, 2012

Cleobalus the Great

Since his appearance one frosty December morning, clad in nothing more than a pair of man-sized trousers attached beneath his arms by a heavy cord, Cleobalus had been a fixture of the Tillett household. So far as the Tilletts were concerned, his status was about equal to that of the umbrella rack which had stood for twenty-five years behind the front door of the parsonage. Surely he was as necessary upon occasion, and as non-existent at other times, as this mahogany gift from some forgotten Ladies’ Aid.

Clee—now only in his meditations did he retain his noble name—bothered himself little as to his social standing. He had enjoyed the adventure of stealing his daddy’s trousers and of running from the overcrowded cabin on the outskirts of Greensboro. Occasionally, from sheer bravado and without the remotest intention of carrying out his threat, he had told Lamie, the Tillett’s paid servant, that he thought he would run away again.

Yo’ don’t know what yo’ is talkin’ ‘bout, chile! Yo’ got a good home heah an’ you knows hit. Then more scornfully, After de way yo’ tol’ me dey treated yo’ at home! Lawd, boy, don’t yo’ ‘member dat mawnin’ yo’ come a-shiverin’ an a-shakin’, an’ so thin an’ black dat yo’ looked like a piece o’ bu’nt toast! An’ after de way Mis’ Tillut done fix ole clo’es fo’ yo’ an’ Mistuh Tillut done foun’ out dat yo’ didn’t have no real daddy—only a step ‘un—an’ dat de law was willun’ fo’ yo’ to stay heah! Go on, chile, yo’ wid a real feather bed on de back piazzo! Heah, take dis skuttle an’ tote me in some coal. Den maybe—maybe mindchu—maybe I’ll give yo’ a piece o’ biscuit an’ gravy.

So, for four months Clee had brought in wood and coal, fetched the mail from the post-office, helped Jim, the sexton, clean the church; and often, when the chores around the parsonage were done, he was lent to the neighbors for others. Mostly he laughed through them all, and sometimes he felt the inexpressible joy of making others laugh with him.

It was by being lent that he had made devotees of the little white boys in the neighborhood, who, in turn, had spread his fame to all those of the little Carolina town. He had seen only a few boys of his own race since he came. There were not many in the Piedmont section, and those in Burlington lived in the outskirts. It was not long after his arrival, when the aura of adventure still clung to him, before his imagination and his sense of the dramatic, had made him the leader of the Church Street gang, a gang without honor in its own block because of its choice of playmates. As chief, Clee had no rivals. No one else could invent such thrilling games on short notice or direct them to such satisfactory results.

He felt that he had come into his own. The joy of leadership in one who for ten years had been merely ‘another mouth to be fed’ among eleven other mouths, softened the discontent of much work, and caused him to accept the Tillett home as his natural habitat.

One noon in April as he sat on the back steps waiting for the yodel with which the gang would announce its return from school two hours hence, he fell to thinking of the morning he arrived. He had almost passed this house when he had seen across the chicken coop in the back yard a most desirable thing. To be sure, when he had removed it from the coop and had wrapped himself in it, it was not the downy comfortable he had taken it to be. It had pricked the exposed skin of his shoulders cruelly, but it was warm, and snuggled in it, he had curled up on the steps and slept. He remembered how Mr. Tillett had laughed when he had found him there . . . but to think what a great person he was now, and all because of that old buggy-robe on the chicken coop! Leader of the Church Street gang and a leader about whom there was much bragging at school. They called him the Dark Terror, and other gangs stood by in awe when he went forth to lead his men. The fact that in the household he was merely an economic asset never occurred to him.

Cleobalus hugged himself, sprang with a