Annjee was able to sit up now and she said she felt better, but she looked ashen and tired. She wanted to get back to work, so she would have a little money for Christmas and be able to help Hager with the doctor’s bill, but she guessed she couldn’t. And she was still worrying about Jimboy. Three months had passed since he went away—a longer time than usual that he hadn’t written. Maybe something had happened to him. Maybe he was out of work and hungry, because this was a hard winter. Maybe he was dead!
“O, my God, no!” Annjee cried as the thought struck her.
But one Sunday morning, ten days before Christmas, the door-bell rang violently and a special-delivery boy stood on the front porch. Annjee’s heart jumped as she sat up in bed. She had seen the youngster approaching from the window. Word from Jimboy surely—or word about him!
“Ma! Sandy! Go quick and see what it is!”
“Letter for Mrs. Annjelica Rodgers,” said the boy, stamping the snow from his feet. “Sign here.”
While Sandy held the door open, letting the cold wind blow through the house, Hager haltingly scrawled something on the boy’s pink pad. Then, with the child behind her, the old woman hurried to her daughter’s bed with the white envelope.
“It’s from him!” Annjee cried; “I know it’s from Jimboy,” as she tore open the letter with trembling fingers.
A scrap of dirty tablet-paper fell on the quilt, and Annjee quickly picked it up. It was written in pencil in a feminine hand.
Dear Sister,
I am stranded in Memphis, Tenn. and the show has gone on to New Orleans. I can’t buy anything to eat because I am broke and don’t know anybody in this town. Annjee, please send me my fare to come home and mail it to the Beale Street Colored Hotel. I’m sending my love to you and mama.
Your baby sister,
Harriett
THIRTEEN
Christmas
* * *
PO’ LITTLE thing,” said Hager. “Po’ little thing. An’ here we ain’t got no money.”
The night before, on Saturday, Hager had bought a sack of flour, a chunk of salt pork, and some groceries. Old Dr. McDillors had called in the afternoon, and she had paid him, too.
“I reckon it would take mo’n thirty dollars to send fo’ Harriett, an’ Lawd knows we ain’t got three dollars in de house.”
Annjee lay limply back on her pillows staring out of the window at the falling snow. She had been crying.
“But never mind,” her mother went on, “I’s gwine see Mr. John Frank tomorrow an’ see can’t I borry a little mo’ money on this mortgage we’s got with him.”
So on Monday morning the old lady left her washing and went uptown to the office of the money-lender, but the clerk there said Mr. Frank had gone to Chicago and would not be back for two weeks. There was nothing the clerk could do about it, since he himself could not lend money.
That afternoon Annjee sat up in bed and wrote a long letter to Harriett, telling her of their troubles, and before she sealed it, Sandy saw his mother slip into the envelope the three one-dollar bills that she had been guarding under her pillow.
“There goes your Santa Claus,” she said to her son, “but maybe Harriett’s hungry. And you don’t want Aunt Harrie to be hungry, do you?”
“No’m,” Sandy said.
The grey days passed and Annjee was able to get up and sit beside the kitchen-stove while her mother ironed. Every afternoon Sandy went downtown to look at the shop windows, gay with Christmas things. And he would stand and stare at the Golden Flyer sleds in Edmondson’s hardware-shop. He could feel himself coasting down a long hill on one of those light, swift, red and yellow coasters, the envy of all the other boys, white and colored, who looked on.
When he went home, he described the sled minutely to Annjee and Aunt Hager and wondered aloud if that might be what he would get for Christmas. But Hager would say: “Santa Claus are just like other folks. He don’t work for nothin’!” And his mother would add weakly from her chair: “This is gonna be a slim Christmas, honey, but mama’ll see what she can do.” She knew his heart was set on a sled, and he could tell that she knew; so maybe he would get it.
One day Annjee gathered her strength together, put a woollen dress over her kimono, wrapped a heavy cloak about herself, and went out into the back yard. Sandy, from the window, watched her picking her way slowly across the frozen ground towards the outhouse. At the trash-pile near the alley fence she stopped and, stooping down, began to pull short pieces of boards and wood from the little pile of lumber that had been left there since last summer by the carpenters who had built the porch. Several times in her labor she rose and leaned weakly against the back fence for support, and once Sandy ran out to see if he could help her, but she told him irritably to get back in the house out of the weather or she would put him to bed without any supper. Then, after placing the boards that she had succeeded in unearthing in a pile by the path, she came wearily back to the kitchen, trembling with cold.
“I’m mighty weak yet,” she said to Hager, “but I’m sure much better than I was. I don’t want to have the grippe no more. . . . Sandy, look in the mail-box and see has the mail-man come by yet.”
As the little boy returned empty-handed, he heard his mother talking about old man Logan, who used to be a carpenter.
“Maybe he can make it,” she was saying, but stopped when she heard Sandy behind her. “I guess I’ll lay back down now.”
Aunt Hager wrung out the last piece of clothes that she had been rinsing. “Yes, chile,” she said, “you go on and lay down. I’s gwine make you some tea after while.” And the old woman went outdoors to take from the line the frozen garments blowing in the sharp north wind.
After supper that night Aunt Hager said casually: “Well, I reckon I’ll run down an’ see Brother Logan a minute whilst I got nothin’ else to do. Sandy, don’t you let de fire go out, and take care o’ yo’ mama.”
“Yes’m,” said the little boy, drawing pictures on the oilcloth-covered table with a pin. His grandmother went out the back door and he looked through the frosty window to see which way she was going. The old woman picked up the boards that his mother had piled near the alley fence, and with them in her arms she disappeared down the alley in the dark.
After a little, Aunt Hager returned puffing and blowing.
“Can he do it?” Annjee demanded anxiously from the bedroom when she heard her mother enter.
“Yes, chile,” Hager answered. “Lawd, it sho is cold out yonder! Whee! Lemme git here to this stove!”
That night it began to snow again. The great heavy flakes fell with languid gentility over the town and silently the whiteness covered everything. The next morning the snow froze to a hard sparkling crust on roofs and ground, and in the late afternoon when Sandy went to return the Reinharts’ clothes, you could walk on top of the snow without sinking.
At the back door of the Reinharts’ house a warm smell of plum-pudding and mince pies drifted out as he waited for the cook to bring the money. When she returned with seventy-five cents, she had a nickel for Sandy, too. As he slid along the street, he saw in many windows gay holly wreaths with red berries and big bows of ribbon tied to them. Sandy wished he could buy a holly wreath for their house. It might make his mother’s room look cheerful. At home it didn’t seem like Christmas with the kitchen full of drying clothes, and no Christmas-tree.
Sandy wondered if, after all, Santa Claus might, by some good fortune, bring him that Golden Flyer sled on Christmas morning. How fine this hard snow would be to coast on, down the long hill past the Hickory Woods! How light and swift he would fly with his new sled! Certainly he had been a good boy, carrying Aunt Hager’s clothes for her, waiting on his mother when she was in bed, emptying the slops and cutting wood every day. And at night when he said his prayers:
Now I lay me down to sleep.
Pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
Pray the Lord my soul to take. . . .
he had added with great earnestness: “And let Santa bring me a Golden Flyer sled, please, Lord. Amen.”
But Sandy knew very well that there wasn’t really any Santa Claus! He knew in his heart that Hager and his mother were Santa Claus—and that they didn’t have any money. They were poor people. He was wearing his mama’s shoes, as Jimmy Lane had once done. And his father and Harriett, who used to make the house gay, laughing and singing, were far away somewhere. . . . There wasn’t any Santa Claus.
“I don’t care,” he said, tramping over the snow in the twilight on his way from the Reinharts’.
Christmas Eve. Candles and poinsettia flowers. Wreaths of evergreen. Baby trees hung with long strands of tinsel and fragile ornaments of colored glass. Sandy passed the windows of many white folks’ houses where the curtains were up and warm floods of electric light made bright the cozy rooms. In Negro shacks, too, there was the dim warmth of oil-lamps and Christmas candles glowing. But at home there wasn’t even a holly wreath. And the snow was whiter and harder than ever on the ground.
Tonight, though, there were no clothes drying in the kitchen when he went in. The ironing-board had been put away behind the door, and the whole place was made tidy and clean. The fire blazed and crackled in the little range; but nothing else said Christmas—no laughter, no tinsel, no tree.
Annjee had been about all day, still weak, but this afternoon she had made a trip to the store for a quarter’s worth of mixed candies and nuts and a single orange, which she had hidden away until morning. Hager had baked a little cake, but there was no frosting on it such as there had been in other years, and there were no strange tissue-wrapped packages stuck away in the corners of trunks and drawers days ahead of time.
Although the little kitchen was warm enough, the two bedrooms were chilly, and the front room was freezing-cold because they kept the door there closed all the time. It was hard to afford a fire in one stove, let alone two, Aunt Hager kept saying, with nobody working but herself.
“I’s thinking about Harriett,” she remarked after their Christmas Eve supper as she rocked before the fire, “and how I’s always tried to raise her right.”
“And I’m thinking about—well, there ain’t no use mentionin’ him,” Annjee said.
A sleigh slid by with jingling bells and shouts of laughter from the occupants, and a band of young people passed on their way to church singing carols. After a while another sleigh came along with a jolly sound.
“Santa Claus!” said Annjee, smiling at her serious little son. “You better hurry and go to bed, because he’ll be coming soon. And be sure to hang up your stocking.”
But Sandy was afraid that she was fooling, and, as he pulled off his clothes, he left his stockings on the floor, stuck into the women’s shoes he had been wearing. Then, leaving the bedroom door half open so that the heat and a little light from the kitchen would come in, he climbed into his mother’s bed. But he wasn’t going to close his eyes yet. Sandy had discovered long ago that you could hear and see many things by not going to sleep when the family expected you to; therefore he remained awake tonight.
His mother was talking to Aunt Hager now: “I don’t think he’ll charge us anything, do you, ma?” And the old woman answered: “No, chile, Brother Logan’s been tryin’ to be ma beau for twenty years, an’ he ain’t gonna charge us nothin’.”
Annjee came into the half-dark bedroom and looked at Sandy, lying still on the side of the bed towards the window. Then she took down her heavy coat from the wall and, sitting on the edge of a chair, began to pull on her rubbers. In a few moments he heard the front door close softly. His mother had gone out.
Where could she be going, he wondered, this time of night? He heard her footsteps crunching the hard snow and, rolling over close to the window, he pulled aside the shade a little and looked out. In the moonlight he saw Annjee moving slowly down the street past Sister Johnson’s house, walking carefully over the snow like a very weak woman.
“Mama’s still sick,” the child thought, with his nose pressed against the cold window-pane. “I wish I could a bought her a present today.”
Soon an occasional snore from the kitchen told Sandy that Hager dozed peacefully in her rocker beside the stove. He sat up in bed, wrapped a quilt about his shoulders, and remained looking out the window, with the shade hanging behind his back.
The white snow sparkled in the moonlight, and the trees made striking black shadows across the yard. Next door at the Johnson’s all was dark and quiet, but across the street, where white folks lived, the lights were burning brightly and a big Christmas-tree with all its candles aglow stood in the large bay window while a woman loaded it with toys. Sandy knew that four children lived there, three boys and a girl, whom he had often watched playing on the lawn. Sometimes he wished he had a brother or sister to play with him, too, because it was very quiet in a house with only grown-ups about. And right now it was dismal and lonely to be by himself looking out the window of a cold bedroom on Christmas Eve.
Then a woman’s cloaked figure came slowly back past Sister Johnson’s house in the moonlight, and Sandy saw that it was his mother returning, her head down and her shadow moving blackly on the snow. You could hear the dry grate of her heels on the frozen whiteness as she walked, leaning forward, dragging something heavy behind her. Sandy prepared to lie down quickly in bed again, but he kept his eyes against the window-pane to see what Annjee was pulling, and, as she came closer to the house, he could distinguish quite clearly behind her a solid, home-made sled bumping rudely over the snow.
Before Anjee’s feet touched the porch, he was lying still as though he had been asleep a long time.
The morning sunlight was tumbling brightly into the windows when Sandy opened his eyes and blinked at the white world outside.
“Aren’t you ever going to get up?” asked Annjee, smiling timidly above him. “It’s Christmas morning, honey. Come see what Santa Claus brought you. Get up quick.”
But he didn’t want to get up. He knew what Santa Claus had brought him and he wanted to stay in bed with his face to the wall. It wasn’t a Golden Flyer sled—and now he couldn’t even hope for one any longer. He wanted to pull the covers over his head and cry, but, “Boy! You ain’t up yet?” called Aunt Hager cheerily from the kitchen. “De little Lawd Jesus is in His manger fillin’ all de world with light. An’ old Santa done been here an’ gone! Get out from there, chile, an’ see!”
“I’m coming, grandma,” said Sandy slowly, wiping his tear-filled eyes and rolling out of bed as he forced his mouth to smile wide and steady at the few little presents he saw on the floor—for the child knew he was expected to smile.
“O! A sled!” he cried in a voice of mock surprise that wasn’t his own at all; for there it stood, heavy and awkward, against the wall and beside it on the floor lay two picture-books from the ten-cent store and a pair of white cotton gloves. Above the sled his stocking, tacked to the wall, was partly filled with candy, and the single orange peeped out from the top.
But the sled! Home-made by some rough carpenter, with strips of rusty tin nailed along the wooden runners, and a piece of clothes-line to pull it with!
“It’s fine,” Sandy lied, as he tried to lift it and place it on the floor as you would in coasting; but it was very heavy, and too wide for a boy to run with in his hands. You could never get a swift start. And a board was warped in the middle.
“It’s a nice sled, grandma,” he lied. “I like it, mama.”
“Mr. Logan made it for you,” his mother answered proudly, happy that he was pleased. “I knew you wanted a sled all the time.”
“It’s a nice sled,” Sandy repeated, grinning steadily as he held the heavy object in his hands. “It’s an awful nice sled.”
“Well, make haste and look at de gloves, and de candy, and them pretty books, too,” called Hager from the kitchen, where she was frying strips of salt pork. “My, you sho is a slow chile on Christmas mawnin’! Come ’ere and lemme kiss you.” She ca
me to the bedroom and picked him up in her arms. “Christmas gift to Hager’s baby chile! Come on, Annjee, bring his clothes out here behind de stove an’ bring his books, too. . . . This here’s Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and this here’s Hansee and Gretsle on de cover—but I reckon you can read ’em better’n I can. . . . Daughter, set de table. Breakfast’s ’bout ready now. Look in de oven an’ see ’bout that corn-bread. . . . Lawd, this here Sandy’s just like a baby lettin’ ole Hager hold him and dress him. . . . Put yo’ foot in that stocking, boy!” And Sandy began to feel happier, sitting on his grandmother’s lap behind the stove.
Before noon Buster had come and gone, showing off his new shoes and telling his friend about the train he had gotten that ran on a real track when you wound it up. After dinner Willie-Mae appeared bringing a naked rag doll and a set of china dishes in a blue box. And Sister Johnson sent them a mince pie as a Christmas gift.
Almost all Aunt Hager’s callers knocked at the back door, but in the late afternoon the front bell rang and Annjee sent Sandy through the cold parlor to answer it. There on the porch stood his Aunt Tempy, with several gaily wrapped packages in her arms. She was almost a stranger to Sandy, yet she kissed him peremptorily on the forehead as he stood in the doorway. Then she came through the house into the kitchen, with much the air of a mistress of the manor descending to the servants’ quarters.
“Land sakes alive!” said Hager, rising to kiss her.
Tempy hugged Annjee, too, before she sat down, stiffly, as though the house she was in had never been her home. To little black Willie-Mae she said nothing.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t invite you for Christmas dinner today, but you know how Mr. Siles is,” Tempy began to explain to her mother and sister. “My husband is home so infrequently, and he doesn’t like a house full of company, but of course Dr. and Mrs. Glenn Mitchell will be in later in the evening. They drop around any time. . . . But I had to run down and bring you a few presents. . . . You haven’t seen my new piano yet, have you, mother? I must come and take you home with me some nice afternoon.” She smiled appropriately, but her voice was hard.
Not Without Laughter Page 12
