He liked to clean things, to make them beautiful, to make them shine. Aunt Hager did, too. When she wasn’t washing clothes, she was always cleaning something about the house, dusting, polishing the range, or scrubbing the kitchen-floor until it was white enough to eat from. To Hager a clean thing was beautiful—also to Sandy, proud every evening of his six unblemished brass spittoons. Yet each day when he came to work, they were covered anew with tobacco juice, cigarette-butts, wads of chewing-gum, and phlegm. But to make them clean was Sandy’s job—and they were beautiful when they were clean.
Charlie Nutter was right—there was nothing very hard about the work and he liked it for a while. The new kinds of life which he saw in the hotel interested and puzzled him, but, being naturally a silent child, he asked no questions, and, beyond the directions for his work, nobody told him anything. Sandy did his cleaning well and the boss had not yet had occasion to bellow at him, as he often bellowed at the two bell-boys.
The Drummer’s Hotel was not a large hotel, nor a nice one. A three-story frame structure, dilapidated and run down, it had not been painted for years. In the lobby two large panes of plate glass looked on the street, and in front of these were rows of hard wooden chairs. At the rear of the lobby was the clerk’s desk, a case of cigars and cigarettes, a cooler for water, and the door to the men’s room. It was Sandy’s duty to clean this toilet, too.
Upstairs on the second and third floors were the bedrooms. Only the poorest of travelling salesmen, transient railroad workers, occasionally a few show-people, and the ladies of the streets with their clients rented them. The night trade was always the most brisk at the Drummer’s Hotel, but it was only on Saturdays that Sandy worked after six o’clock. That night he would not get home until ten or eleven, but Aunt Hager would always be waiting for him, keeping the fire warm, with the wash-tub full of water for his weekly bath.
There was no dining-room attached to the hotel, and, aside from Sandy, there were only five employees. The boss himself, Joe Willis, was usually at the desk. There were two chambermaids who worked in the mornings, an old man who did the heavy cleaning and scrubbing once or twice a week, and two bell-boys—one night boy and one day boy supposedly, but both bellmen had been there so long that they arranged the hours to suit themselves. Charlie Nutter had started small, like Sandy, and had grown up there. The other bell-boy, really no boy at all, but an old man, had been in the hotel ever since it opened, and Sandy was as much afraid of him as he was of the boss.
This bellman’s name was Mr. George Clark. His uniform was frayed and greasy, but he wore it with the air of a major, and he acted as though all the burdens of running the hotel were on his shoulders. He knew how everything was to be done, where everything was kept, what every old guest liked. And he could divine the tastes of each new guest before he had been there a day. Subservient and grinning to white folks, evil and tyrannical to the colored help, George was the chief authority, next to Joe Willis, in the Drummer’s Hotel. He it was who found some fault with Sandy’s work every day until he learned to like the child because Sandy never answered back or tried to be fly, as George said most young niggers were. After a time the old fellow seldom bothered to inspect Sandy’s spittoons or to look in the corners for dust, but, nevertheless, he remained a person to be humored and obeyed if one wished to work at the Drummer’s Hotel.
Besides being the boss’s right-hand man, George Clark was the official bootlegger for the house, too. In fact, he kept his liquor-supply in the hotel cellar. When he was off duty, Charlie, the other bell-hop, sold it for him if there were any calls from the rooms above. They made no sales other than to guests of the house, but such sales were frequent. Some of the white women who used the rooms collected a commission from George for the sales they helped make to their men visitors.
Sandy was a long time learning the tricks of hotel work. “Yuh sure a dumb little joker,” Charlie was constantly informing him. “But just stay around awhile and yuh’ll get on to it.”
Christmas came and Sandy sent his mother in Detroit a big box of drugstore candy. For Aunt Hager he started to buy a long pair of green ear-rings for fifty cents, but he was afraid she might not like them, so he bought her white handkerchiefs instead. And he sent a pretty card to Harriett, for one snowy December day his aunt had seen him through the windows sweeping out the lobby of the hotel and she had called him to the door to talk to her. She thrust a little piece of paper into his hand with her new address on it.
“Maudel’s moved to Kansas City,” she said, “so I don’t live there any more. You better keep this address yourself and if mama ever needs me, you can know where I am.”
Then she went on through the snow, looking very pretty in a cheap fur coat and black, high-heeled slippers, with grey silk stockings. Sandy saw her pass the hotel often with different men. Sometimes she went by with Cudge Windsor, the owner of the pool hall, or Billy Sanderlee. Almost always she was with sporty-looking fellows who wore derbies and had gold teeth. Sandy noticed that she didn’t urge him to come to see her at this new house-number she had given him, so he put the paper in his pocket and went back to his sweeping, glad, anyway, to have seen his Aunt Harriett.
One Saturday afternoon several white men were sitting in the lobby smoking and reading the papers. Sandy swept around their chairs, dusted, and then took the spittoons out to clean. This work did not require his attention; while he applied the polish with a handful of soft rags, he could let his mind wander to other things. He thought about Harriett. Then he thought about school and what he would do when he was a man; about Willie-Mae, who had a job washing dinner dishes for a white family; about Jimmy Lane, who had no mama; and Sandy wondered what his own mother and father were doing in another town, and if they wanted him with them. He thought how old and tired and grey-headed Aunt Hager had become; how she puffed and blowed over the wash-tubs now, but never complained; how she waited for him on Saturday nights with the kitchen-stove blazing, so he would be warm after walking so far in the cold; and how she prayed he would be a great man some day. . . . Sitting there in the back room of the hotel, Sandy wondered how people got to be great, as, one by one, he made the spittoons bright and beautiful. He wondered how people made themselves great.
That night he would have to work late picking up papers in the lobby, running errands for the boss, and shining shoes. After he had put the spittoons around, he would go out and get a hamburger sandwich and a cup of coffee for supper; then he would come back and help Charlie if he could. . . . Charlie was a good old boy. He had taken only a dollar for getting Sandy his job and he often helped him make tips by allowing Sandy to run to the telegraph office or do some other little odd job for a guest upstairs. . . . Sure, Charlie was a nice guy.
Things were pretty busy tonight. Several men had their shoes shined as they sat tipped back in the lobby chairs while Sandy with his boot-black box let them put up a foot at a time to be polished. One tall farmer gave him a quarter tip and a pat on the head.
“Bright little feller, that,” he remarked to the boss.
About ten o’clock the blond Miss Marcia McKay’s bell rang, and, Charlie being engaged, Joe Willis sent Sandy up to see what she wanted. Miss McKay had just come in out of the snow a short time before with a heavy-set ugly man. Both of them were drunk. Sandy knocked timidly outside her room.
“Come in,” growled the man’s voice.
Sandy opened the door and saw Miss McKay standing naked in the middle of the floor combing her hair. He stopped on the threshold.
“Aw, come in,” said the man. “She won’t bite you! Where’s that other bell-boy? We want some licker! . . . Damn it! Say, send Charlie up here! He knows what I want!”
Sandy scampered away, and when he found Charlie, he told him about Miss McKay. The child was scared because he had often heard of colored boys’ being lynched for looking at white women, even with their clothes on—but the bell-boy only laughed.
“Yuh’re a dumb little joker!” he said. “Just stay
around here awhile and yuh’ll see lots more’n that!” He winked and gave Sandy a nudge in the ribs. “Boy, I done sold ten quarts o’ licker tonight,” he whispered jubilantly. “And some a it was mine, too!”
Sandy went back to the lobby and the shining of shoes. A big, red-necked stranger smoking and drinking with a crowd of drummers in one corner of the room called to him “Hey, boy! Shine me up here!” So he edged into the center of the group of men with his blacking-box, got down on his knees before the big fellow, took out his cans and his cloths, and went to work.
The white men were telling dirty stories, uglier than any Sandy had heard at the colored barber-shop and not very funny—and some of them made him sick at the stomach.
The big man whose shoes he was shining said: “Now I’m gonna tell one.” He talked with a Southern drawl and a soft slurring of word-endings like some old colored folks. He had been drinking, too. “This is ’bout a nigger went to see Aunt Hanner one night. . . .”
A roar of laughter greeted his first effort and he was encouraged to tell another.
“Old darky caught a gal on the levee . . .” he commenced.
Sandy finished polishing the shoes and put the cloths inside his wooden box and stood up waiting for his pay, but the speaker did not notice the colored boy until he had finished his tale and laughed heartily with the other men. Then he looked at Sandy. Suddenly he grinned.
“Say, little coon, let’s see you hit a step for the boys! . . . Down where I live, folks, all our niggers can dance! . . . Come on, boy, snap it up!”
“I can’t,” Sandy said, frowning instead of smiling, and growing warm as he stood there in the smoky circle of grinning white men. “I don’t know how to dance.”
“O, you’re one of them stubborn Kansas coons, heh?” said the red-necked fellow disgustedly, the thickness of whisky on his tongue. “You Northern darkies are dumb as hell, anyhow!” Then, turning to the crowd of amused lobby loungers, he announced: “Now down in Mississippi, whar I come from, if you offer a nigger a dime, he’ll dance his can off . . . an’ they better dance, what I mean!”
He turned to the men around him for approbation, while Sandy still waited uncomfortably to be paid for the shine. But the man kept him standing there, looking at him drunkenly, then at the amused crowd of Saturday-night loungers.
“Now, a nigger his size down South would no more think o’ not dancin’ if a white man asked him than he would think o’ flyin’. This boy’s jest tryin’ to be smart, that’s all. Up here you-all’ve got darkies spoilt, believin’ they’re somebody. Now, in my home we keep ’em in their places.” He again turned his attention to Sandy. “Boy! I want to see you dance!” he commanded.
But Sandy picked up his blacking-box and had begun to push through the circle of chairs, not caring any longer about his pay, when the southerner rose and grabbed him roughly by the arm, exhaling alcoholic breath in the boy’s face as he jokingly pulled him back.
“Com’ere, you little—” but he got no further, for Sandy, strengthened by the anger that suddenly possessed him at the touch of this white man’s hand, uttered a yell that could be heard for blocks.
Everyone in the lobby turned to see what had happened, but before Joe Willis got out from behind the clerk’s desk, the boy, wriggling free, had reached the street-door. There Sandy turned, raised his boot-black box furiously above his head, and flung it with all his strength at the group of laughing white men in which the drunken southerner was standing. From one end of the whizzing box a stream of polish-bottles, brushes, and cans fell clattering across the lobby while Sandy disappeared through the door, running as fast as his legs could carry him in the falling snow.
“Hey! You black bastard!” Joe Willis yelled from the hotel entrance, but his voice was blown away in the darkness. As Sandy ran, he felt the snow-flakes falling in his face.
TWENTY-ONE
Note to Harriett
* * *
SEVERAL days later, when Sandy took out of his pocket the piece of paper that his Aunt Harriett had given him that day in front of the hotel, he noticed that the address written on it was somewhere in the Bottoms. He felt vaguely worried, so he did not show it to his grandmother, because he had often heard her say that the Bottoms was a bad place. And when he was working at the barber-shop, he had heard the men talking about what went on there—and in a sense he knew what they meant.
It was a gay place—people did what they wanted to, or what they had to do, and didn’t care—for in the Bottoms folks ceased to struggle against the boundaries between good and bad, or white and black, and surrendered amiably to immorality. Beyond Pearl Street, across the tracks, people of all colors came together for the sake of joy, the curtains being drawn only between themselves and the opposite side of the railroad, where the churches were and the big white Y.M.C.A.
At night in the Bottoms victrolas moaned and banjos cried ecstatically in the darkness. Summer evenings little yellow and brown and black girls in pink or blue bungalow aprons laughed invitingly in doorways, and dice rattled with the staccato gaiety of jazz music on long tables in rear rooms. Pimps played pool; bootleggers lounged in big red cars; children ran in the streets until midnight, with no voice of parental authority forcing them to an early sleep; young blacks fought like cocks and enjoyed it; white boys walked through the streets winking at colored girls; men came in autos; old women ate pigs’ feet and watermelon and drank beer; whisky flowed; gin was like water; soft indolent laughter didn’t care about anything; and deep nigger-throated voices that had long ago stopped rebelling against the ways of this world rose in song.
To those who lived on the other side of the railroad and never realized the utter stupidity of the word “sin,” the Bottoms was vile and wicked. But to the girls who lived there, and the boys who pimped and fought and sold licker there, “sin” was a silly word that did not enter their heads. They had never looked at life through the spectacles of the Sunday-School. The glasses good people wore wouldn’t have fitted their eyes, for they hung no curtain of words between themselves and reality. To them, things were—what they were.
“Ma bed is hard, but I’m layin’ in it jest de same!”
sang the raucous-throated blues-singer in her song;
“Hey! . . . Hey! Who wants to lay with me?”
It was to one of these streets in the Bottoms that Sandy came breathlessly one bright morning with a note in his hand. He knocked at the door of a big grey house.
“Is this where Harriett Williams lives?” he panted.
“You means Harrietta?” said a large, sleek yellow woman in a blue silk kimono who opened the door. “Come in, baby, and sit down. I’ll see if she’s up yet.” Then the woman left Sandy in the parlor while she went up the stairs calling his aunt in a clear, lazy voice.
There were heavy velvet draperies at the windows and doors in this front room where Sandy sat, and a thick, well-worn rug on the floor. There was a divan, a davenport covered with pillows, a centre table, and several chairs. Through the curtains at the double door leading into the next room, Sandy saw a piano, more sofas and chairs, and a cleared oiled floor that might be used for dancing. Both rooms were in great disorder, and the air in the house smelled stale and beerish. Licker-bottles and ginger-ale bottles were underneath the center table, underneath the sofas, and on top of the piano. Ash-trays were everywhere, overflowing with cigar-butts and cigarette-ends—on the floor, under chairs, overturned among the sofa-pillows. A small brass tray under one of the sofas held a half-dozen small glasses, some of them still partly full of whisky or gin.
Sandy sat down to wait for his aunt. It was very quiet in the house, although it was almost ten o’clock. A man came down the stairs with his coat on his arm, blinking sleepily. He passed through the hall and out into the street. Bedroom-slippered feet shuffled to the head of the steps on the second floor, and the lazy woman’s voice called: “She’ll be down in a minute, darling. Just wait there.”
Sandy waited. He heard the splash of w
ater above and the hoarse gurgling of a bath-tub being emptied. Presently Harriett appeared in a little pink wash dress such as a child wears, the skirt striking her just above the knees. She smelled like cashmere-bouquet soap, and her face was not yet powdered, nor her hair done up, but she was smiling broadly, happy to see her nephew, as her arms went round his neck.
“My! I’m glad to see you, honey! How’d you happen to come? How’d you find me?”
“Grandma’s sick,” said Sandy. “She’s awful sick and Aunt Tempy sent you this note.”
The girl opened the letter. It read:
Your mother is not expected to live. You better come to see her since she has asked for you. Tempy.
“O! . . . Wait a minute,” said Harriett softly. “I’ll hurry.”
Sandy sat down again in the room full of ash-trays and licker-bottles. Many feet pattered upstairs, and, as doors opened and closed, women’s voices were heard: “Can I help you, girlie? Can I lend you anything? Does you need a veil?”
When Harriett came down, she was wearing a tan coat-suit and a white turban, pulled tight on her head. Her face was powdered and her lips rouged ever so slightly. The bag she carried was beaded, blue and gold.
“Come on, Sandy,” she said. “I guess I’m ready.”
As they went out, they heard a man’s voice in a shabby house across the street singing softly to a two-finger piano accompaniment:
Sugar babe, I’m leavin’
Not Without Laughter Page 17
