Sister Johnson went home, leaving Harriett in the parlor. When Sandy and Tempy returned from locking the back windows and doors, they found the girl still standing there, and for a moment the two sisters looked at one another in silence. Then Tempy said coldly: “We’re going.”
Harriett went out alone into the drizzling rain. Tempy tried the parlor windows to be sure they were well fastened; then, stepping outside on the porch, she locked the door and put the key in her bag.
“Come on,” she said.
Sandy looked up and down the street, but in the thick twilight of fog and rain Harriet had disappeared, so he followed his aunt into the waiting cab. As the hack clattered off, the boy gave an involuntary shiver.
“Do you want to hold my hand,” Tempy asked, unbending a little.
“No,” Sandy said. So they rode in silence.
TWENTY-THREE
Tempy’s House
* * *
“JAMES, you must get up on time in this house. Breakfast has been ready twenty minutes. I can’t come upstairs every morning to call you. You are old enough now to wake yourself and you must learn to do so—you’ve too far to walk to school to lie abed.”
Sandy tumbled out. Tempy left the room so that he would be free to dress, and soon he came downstairs to breakfast.
He had never had a room of his own before. He had never even slept in a room alone, but here his aunt had given him a small chamber on the second floor which had a window that looked out into a tidy back yard where there was a brick walk running to the back gate. The room, which was very clean, contained only the bed, one chair, and a dresser. There was, too, a little closet in which to hang clothes, but Sandy did not have many to put in it.
The thing that impressed him most about the second floor was the bathroom. He had never lived where there was running water indoors. And in this room, too, everything was so spotlessly clean that Sandy was afraid to move lest he disturb something or splash water on the wall.
When he came downstairs for breakfast, he found the table set for two. Mr. Siles, being in the railway postal service, was out on a trip. The grapefruit was waiting as Sandy slid shyly into his place opposite the ash-brown woman who had become his guardian since his grandma’s death. She bowed her head to say a short grace; then they ate.
“Have you been accustomed to drinking milk in the mornings?” Tempy asked as they were finishing the meal. “If you have, the milkman can leave another bottle. Young people should have plenty of milk.”
“Yes’m, I’d like it, but we only had coffee at home.”
“You needn’t say ‘yes’m’ in this house. We are not used to slavery talk here. If you like milk, I’ll get it for you. . . . Now, how are your clothes? I see your stocking has a hole in it, and one pants-leg is hanging.”
“It don’t stay fastened.”
“It doesn’t, James! I’ll buy you some more pants tomorrow. What else do you need?”
Sandy told her, and in a few days she took him to Wertheimer’s, the city’s largest store, and outfitted him completely. And, as they shopped, she informed him that she was the only colored woman in town who ran a bill there.
“I want white people to know that Negroes have a little taste; that’s why I always trade at good shops. . . . And if you’re going to live with me, you’ll have to learn to do things right, too.”
The tearful letter that came from Annjee when she heard of her mother’s death said that Toledo was a very difficult place to get work in, and that she had no money to send railroad fare for Sandy, but that she would try to send for him as soon as she could. Jimboy was working on a lake steamer and was seldom home, and she couldn’t have Sandy with her anyway until they got a nicer place to stay; so would Tempy please keep him a little while?
By return post Tempy replied that if Annjee had any sense, she would let Sandy remain in Stanton, where he could get a good education, and not be following after his worthless father all over the country. Mr. Siles and she had no children, and Sandy seemed like a quiet, decent child, smart in his classes. Colored people needed to encourage talent so that the white race would realize Negroes weren’t all mere guitar-players and housemaids. And Sandy could be a credit if he were raised right. Of course, Tempy knew he hadn’t had the correct environment to begin with—living with Jimboy and Harriett and going to a Baptist church, but undoubtedly he could be trained. He was young. “And I think it would be only fair to the boy that you let him stay with us, because, Annjee, you are certainly not the person to bring him up as he should be reared.” The letter was signed: “Your sister, Tempy,” and written properly with pen and ink.
So it happened that Sandy came to live with Mr. and Mrs. Arkins Siles, for that was the name by which his aunt and uncle were known in the Negro society of the town. Mr. Siles was a mail-clerk on the railroad—a position that colored people considered a high one because you were working for “Uncle Sam.” He was a paste-colored man of forty-eight who had inherited three houses from his father.
Tempy, when she married, had owned houses too, one of which had been willed her by Mrs. Barr-Grant, for whom she had worked for years as personal maid. She had acquired her job while yet in high school, and Mrs. Barr-Grant, who travelled a great deal in the interest of woman suffrage and prohibition, had taken Tempy east with her. On their return to Stanton she allowed the colored maid to take charge of her home, where she also employed a cook and a parlor girl. Thus was the mistress left free to write pamphlets and prepare lectures on the various evils of the world standing in need of correction.
Tempy pleased Mrs. Barr-Grant by being prompt and exact in obeying orders and by appearing to worship her Puritan intelligence. In truth Tempy did worship her mistress, for the colored girl found that by following Mrs. Barr-Grant’s early directions she had become an expert housekeeper; by imitating her manner of speech she had acquired a precise flow of language; and by reading her books she had become interested in things that most Negro girls never thought about. Several times the mistress had remarked to her maid: “You’re so smart and such a good, clean, quick little worker, Tempy, that it’s too bad you aren’t white.” And Tempy had taken this to heart, not as an insult, but as a compliment.
When the white lady died, she left one of her small houses to her maid as a token of appreciation for faithful services. By dint of saving, and of having resided with her mistress where there had been no living expenses, Tempy had managed to buy another house, too. When Mr. Siles asked her to be his wife, everybody said it was a fine match, for both owned property, both were old enough to know what they wanted, and both were eminently respectable. . . . Now they prospered together.
Tempy no longer worked out, but stayed home, keeping house, except that she went each month to collect her rents and those of her husband. She had a woman to do the laundry and help with the cleaning, but Tempy herself did the cooking, and all her meals were models of economical preparation. Just enough food was prepared each time for three people. Sandy never had a third helping of dessert in her house. No big pots of black-eyed peas and pigtails scented her front hall, either. She got her recipes from The Ladies’ Home Journal—and she never bought a watermelon.
White people were for ever picturing colored folks with huge slices of watermelon in their hands. Well, she was one colored woman who did not like them! Her favorite fruits were tangerines and grapefruit, for Mrs. Barr-Grant had always eaten those, and Tempy had admired Mrs. Barr-Grant more than anybody else—more, of course, than she had admired Aunt Hager, who spent her days at the wash-tub, and had loved watermelon.
Colored people certainly needed to come up in the world, Tempy thought, up to the level of white people—dress like white people, talk like white people, think like white people—and then they would no longer be called “niggers.”
In Tempy this feeling was an emotional reaction, born of white admiration, but in Mr. Siles, who shared his wife’s views, the same attitude was born of practical thought. The whites had the money,
and if Negroes wanted any, the quicker they learned to be like the whites, the better. Stop being lazy, stop singing all the time, stop attending revivals, and learn to get the dollar—because money buys everything, even the respect of white people.
Blues and spirituals Tempy and her husband hated because they were too Negro. In their house Sandy dared not sing a word of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, for what had darky slave songs to do with respectable people? And rag-time belonged in the Bottoms with the sinners. (It was ironically strange that the Bottoms should be the only section of Stanton where Negroes and whites mingled freely on equal terms.) That part of town, according to Tempy, was lost to God, and the fact that she had a sister living there burned like a hidden cancer in her breast. She never mentioned Harriett to anyone.
Tempy’s friends were all people of standing in the darker world—doctors, school-teachers, a dentist, a lawyer, a hairdresser. And she moved among these friends as importantly as Mrs. Barr-Grant had moved among a similar group in the white race. Many of them had had washwomen for mothers and day-laborers for fathers; but none ever spoke of that. And while Aunt Hager lived, Tempy, after getting her position with Mrs. Barr-Grant, was seldom seen with the old woman. After her marriage she was even more ashamed of her family connections—a little sister running wild, and another sister married for the sake of love—Tempy could never abide Jimboy, or understand why Annjee had taken up with a rounder from the South. One’s family as a topic of conversation, however, was not popular in high circles, for too many of Stanton’s dark society folks had sprung from humble family trees and low black bottoms.
“But back in Washington, where I was born,” said Mrs. Doctor Mitchell once, “we really have blood! All the best people at the capital come from noted ancestry—Senator Bruce, John M. Langston, Governor Pinchback, Frederick Douglass. Why, one of our colored families on their white side can even trace its lineage back to George Washington! . . . O, yes, we have a background! But, of course, we are too refined to boast about it.”
Tempy thought of her mother then and wished that black Aunt Hager had not always worn her apron in the streets, uptown and everywhere! Of course, it was clean and white and seemed to suit the old lady, but aprons weren’t worn by the best people. When Tempy was in the hospital for an operation shortly after her marriage, they wouldn’t let Hager enter by the front door—and Tempy never knew whether it was on account of her color or the apron! The Presbyterian Hospital was prejudiced against Negroes and didn’t like them to use the elevator, but certainly her mother should not have come there in an apron!
Well, Aunt Hager had meant well, Tempy thought, even if she didn’t dress right. And now this child, Sandy—James was his correct name! At that first breakfast they ate together, she asked him if he had a comb and brush of his own.
“No’m, I ain’t,” said Sandy.
“I haven’t,” she corrected him. “I certainly don’t want my white neighbors to hear you saying ‘ain’t’ . . . You’ve come to live with me now and you must talk like a gentleman.”
TWENTY-FOUR
A Shelf of Books
* * *
THAT spring, shortly after Sandy went to stay with Tempy, there was an epidemic of mumps among the schoolchildren in Stanton, and, old as he was, he was among its early victims. With jaws swollen to twice their normal size and a red sign, MUMPS, on the house, he was forced to remain at home for three weeks. It was then that the boy began to read books other than the ones he had had to study for his lessons. At Aunt Hager’s house there had been no books, anyway, except the Bible and the few fairytales that he had been given at Christmas; but Tempy had a case full of dusty volumes that were used to give dignity to her sitting-room: a row of English classics bound in red, an Encyclopedia of World Knowledge in twelve volumes, a book on household medicine full of queer drawings, and some modern novels—The Rosary, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, the newest Harold Bell Wright, and all that had ever been written by Gene Stratton Porter, Tempy’s favorite author. The Negro was represented by Chesnutt’s House Behind the Cedars, and the Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Tempy tolerated on account of his fame, but condemned because he had written so much in dialect and so often of the lower classes of colored people. Tempy subscribed to Harper’s Magazine, too, because Mrs. Barr-Grant had taken it. And in her sewing-room closet there was also a pile of The Crisis, the thin Negro monthly that she had been taking from the beginning of its publication.
Sandy had heard of that magazine, but he had never seen a copy; so he went through them all, looking at the pictures of prominent Negroes and reading about racial activities all over the country, and about racial wrongs in the South. In every issue he found, too, stirring and beautifully written editorials about the frustrated longings of the black race, and the hidden beauties in the Negro soul. A man named Du Bois wrote them.
“Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois,” said Tempy, “and he is a great man.”
“Great like Booker T. Washington?” asked Sandy.
“Teaching Negroes to be servants, that’s all Washington did!” Tempy snorted in so acid a tone that Sandy was silent. “Du Bois wants our rights. He wants us to be real men and women. He believes in social equality. But Washington—huh!” The fact that he had established an industrial school damned Washington in Tempy’s eyes, for there were enough colored workers already. But Du Bois was a doctor of philosophy and had studied in Europe! . . . That’s what Negroes needed to do, get smart, study books, go to Europe! “Don’t talk to me about Washington,” Tempy fumed. “Take Du Bois for your model, not some white folks’ nigger.”
“Well, Aunt Hager said—” then Sandy stopped. His grandmother had thought that Booker T. was the greatest of men, but maybe she had been wrong. Anyway, this Du Bois could write! Gee, it made you burn all over to read what he said about a lynching. But Sandy did not mention Booker Washington again to Tempy, although, months later, at the library he read his book called Up from Slavery, and he was sure that Aunt Hager hadn’t been wrong. “I guess they are both great men,” he thought.
Sandy’s range of reading increased, too, when his aunt found a job for him that winter in Mr. Prentiss’s gift-card- and printing-shop, where he kept the place clean and acted as delivery boy. This shop kept a shelf of current novels and some volumes of the new poetry—Sandburg, Lindsay, Masters—which the Young Women’s Club of Stanton was then studying, to the shocked horror of the older white ladies of the town. Sandy knew of this because Mr. Prentiss’s daughter, a student at Goucher College, used to keep shop and she pointed out volumes for the boy to read and told him who their authors were and what the books meant. She said that none of the colored boys they had employed before had ever been interested in reading; so she often lent him, by way of encouragement, shop-worn copies to be taken home at night and returned the next day. Thus Sandy spent much of his first year with Tempy deep in novels too mature for a fourteen-year-old boy. But Tempy was very proud of her studious young nephew. She began to decide that she had made no mistake in keeping him with her, and when he entered the high school, she bought him his first long-trouser suit as a spur towards further application.
Sandy became taller week by week, and it seemed to Tempy as if his shirt-sleeves became too short for him overnight. His voice was changing, too, and he had acquired a liking for football, but his after-school job at Prentiss’s kept him from playing much. At night he read, or sometimes went to the movies with Buster—but Tempy kept him home as much as she could. Occasionally he saw Willie-Mae, who was keeping company with the second cook at Wright’s Hotel. And sometimes he saw Jimmy Lane, who was a bell-hop now and hung out with a sporty crowd in the rear room of Cudge Windsor’s pool hall. But whenever Sandy went into his old neighborhood, he felt sad, remembering Aunt Hager and his mother, and Jimboy, and Harriett—for his young aunt had gone away from Stanton, too, and the last he heard about her rumored that she was on the stage in Kansas City. Now the little house where Sandy had lived with his
grandmother belonged to Tempy, who kept it rented to a family of strangers.
In high school Sandy was taking, at his aunt’s request, the classical course, which included Latin, ancient history, and English, and which required a great deal of reading. His teacher of English was a large, masculine woman named Martha Fry, who had once been to Europe and who loved to talk about the splendors of old England and to read aloud in a deep, mannish kind of voice, dramatizing the printed words. It was from her that Sandy received an introduction to Shakespeare, for in the spring term they studied The Merchant of Venice. In the spring also, under Miss Fry’s direction, the first-year students were required to write an essay for the freshman essay prizes of both money and medals. And in this contest Sandy won the second prize. It was the first time in the history of the school that a colored pupil had ever done anything of the sort, and Tempy was greatly elated. There was a note in the papers about it, and Sandy brought his five dollars home for his aunt to put away. But he gave his bronze medal to a girl named Pansetta Young, who was his class-mate and a new-found friend.
From the first moment in school that he saw Pansetta, he knew that he liked her, and he would sit looking at her for hours in every class that they had together—for she was a little baby-doll kind of girl, with big black eyes and a smooth pinkish-brown skin, and her hair was curly on top of her head. Her widowed mother was a cook at the Goucher College dining-hall; and she was an all-alone little girl, for Pansetta had no brothers or sisters. After Thanksgiving Sandy began to walk part of the way home with her every day. He could not accompany her all the way because he had to go to work at Mr. Prentiss’s shop. But on Christmas he bought her a box of candy—and sent it to her by mail. And at Easter-time she gave him a chocolate egg.
Not Without Laughter Page 19
