Not Without Laughter

by Langston Hughes

  But who were nice people anyway? Sandy hated the word “nice.” His Aunt Tempy was always using it. All of her friends were nice, she said, respectable and refined. They went around with their noses in the air and they didn’t speak to porters and washwomen—though they weren’t nearly so much fun as the folks they tried to scorn. Sandy liked Cudge Windsor or Jap Logan better than he did Dr. Mitchell, who had been to college—and never forgotten it.

  Sandy wondered if Booker T. Washington had been like Tempy’s friends? Or if Dr. Du Bois was a snob just because he was a college man? He wondered if those two men had a good time being great. Booker T. was dead, but he had left a living school in the South. Maybe he could teach in the South, too, Sandy thought, if he ever learned enough. Did colored folks need to know the things he was studying in books now? Did French and Latin and Shakespeare make people wise and happy? Jap Logan never went beyond the seventh grade and he was happy. And Jimboy never attended school much either. Maybe school didn’t matter. Yet to get a good job you had to be smart—and white, too. That was the trouble, you had to be white!

  “But I want to learn!” thought Sandy as he lay awake in the dark after he had gone to bed at night. “I want to go to college. I want to go to Europe and study. ‘Work and make ready and maybe your chance will come,’ it said under the picture of Lincoln on the calendar given away by the First National Bank, where Earl, his white friend, already had a job promised him when he came out of school. . . . It was not nearly so difficult for white boys. They could work at anything—in stores, on newspapers, in offices. They could become president of the United States if they were clever enough. But a colored boy. . . . No wonder Buster was going to pass for white when he left Stanton.

  “I don’t blame him,” thought Sandy. “Sometimes I hate white people, too, like Aunt Harrie used to say she did. Still, some of them are pretty decent—my English-teacher, and Mr. Prentiss where I work. Yet even Mr. Prentiss wouldn’t give me a job clerking in his shop. All I can do there is run errands and scrub the floor when everybody else is gone. There’s no advancement for colored fellows. If they start as porters, they stay porters for ever and they can’t come up. Being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred—and the white folks live upstairs. They don’t want us up there with them, even when we’re respectable like Dr. Mitchell, or smart like Dr. Du Bois. . . . And guys like Jap Logan—well, Jap don’t care anyway! Maybe it’s best not to care, and stay poor and meek waiting for heaven like Aunt Hager did. . . . But I don’t want heaven! I want to live first!” Sandy thought. “I want to live!”

  He understood then why many old Negroes said: “Take all this world and give me Jesus!” It was because they couldn’t get this world anyway—it belonged to the white folks. They alone had the power to give or withhold at their back doors. Always back doors—even for Tempy and Dr. Mitchell if they chose to go into Wright’s Hotel or the New Albert Restaurant. And no door at all for Negroes if they wanted to attend the Rialto Theatre, or join the Stanton Y.M.C.A., or work behind the grilling at the National Bank.

  The Doors of Life. . . . God damn that simple-minded book that Tempy had given him! What did an old white minister know about the doors of life for him and Pansetta and Jimmy Lane, for Willie-Mae and Buster and Jap Logan and all the black and brown and yellow youngsters standing on the threshold of the great beginning in a Western town called Stanton? What did an old white minister know about the doors of life anywhere? And, least of all, the doors to a Negro’s life? . . . Black youth. . . . Dark hands knocking, knocking! Pansetta’s little brown hands knocking on the doors of life! Baby-doll hands, tiny autumn-leaf girl-hands! . . . Gee, Pansetta! . . . The Doors of Life . . . the great big doors. . . . Sandy was asleep . . . of life.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Beware of Women

  * * *

  “I WON’T permit it,” said Tempy. “I won’t stand for it. You’ll have to mend your ways, young man! Spending your evenings in Windsor’s pool parlor and running the streets with a gang of common boys that have had no raising, that Jimmy Lane among them. I won’t stand for it while you stay in my house. . . . But that’s not the worst of it. Mr. Prentiss tells me you’ve been getting to work late after school three times this week. And what have you been doing? O, don’t think I don’t know! I saw you with my own eyes yesterday walking home with that girl Pansetta Young! . . . Well, I want you to understand that I won’t have it!”

  “I didn’t walk home with her,” said Sandy. “I only go part way with her every day. She’s in my class in high school and we have to talk over our lessons. She’s the only colored kid in my class I have to talk to.”

  “Lessons! Yes, I know it’s lessons,” said Tempy sarcastically. “If she were a girl of our own kind, it would be all right. I don’t see why you don’t associate more with the young people of the church. Marie Steward or Grace Mitchell are both nice girls and you don’t notice them. No, you have to take up with this Pansetta, whose mother works out all day, leaving her daughter to do as she chooses. Well, she’s not going to ruin you, after all I’ve done to try to make something out of you.”

  “Beware of women, son,” said Mr. Siles pontifically from his deep morris-chair. It was one of his few evenings home and Tempy had asked him to talk to her nephew, who had gotten beyond her control, for Sandy no longer remained in at night even when she expressly commanded it; and he no longer attended church regularly, but slept on Sunday mornings instead. He kept up his school-work, it was true, but he seemed to have lost all interest in acquiring the respectable bearing and attitude towards life that Tempy thought he should have. She bought him fine clothes and he went about with ruffians.

  “In other words, he has been acting just like a nigger, Mr. Siles!” she told her husband. “And he’s taken up with a girl who’s not of the best, to say the least, even if she does go to the high school. Mrs. Francis Cannon, who lives near her, tells me that this Pansetta has boys at her house all the time, and her mother is never at home until after dark. She’s a cook or something somewhere. . . . A fine person for a nephew of ours to associate with, this Pansy daughter of hers!”

  “Pansetta’s a nice girl,” said Sandy. “And she’s smart in school, too. She helps me get my Latin every day, and I might fail if she didn’t.”

  “Huh! It’s little help you need with your Latin, young man! Bring it here and I’ll help you. I had Latin when I was in school. And certainly you don’t need to walk on the streets with her in order to study Latin, do you? First thing you know you’ll be getting in trouble with her and she’ll be having a baby—I see I have to be plain—and whether it’s yours or not, she’ll say it is. Common girls like that always want to marry a boy they think is going to amount to something—going to college and be somebody in the world. Besides, you’re from the Williams family and you’re good-looking! But I’m going to stop this affair right now. . . . From now on you are to leave that girl alone, do you understand me? She’s dangerous!”

  “Yes,” grunted Mr. Siles. “She’s dangerous.”

  Angry and confused, Sandy left the room and went upstairs to bed, but he could not sleep. What right had they to talk that way about his friends? Besides, what did they mean about her being dangerous? About his getting in trouble with her? About her wanting to marry him because her mother was a cook and he was going to college?

  A white boy in Sandy’s high-school class had “got in trouble” with an Italian girl and they had had to go to the juvenile court to fix it up, but it had been kept quiet. Even now Sandy couldn’t quite give an exact explanation of what getting in trouble with a girl meant. Did a girl have to have a baby just because a fellow walked home with her when he didn’t even go in? Pansetta had asked him into her house often, but he always had to go back uptown to work. He was due at work at four o’clock—besides he knew it wasn’t quite correct to call on a young lady if her mother was not at home. But it wasn’t necessarily bad, was it? And how coul
d a girl have a baby and say it was his if it wasn’t his? Why couldn’t he talk to his Aunt Tempy about such things and get a clear and simple answer instead of being given an old book like The Doors of Life that didn’t explain anything at all?

  Pansetta hadn’t said a word to him about babies, or anything like that, but she let him kiss her once and hold her on his lap at Sadie Butler’s Christmas party. Gee, but she could kiss—and such a long time! He wouldn’t care if she did make him marry her, only he wanted to travel first. If his mother would send for him now, he would like to go to Chicago. His Aunt Tempy was too cranky, and too proper. She didn’t like any of his friends, and she hated the pool hall. But where else was there for a fellow to play? Who wanted to go to those high-toned people’s houses, like the Mitchells’, and look bored all the time while they put Caruso’s Italian records on their new victrola? Even if it was the finest victrola owned by a Negro in Stanton, as they always informed you, Sandy got tired of listening to records in a language that none of them understood.

  “But this is opera!” they said. Well, maybe it was, but he thought that his father and Harriett used to sing better. And they sang nicer songs. One of them was:

  Love, O love, O careless love—

  Goes to your head like wine!

  “And maybe I really am in love with Pansetta. . . . But if she thinks she can fool me into marrying her before I’ve travelled all around the world, like my father, she’s wrong,” Sandy thought. “She can’t trick me, not this kid!” Then he was immediately sorry that he had allowed Tempy’s insinuations to influence his thoughts.

  “Pretty, baby-faced Pansetta! Why, she wouldn’t try to trick anybody into anything. If she wanted me to love her, she’d let me, but she wouldn’t try to trick a fellow. She wouldn’t let me love her that way anyhow—like Tempy meant. Gee, that was ugly of Aunt Tempy to say that! . . . But Buster said she would. . . . Aw, he always talked that way about girls! He said no women were any good—as if he knew! And Jimmy Lane said white women were worse than colored—but all the boys who worked at hotels said that.”

  Let ’em talk! Sandy liked Pansetta anyhow. . . . But maybe his Aunt Tempy was right! Maybe he had better stop walking home with her. He didn’t want to “get in trouble” and not be able to travel to Chicago some time, where his mother was. Maybe he could go to Chicago next summer if he began to save his money now. He wanted to see the big city, where the buildings were like towers, the trains ran overhead, and the lake was like a sea. He didn’t want to “get in trouble” with Pansetta even if he did like her. Besides, he had to live with Tempy for awhile yet and he hated to be quarrelling with his aunt all the time. He’d stop going to the pool hall so much and stay home at night and study. . . . But, heck! it was too beautiful out of doors to stay in the house—especially since spring had come!

  Through his open window, as he lay in bed after Tempy’s tirade about the girl, he could see the stars and the tops of the budding maple-trees. A cool earth-smelling breeze lifted the white curtains, scattering the geometry papers that he had left lying on his study table. He got out of bed to pick up the papers and put them away, and stood for a moment in his pyjamas looking out of the window at the roofs of the houses and the tops of the trees under the night sky.

  “I wish I had a brother,” Sandy thought as he stood there. “Maybe I could talk to him about things and I wouldn’t have to think so much. It’s no fun being the only kid in the family, and your father never home either. . . . When I get married, I’m gonna have a lot of children; then they won’t have to grow up by themselves.”

  The next day after school he walked nearly home with Pansetta as usual, although he was still thinking of what Tempy had said, but he hadn’t decided to obey his aunt yet. At the corner of the block in which the girl lived, he gave her her books.

  “I got to beat it back to the shop now. Old man Prentiss’ll have a dozen deliveries waiting for me just because I’m late.”

  “All right,” said Pansetta in her sweet little voice. “I’m sorry you can’t come on down to my house awhile. Say, why don’t you work at the hotel, anyway? Wouldn’t you make more money there?”

  “Guess I would,” replied the boy. “But my aunt thinks it’s better where I am.”

  “Oh,” said Pansetta. “Well, I saw Jimmy Lane last night and he’s making lots of money at the hotel. He wanted to meet me around to school this afternoon, but I told him no. I said you took me home.”

  “I do,” said Sandy.

  “Yes,” laughed Pansetta; “but I didn’t tell him you wouldn’t ever come in.”

  During the sunny spring weeks that followed, Sandy did not walk home with her any more after school. Having to go to work earlier was the excuse he gave, but at first Pansetta seemed worried and puzzled. She asked him if he was mad at her, or something, but he said he wasn’t. Then in a short time other boys were meeting her on the corner near the school, buying her cones when the ice-cream wagon passed and taking her home in the afternoons. To see other fellows buying her ice-cream and walking home with her made Sandy angry, but it was his own fault, he thought. And he felt lonesome having no one to walk with after classes.

  Pansetta, in school, was just as pleasant as before, but in a kind of impersonal way, as though she hadn’t been his girl once. And now Sandy was worried, because it had been easy to drop her, but would it be easy to get her back again if he should want her? The hotel boys had money, and once or twice he saw her talking with Jimmy Lane. Gee, but she looked pretty in her thin spring dresses and her wide straw hat.

  Why had he listened to Tempy at all? She didn’t know Pansetta, and just because her mother worked out in service she wanted him to snub the girl. What was that to be afraid of—her mother not being home after school? Even if Pansetta would let him go in the house with her and put his arms around her and love her, why shouldn’t he? Didn’t he have a right to have a girl like that, as well as the other fellows? Didn’t he have a right to be free with women, too, like all the rest of the young men? . . . But Pansetta wasn’t that kind of girl! . . . What made his mind run away with him? Because of what Tempy had said? . . . To hell with Tempy!

  “She’s just an old-fashioned darky Episcopalian, that’s what Tempy is! And she wanted me to drop Pansetta because her mother doesn’t belong to the Dunbar Whist Club. Gee, but I’m ashamed of myself. I’m a cad and a snob, that’s all I am, and I’m going to apologize.” Subconsciously he was living over a scene from an English novel he had read at the printing-shop, in which the Lord dropped the Squire’s daughter for a great Lady, but later returned to his first love. Sandy retained the words “cad” and “snob” in his vocabulary, but he wasn’t thinking of the novel now. He really believed, after three weeks of seeing Pansetta walking with other boys, that he had done wrong, and that Tempy was the villainess in the situation. It was worrying him a great deal; he decided to make up with Pansetta if he could.

  One Friday afternoon she left school with a great armful of books. They had to write an English composition for Monday and she had taken some volumes from the school library for reference. He might have offered to carry them for her, but he hadn’t. Instead he went to work—and there had been no other colored boys on the corner waiting for her as she went out. Now he could have kicked himself for his neglect, he thought, as he cleaned the rear room of Mr. Prentiss’s gift-card shop. Suddenly he dropped the broom with which he was sweeping, grabbed his cap, and left the place, for the desire to make friends with Pansetta possessed him more fiercely than ever, and he no longer cared about his work.

  “I’m going to see her right now,” he thought, “before I go home to supper. Gee, but I’m ashamed of the way I’ve treated her.”

  On the way to Pansetta’s house the lawns looked fresh and green and on some of them tulips were blooming. The late afternoon sky was aglow with sunset. Little boys were out in the streets with marbles and tops, and little girls were jumping rope on the sidewalks. Workmen were coming home, empty dinner-pails
in their hands, and a band of Negro laborers passed Sandy, singing softly together.

  “I must hurry,” the boy thought. “It will soon be our supper-time.” He ran until he was at Pansetta’s house—then came the indecision: Should he go in? Or not go in? He was ashamed of his treatment of her and embarrassed. Should he go on by as if he had not meant to call? Suppose she shut the door in his face! Or, worse, suppose she asked him to stay awhile! Should he stay? What Tempy had said didn’t matter any more. He wanted to be friends with Pansetta again. He wanted her to know he still liked her and wanted to walk home with her. But how could he say it? Had she seen him from the window? Maybe he could turn around and go back, and see her Monday at school.

  “No! I’m not a coward,” he declared. “Afraid of a girl! I’ll walk right up on the front porch and knock!” But the small house looked very quiet and the lace curtains were tightly drawn together at the windows. . . . He knocked again. Maybe there was no one home. . . . Yes, he heard somebody.