“Say, kid,” it whispered smoothly, touching the boy’s arm, “listen, I got some swell French pictures up in my room—naked women and everything! Want to come up and see them?”
“No,” said Sandy quickening his pace. “I got to go somewhere.”
“But I room right around the corner,” the voice insisted. “Come on by. You’re a nice kid, you know it? Listen, don’t walk so fast. Stop, let me talk to you.”
But Sandy was beginning to understand. A warm sweat broke out on his neck and forehead. Sometimes, at the pool hall in Stanton, he had heard the men talk about queer fellows who stopped boys in the streets and tried to coax them to their rooms.
“He thinks I’m dumb,” thought Sandy, “but I’m wise to him!” Yet he wondered what such men did with the boys who accompanied them. Curious, he’d like to find out—but he was afraid; so at the next corner he turned and started rapidly towards State Street, but the queer fellow kept close beside him, begging.
“. . . and we’ll have a nice time. . . . I got wine in the room, if you want some, and a vic, too.”
“Get away, will you!”
They had reached State Street where the lights were bright and people were passing all the time. Sandy could see the fellow’s anxious face quite clearly now.
“Listen, kid . . . you . . .”
But suddenly the man was no longer beside him—for Sandy commenced to run. On the brightly lighted avenue panic seized him. He had to escape this powdered face at his shoulder. The whining voice made him sick inside—and, almost without knowing it, his legs began swerving swiftly between the crowds along the curb. When he stopped in front of the Monogram Theatre, two blocks away, he was freed of his companion.
“Gee, that’s nice,” panted Sandy, grinning as he stood looking at the pictures in front of the vaudeville house, while hundreds of dark people passed up and down on the sidewalk behind him. Lots of folks were going into the theatre, laughing and pushing, for one of the great blues-singing Smiths was appearing there. Sandy walked towards the ticket-booth to see what the prices were.
“Buy me a ticket, will you?” said a feminine voice beside him. This time it was a girl—a very ugly, skinny girl, whose smile revealed a row of dirty teeth. She sidled up to the startled boy whom she had accosted and took his hand.
“I’m not going in,” Sandy said shortly, as he backed away, wiping the palm of his hand on his coat-sleeve.
“All right then, stingy!” hissed the girl, flouncing her hips and digging into her own purse for the coins to buy a ticket. “I got money.”
Some men standing on the edge of the sidewalk laughed as Sandy went up the street. A little black child in front of him toddled along in the crowd, seemingly by itself, licking a big chocolate ice-cream cone that dripped down the front of its dress.
So this was Chicago where the buildings were like towers and the lake was like a sea . . . State Street, the greatest Negro street in the world, where people were always happy, lights for ever bright; and where the prettiest brown-skin women on earth could be found—so the men in Stanton said.
“I guess I didn’t walk the right way. But maybe tomorrow I’ll see other things,” Sandy thought, “the Loop and the lake and the museum and the library. Maybe they’ll be better.”
He turned into a side street going back towards Wabash Avenue. It was darker there, and near the alley a painted woman called him, stepping out from among the shadows.
“Say, baby, com’ere!” But the boy went on.
Crossing overhead an L train thundered by, flashing its flow of yellow light on the pavement beneath.
Sandy turned into Wabash Avenue and cut across the street. As he approached the colored Y.M.C.A., three boys came out with swimming suits on their arms, and one of them said: “Damn, but it’s hot!” They went up the street laughing and talking with friendly voices, and at the corner they turned off.
“I must be nearly home,” Sandy thought, as he made out a group of kids still playing under the streetlight. Then he distinguished, among the other shabby buildings, the brick house where he lived. The front porch was still crowded with roomers trying to keep cool, and as the boy came up to the foot of the steps, some of the fellows seated there moved to let him pass.
“Good-evenin’, Mr. Rogers,” Mrs. Harris called, and as Sandy had never been called Mr. Rogers before, it made him feel very manly and a little embarrassed as he threaded his way through the group on the porch.
Upstairs he found his mother sleeping deeply on one side of the bed. He undressed, keeping on his underwear, and crawled in on the other side, but he lay awake a long while because it was suffocatingly hot, and very close in their room. The bed-bugs bit him on the legs. Every time he got half asleep, an L train roared by, shrieking outside their open windows, lighting up the room, and shaking the whole house. Each time the train came, he started and trembled as though a sudden dragon were rushing at the bed. But then, after midnight, when the elevated cars passed less frequently, and he became more used to their passing, he went to sleep.
TWENTY-NINE
Elevator
* * *
THE following day Sandy went to work as elevator-boy at the hotel in the Loop where Mr. Harris was head bellman, and during the hot summer months that followed, his life in Chicago gradually settled into a groove of work and home—work, and home to Annjee’s stuffy little room against the elevated tracks, where at night his mother read the war news and cried because there had been no letter from Jimboy. Whether Sandy’s father was in Brest or Saint-Lazare with the labor battalions, or at the front, she did not know. The Chicago Defender said that colored troops were fighting in the Champagne sector with great distinction, but Annjee cried anew when she read that.
“No news is good news,” Sandy repeated every night to comfort his mother, for he couldn’t imagine Jimboy dead. “Papa’s all right!” But Annjee worried and wept, half sick all the time, for ever reading the death lists fearfully for her husband’s name.
That summer the heat was unbearable. Uptown in the Black Belt the air was like a steaming blanket around your head. In the Loop the sky was white-hot metal. Even on the lake front there was no relief unless you hurried into the crowded water. And there were long stretches of beach where the whites did not want Negroes to swim; so it was often dangerous to bathe if you were colored.
Sandy sweltered as he stood at the door of his box-like, mirrored car in the big hotel lobby. He wore a red uniform with brass buttons and a tight coat that had to be kept fastened no matter how warm it was. But he felt very proud of himself holding his first full-time job, helping his mother with the room rent, and trying to save a little money out of each pay in order to return to high school in the fall.
The prospects of returning to school, however, were not bright. Some weeks it was impossible for Sandy to save even a half-dollar. And Annjee said now that she believed he should stay out of school and work to take care of himself, since he was as large as a man and had more education already than she’d had at his age. Aunt Hager would not have felt that way, though, Sandy thought, remembering his grandmother’s great ambition for him. But Annjee was different, less far-seeing than her mother had been, less full of hopes for her son, not ambitious about him—caring only for the war and Jimboy.
At the hotel Sandy’s hours on duty were long, and his legs and back ached with weariness from standing straight in one spot all the time, opening and closing the bronze door of the elevator. He had been assigned the last car in a row of six, each manned by a colored youth standing inside his metal box in a red uniform, operating the lever that sent the car up from the basement grill to the roof-garden restaurant on the fifteenth floor and then back down again all day. Repeating up-down—up-down—up-down interminably, carrying white guests.
After two months of this there were times when Sandy felt as though he could stand it no longer. The same flow of people week after week—fashionable women, officers, business men; the fetid air of the elevator-shaft, heavy with br
eath and the perfume of bodies; the same doors opening at the same unchanging levels hundreds of times each innumerable, monotonous day. The L in the morning; the L again at night. The street or the porch for a few minutes of air. Then bed. And the same thing tomorrow.
“I’ve got to get out of this,” Sandy thought. “It’s an awful job.” Yet some of the fellows had been there for years. Three of the elevator-men on Sandy’s shift were more than forty years old—and had never gotten ahead in life. Mr. Harris had been a bell-hop since his boyhood, doing the same thing day after day—and now he was very proud of being head bell-boy in Chicago.
“I’ve got to get out of this,” Sandy kept repeating. “Or maybe I’ll get stuck here, too, like they are, and never get away. I’ve got to go back to school.”
Yet he knew that his mother was making very little money—serving more or less as an apprentice in the hairdressing-shop, trying to learn the trade. And if he quit work, how would he live? Annjee did not favor his returning to school. And could he study if he were hungry? Could he study if he were worried about having no money? Worried about Annjee’s displeasure?
“Yes! I can!” he said. “I’m going to study!” He thought about Booker Washington sleeping under the wooden pavements at Richmond—because he had had no place to stay on his way to Hampton in search of an education. He thought about Frederick Douglass—a fugitive slave, owning not even himself, and yet a student. “If they could study, I can, too! When school opens, I’m going to quit this job. Maybe I can get another one at night or in the late afternoon—but it doesn’t matter—I’m going back to my classes in September. . . . I’m through with elevators.”
Jimboy! Jimboy! Like Jimboy! something inside him warned, quitting work with no money, uncaring.
“Not like Jimboy,” Sandy countered against himself. “Not like my father, always wanting to go somewhere. I’d get as tired of travelling all the time, as I do of running this elevator up and down day after day. . . . I’m more like Harriett—not wanting to be a servant at the mercies of white people for ever. . . . I want to do something for myself, by myself. . . . Free. . . . I want a house to live in, too, when I’m older—like Tempy’s and Mr. Siles’s. . . . But I wouldn’t want to be like Tempy’s friends—or her husband, dull and colorless, putting all his money away in a white bank, ashamed of colored people.”
“A lot of minstrels—that’s all niggers are!” Mr. Siles had said once. “Clowns, jazzers, just a band of dancers—that’s why they never have anything. Never be anything but servants to the white people.”
Clowns! Jazzers! Band of dancers! . . . Harriett! Jimboy! Aunt Hager! . . . A band of dancers! . . . Sandy remembered his grandmother whirling around in front of the altar at revival meetings in the midst of the other sisters, her face shining with light, arms outstretched as though all the cares of the world had been cast away; Harriett in the back yard under the apple-tree, eagle-rocking in the summer evenings to the tunes of the guitar; Jimboy singing. . . . But was that why Negroes were poor, because they were dancers, jazzers, clowns? . . . The other way round would be better: dancers because of their poverty; singers because they suffered; laughing all the time because they must forget. . . . It’s more like that, thought Sandy.
A band of dancers. . . . Black dancers—captured in a white world. . . . Dancers of the spirit, too. Each black dreamer a captured dancer of the spirit. . . . Aunt Hager’s dreams for Sandy dancing far beyond the limitations of their poverty, of their humble station in life, of their dark skins.
“I wants you to be a great man, son,” she often told him, sitting on the porch in the darkness, singing, dreaming, calling up the deep past, creating dreams within the child. “I wants you to be a great man.”
“And I won’t disappoint you!” Sandy said that hot Chicago summer, just as though Hager were still there, planning for him. “I won’t disappoint you!” he said, standing straight in his sweltering red suit in the cage of the hotel elevator. “I won’t disappoint you, Aunt Hager,” dreaming at night in the stuffy little room in the great Black Belt of Chicago. “I won’t disappoint you now,” opening his eyes at dawn when Annjee shook him to get up and go to work again.
THIRTY
Princess of the Blues
* * *
ONE hot Monday in August Harrietta Williams, billed as “The Princess of the Blues,” opened at the Monogram Theatre on State Street. The screen had carried a slide of her act the week previous, so Sandy knew she would be there, and he and his mother were waiting anxiously for her appearance. They were unable to find out before the performance where she would be living, or if she had arrived in town, but early that Monday evening Sandy hurried home from work, and he and Annjee managed to get seats in the theatre, although it was soon crowded to capacity and people stood in the aisles.
It was a typical Black Belt audience, laughing uproariously, stamping its feet to the music, kidding the actors, and joining in the performance, too. Rows of shiny black faces, gay white teeth, bobbing heads. Everybody having a grand time with the vaudeville, swift and amusing. A young tap-dancer rhymed his feet across the stage, grinning from ear to ear, stepping to the tantalizing music, ending with a series of intricate and amazing contortions that brought down the house. Then a sister act came on, with a stock of sentimental ballads offered in a wholly jazzy manner. They sang even a very melancholy mammy song with their hips moving gaily at every beat.
O, what would I do
Without dear you,
Sweet mammy?
they moaned reverently, with their thighs shaking.
“Aw, step it, sweet gals!” the men and boys in the audience called approvingly. “We’ll be yo’ mammy and yo’ pappy, too! Do it, pretty mamas!”
A pair of black-faced comedians tumbled on the stage as the girls went off, and began the usual line of old jokes and razor comedy.
“Gee, I wish Aunt Harriett’s act would come on,” Sandy said as he and Annjee laughed nervously at the comedians.
Finally the two blacked-up fellows broke into a song called Walking the Dog, flopping their long-toed shoes, twirling their middles like egg-beaters, and made their exit to a roar of laughter and applause. Then the canvas street-scene rose, disclosing a gorgeous background of blue velvet, with a piano and a floor-lamp in the centre of the stage.
“This is Harriett’s part now,” Sandy whispered excitedly as a tall, yellow, slick-headed young man came in and immediately began playing the piano. “And, mama, that’s Billy Sanderlee!”
“Sure is!” said Annjee.
Suddenly the footlights were lowered and the spotlight flared, steadied itself at the right of the stage, and waited. Then, stepping out from among the blue curtains, Harriett entered in a dress of glowing orange, flame-like against the ebony of her skin, barbaric, yet beautiful as a jungle princess. She swayed towards the footlights, while Billy teased the keys of the piano into a hesitating delicate jazz. Then she began to croon a new song—a popular version of an old Negro melody, refashioned with words from Broadway.
“Gee, Aunt Harrie’s prettier than ever!” Sandy exclaimed to his mother.
“Same old Harriett,” said Annjee. “But kinder hoarse.”
“Sings good, though,” Sandy cried when Harriett began to snap her fingers, putting a slow, rocking pep into the chorus, rolling her bright eyes to the tune of the melody as the piano rippled and cried under Billy Sanderlee’s swift fingers.
“She’s the same Harrie,” murmured Annjee.
When she appeared again, in an apron of blue calico, with a bandanna handkerchief knotted about her head, she walked very slowly. The man at the piano had begun to play blues—the old familiar folk-blues—and the audience settled into a receptive silence broken only by a “Lawdy! . . . Good Lawdy! Lawd!” from some southern lips at the back of the house, as Harriett sang:
Red sun, red sun, why don’t you rise today?
Red sun, O sun! Why don’t you rise today?
Ma heart is breakin’—ma baby’s
gone away.
A few rows ahead of Annjee a woman cried out: “True, Lawd!” and swayed her body.
Little birds, little birds, ain’t you gonna sing this morn?
Says, little chirpin’ birds, ain’t you gonna sing this morn?
I cannot sleep—ma lovin’ man is gone.
“Whee-ee-e! . . . Hab mercy! . . . Moan it, gal!” exclamations and shouts broke loose in the understanding audience.
“Just like when papa used to play for her,” said Sandy. But Annjee was crying, remembering Jimboy, and fumbling in her bag for a handkerchief. On the stage the singer went on—as though singing to herself—her voice sinking to a bitter moan as the listeners rocked and swayed.
It’s a mighty blue mornin’ when yo’ daddy leaves yo’ bed.
I says a blue, blue mornin’ when yo’ daddy leaves yo’ bed—
’Cause if you lose yo’ man, you’d just as well be dead!
Her final number was a dance-song which she sang in a sparkling dress of white sequins, ending the act with a mad collection of steps and a swift sudden whirl across the whole stage as the orchestra joined Billy’s piano in a triumphant arch of jazz.
The audience yelled and clapped and whistled for more, stamping their feet and turning to one another with shouted comments of enjoyment.
“Gee! She’s great,” said Sandy. When another act finally had the stage after Harriett’s encores, he was anxious to get back to the dressing-room to see her.
“Maybe they won’t let us in,” Annjee objected timidly.
“Let’s try,” Sandy insisted, pulling his mother up. “We don’t want to hear this fat woman with the flag singing Over There. You’ll start crying, anyhow. Come on, mama.”
When they got backstage, they found Harriett standing in the dressing-room door laughing with one of the black-face comedians, a summer fur over her shoulders, ready for the street. Billy Sanderlee and the tap-dancing boy were drinking gin from a bottle that Billy held, and Harriett was holding her glass, when she saw Sandy coming.
Not Without Laughter Page 23
