Not Without Laughter

by Langston Hughes

  Her furs slipped to the floor. “My Lord!” she cried, enveloping them in kisses. “What are you doing in Chicago, Annjee? My, I’m mighty glad to see you, Sandy! . . . I’m certainly surprised—and so happy I could cry. . . . Did you catch our act tonight? Can’t Billy play the piano, though? . . . Great heavens! Sandy, you’re twice as tall as me! When did you leave home? How’s that long-faced sister o’ mine, Tempy?”

  After repeated huggings the new-comers were introduced to everybody around. Sandy noticed a certain harshness in his aunt’s voice. “Smoking so much,” she explained later. “Drinking, too, I guess. But a blues-singer’s supposed to sing deep and hoarse, so it’s all right.”

  Beyond the drop curtain Sandy could hear the audience laughing in the theatre, and occasionally somebody shouting at the performers.

  “Come on! Let’s go and get a bite to eat,” Harriett suggested when they had finally calmed down enough to decide to move on. “Billy and me are always hungry. . . . Where’s Jimboy, Annjee? In the war, I suppose! It’d be just like that big jigaboo to go and enlist first thing, whether he had to or not. Billy here was due to go, too, but licker kept him out. This white folk’s war for democracy ain’t so hot, nohow! . . . Say, how’d you like to have some chop suey instead of going to a regular restaurant?”

  In a Chinese café they found a quiet booth, where the two sisters talked until past midnight—with Sandy and Billy silent for the most part. Harriett told Annjee about Aunt Hager’s death and the funeral that chill rainy day, and how Tempy had behaved so coldly when it was all over.

  “I left Stanton the week after,” Harriett said, “and haven’t been back since. Had hard times, too, but we’re kinder lucky now, Billy and me—got some dates booked over the Orpheum circuit soon. Liable to get wind of us at the Palace on Broadway one o’ these days. Can’t tell! Things are breakin’ pretty good for spade acts—since Jews are not like the rest of the white folks. They will give you a break if you’ve got some hot numbers to show ’em, whether you’re colored or not. And Jews control the theatres.”

  But the conversation went back to Stanton, when Hager and Jimboy and all of them had lived together, laughing and quarrelling and playing the guitar—while the tea got cold and the chop suey hardened to a sticky mess as the sisters wept. Billy marked busily on the table-cloth meanwhile with a stubby pencil, explaining to Sandy a new and intricate system he had found for betting on the numbers.

  “Harrie and me plays every day. Won a hundred forty dollars last week in Cleveland,” he said.

  “Gee! I ought to start playing,” Sandy exclaimed. “How much do you put on each number?”

  “Well, for a nickel you can win . . .”

  “No, you oughtn’t,” checked Harriett, suddenly conscious of Billy’s conversation, turning towards Sandy with a hand­kerchief to her eyes. “Don’t you fool with those numbers, honey! . . . What are you trying to do, Billy, start the boy off on your track? . . . You’ve got to get your education, Sandy, and amount to something. . . . Guess you’re in high school now, aren’t you, kid?”

  “Third year,” said Sandy slowly, dreading a new argument with his mother.

  “And determined to keep on going here this fall, in spite o’ my telling him I don’t see how,” put in Annjee. “Jimboy’s over yonder, Lord knows where, and I certainly can’t take care of Sandy and send him to school, too. No need of my trying—since he’s big enough and old enough to hold a job and make his own living. He ought to be wanting to help me, anyway. Instead of that, he’s determined to go back to school.”

  “Make his own living!” Harriett exclaimed, looking at Ann­jee in astonishment. “You mean you want Sandy to stay out of school to help you? What good is his little money to you?”

  “Well, he helps with the room rent,” his mother said. “And gets his meals where he works. That’s better’n we’d be doing with him studying and depending on me to keep things up.”

  “What do you mean better?” Harriett cried, glaring at her sister excitedly, forgetting they had been weeping together five minutes before. “For crying out loud—better? Why, Aunt Hager’d turn over in her grave if she heard you talking so calmly about Sandy leaving school—the way she wanted to make something out of this kid. . . . How much do you earn a week?” Harriett asked suddenly, looking at her nephew across the table.

  “Fourteen dollars.”

  “Pshaw! Is that all? I can give you that much myself,” Harriett said. “We’ve got straight bookings until Christmas—then cabaret work’s good around here. Bill and I can always make the dough—and you go to school.”

  “I want to, Aunt Harrie,” Sandy said, suddenly content.

  “Yea, old man,” put in Billy. “And I’ll shoot you a little change myself—to play the numbers,” he added, winking.

  “Well,” Annjee began, “what about . . .”

  But Harriett ignored Billy’s interjection as well as her sister’s open mouth. “Running an elevator for fourteen dollars a week and losing your education!” she cried. “Good Lord! Annjee, you ought to be ashamed, wanting him to keep that up. This boy’s gotta get ahead—all of us niggers are too far back in this white man’s country to let any brains go to waste! Don’t you realize that? . . . You and me was foolish all right, breaking mama’s heart, leaving school, but Sandy can’t do like us. He’s gotta be what his grandma Hager wanted him to be—able to help the black race, Annjee! You hear me? Help the whole race!”

  “I want to,” Sandy said.

  “Then you’ll stay in school!” Harriett affirmed, still looking at Annjee. “You surely wouldn’t want him stuck in an elevator for ever—just to help you, would you, sister?”

  “I reckon I wouldn’t,” Annjee murmured, shaking her head.

  “You know damn well you wouldn’t,” Harriett concluded. And, before they parted, she slipped a ten-dollar bill into her nephew’s hand.

  “For your books,” she said.

  When Sandy and his mother started home, it was very late, but in a little Southern church in a side street, some old black worshippers were still holding their nightly meeting. High and fervently they were singing:

  By an’ by when de mawnin’ comes,

  Saints an’ sinners all are gathered home. . . .

  As the deep volume of sound rolled through the open door, Annjee and her son stopped to listen.

  “It’s like Stanton,” Sandy said, “and the tent in the Hickory Woods.”

  “Sure is!” his mother exclaimed. “Them old folks are still singing—even in Chicago! . . . Funny how old folks like to sing that way, ain’t it?”

  “It’s beautiful!” Sandy cried—for, vibrant and steady like a stream of living faith, their song filled the whole night:

  An’ we’ll understand it better by an’ by!

  CHRONOLOGY

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  NOTES

  Chronology

  1919

  February 17: Returning veterans of the Fifteenth Regiment of New York’s National Guard march triumphally through Harlem. February 19–21: While the Paris Peace Conference is taking place, W.E.B. Du Bois organizes Pan-African Conference in Paris, attended by fifty-seven delegates from the United States, the West Indies, Europe, and Africa; conference calls for acknowledgment and protection of the rights of Africans under colonial rule. March: Release of The Homesteader, directed and produced by self-published novelist and entrepreneur Oscar Micheaux, first feature-length film by an African American. May: Hair-care entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker dies at her estate in Irvington, New York; her daughter A’Lelia Walker assumes control of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. May–October: In what becomes known as “the Red Summer,” racial conflicts boil over in the wake of the return of African American veterans; incidents of racial violence erupt across the United States, including outbreaks in Charleston, South Carolina; Long­view, Texas; Omaha; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Knoxville; and Elaine, Arkansas. June: Marcus Garvey
establishes his Black Star Line (the shipping concern will operate until 1922). July: Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die,” written in response to the summer of violence, appears in Max Eastman’s magazine The Liberator. September: Jessie Redmon Fauset joins staff of The Crisis, the literary magazine of the NAACP founded in 1910, as literary editor.

  1920

  January: The Brownie’s Book, a magazine for African American children, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois with Jessie Redmon Fauset and Augustus Dill, begins its run of twenty-four issues. Oscar Micheaux releases the anti-lynching film, Within Our Gates, an answer both to D. W. Griffith’s inflammatory The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the Red Summer of 1919. April: In an article in The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois writes: “A renaissance of American Negro literature is due.” August: The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded by Jamaican immigrant and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, holds its first convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City, attended by some 25,000 delegates. November: James Weldon Johnson becomes executive secretary (and first black officer) of the NAACP. Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” is released by Okeh Records. Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, starring Charles Gilpin, opens at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village.

  Books

  W.E.B. Du Bois: Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Har­court, Brace & Howe)

  Claude McKay: Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (Grant Richards)

  1921

  February: Max Eastman invites Claude McKay, just returned from England, to become associate editor of The Liberator. March: Harry Pace forms Black Swan Phonograph Company, one of the first black-owned record companies in Harlem; its most successful recording artist is Ethel Waters. May: Shuffle Along, a pioneering all–African American production, with book by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles and music and lyrics by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, opens on Broadway and becomes a hit. It showcases such stars as Florence Mills and Josephine Baker. June: Langston Hughes publishes his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in The Crisis. August–September: Exhibit of African American art at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, including work by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Meta Fuller, and Laura Wheeler Waring. December: René Maran, a native of Martinique, becomes the first black recipient of the Prix Goncourt, for his novel Batouala; soon translated into English, it will be widely discussed in the African American press.

  1922

  January: The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill is passed by the House of Representatives; it is subsequently blocked in the Senate. Spring: Birthright, novel of African American life by the white novelist T. S. Stribling, is published by Century Publications. (Oscar Micheaux will make two films based on the book, in 1924 and 1938.) White real estate magnate William E. Harmon establishes the Harmon Foundation to advance African American achievements.

  Books

  Georgia Douglas Johnson: Bronze (B. J. Brimmer)

  James Weldon Johnson, editor: The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, Brace)

  Claude McKay: Harlem Shadows (Harcourt, Brace; expanded version of Spring in New Hampshire)

  T. S. Stribling: Birthright (Century)

  1923

  January: Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League and edited by sociologist Charles S. Johnson, is founded. Claude McKay addresses the Fourth Congress of the Third International in Moscow. February: Bessie Smith’s “Downhearted Blues” (written and originally recorded by Alberta Hunter) is released by Columbia Records and sells nearly a million copies within six months. May: Willis Richardson’s The Chip Woman, produced by the National Ethiopian Art Players, becomes the first serious play by an African American playwright to open on Broadway. June: Marcus Garvey receives a five-year sentence for mail fraud. December: Tenor Roland Hayes, having won acclaim in London as a singer of classical music, gives a concert of lieder and spirituals at Town Hall in New York. The Messenger, founded in 1917 by Asa Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen as a black trade unionist magazine with socialist sympathies, begins publishing more literary material under editorial guidance of George S. Schuyler and Theophilus Lewis.

  Books

  Marcus Garvey: Philosophy and Opinion of Marcus Garvey (Universal Publishing House)

  Jean Toomer: Cane (Boni & Liveright)

  1924

  March: The Civic Club dinner, held in honor of Jessie Redmon Fauset on publishing her first novel There Is Confusion, is sponsored by Opportunity and Charles S. Johnson. Those in attendance include Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Eric Walrond, Gwendolyn Bennett, and such representatives of the New York publishing world as Alfred A. Knopf and Horace Liveright. (In retrospect the occasion is often taken to mark the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance.) May: W.E.B. Du Bois attacks Marcus Garvey in The Crisis article “A Lunatic or a Traitor.” Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun Got Wings, starring Paul Robeson and controversial for its theme of miscegenation, opens. Autumn: Countee Cullen is the first recipient of Witter Bynner Poetry Competition. September: René Maran publishes poems by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer in his Paris newspaper, Les Continents. Louis Armstrong comes to New York from Chicago to join Fletcher Henderson’s band at the Roseland Ballroom.

  Books

  W.E.B. Du Bois: The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (Stratford)

  Jessie Redmon Fauset: There Is Confusion (Boni & Live­right)

  Walter White: The Fire in the Flint (Knopf)

  1925

  February: After his appeals are denied, Marcus Garvey begins serving his sentence for mail fraud at Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. March: Howard Philosophy Professor Alain Locke edits a special issue of The Survey Graphic titled “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro”; in November The New Negro, an expanded book version, is published by Albert and Charles Boni. The volume features six pages of painter Aaron Douglas’s African-inspired illustrations, and includes writing by Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Richard Bruce Nugent, Anne Spencer, Claude McKay, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Arthur Schomburg, Charles S. Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and E. Franklin Frazier. May: Opportunity holds its first awards dinner, recognizing, among others, Langston Hughes (“The Weary Blues,” first prize), Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Eric Walrond, and Sterling Brown. Paul Robeson appears at Greenwich Village Theatre in a concert entirely devoted to spirituals, accompanied by Lawrence Brown. August: A. Phillip Randolph organizes the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. October: The American Negro Labor Congress is founded in Chicago. November: First prize of The Crisis awards goes to poet Countee Cullen. Paul Robeson stars in Oscar Micheaux’s film Body and Soul. December: Marita Bonner publishes essay “On Being Young—A Woman—And Colored” in The Crisis, about the predicament and possibilities of the educated black woman.

  Books

  Countee Cullen: Color (Harper)

  James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, editors: The Book of American Negro Spirituals (Viking Press)

  Alain Locke, editor: The New Negro: An Interpretation (Albert and Charles Boni)

  1926

  January: The Harmon Foundation announces its first awards for artistic achievement by African Americans. Palmer Hayden, a World War I veteran and menial laborer, wins the gold medal for painting. February: Jessie Redmon Fauset steps down as editor of The Crisis. The play Lulu Belle, starring Lenore Ulric in blackface as well as the African American actress Edna Thomas, opens to great success on Broadway; it helps create a vogue of whites frequenting Harlem nightspots. March: The Savoy Ballroom opens on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets. June: Successive issues of The Nation feature Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and George S. Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum.” July: W.E.B. Du Bois founds Krigwa Players, Harlem theater group devoted to plays depicting African American life. August: Carl Van Vechten, white novelist and close friend
to many Negro Renaissance figures, publishes his roman à clef, Nigger Heaven, with Knopf. Although many of his friends—including James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Lang­ston Hughes—are supportive, the book is widely disliked by African American readers, and notably condemned by W.E.B. Du Bois. October: Arthur Schomburg’s collection of thousands of books, manuscripts, and artworks is purchased for the New York Public Library by the Carnegie Corporation; it will form the basis of what will become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. November: Fire!!, a journal edited by Wallace Thurman, makes its sole appearance. Contributors include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gwendolyn Bennett, among others. “Smoke, Lilies and Jade,” a short story by Richard Bruce Nugent published in Fire!!, shocks many by its delineation of a homosexual liaison as well as by Nugent’s suggestive line drawings. Most copies are accidentally destroyed in a fire. December: Countee Cullen begins contributing a column, “The Dark Tower,” to Opportunity. (It will run until September 1928.)

  Books

  W. C. Handy, editor: Blues: An Anthology (Boni & Boni)

  Langston Hughes: The Weary Blues (Knopf)

  Alain Locke, editor: Four Negro Poets (Simon & Schuster)

  Carl Van Vechten: Nigger Heaven (Knopf)

  Eric Walrond: Tropic Death (Boni & Liveright; story collection)

  Walter White: Flight (Knopf)

  1927

  July: Ethel Waters stars on Broadway in the revue Africana. August: Rudolph Fisher’s essay “The Caucasian Storms Harlem” is published in The American Mercury. September: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, first published anonymously in 1912, is republished by Knopf. October: A’Lelia Walker, cosmetics heiress and Harlem socialite, opens The Dark Tower, a tearoom intended as a cultural gathering place, at her home on West 130th Street: “We dedicate this tower to the aesthetes. That cultural group of young Negro writers, sculptors, painters, music artists, composers, and their friends.” The Theatre Guild production of DuBose Heyward’s play Porgy, with an African American cast, opens to great success. December: Marcus Garvey, pardoned by Calvin Coolidge after serving more than half of five-year sentence for mail fraud, is deported. Duke Ellington and his orchestra begin what will prove a years-long engagement at the Cotton Club of Harlem.