Not Without Laughter Read online

  “No, I ain’t, not yet.”

  “Great colored tent-meetin’ with de Battle-Ax of de Lawd, Reverend Braswell preachin’! Yes, sir! Gwine start August eigh­teenth in de Hickory Woods yonder by de edge o’ town.”

  “Good news,” cried Hager. “Mo’ sinners than enough’s in need o’ savin’. I’s gwine to take Sandy an’ get him started right with de Lawd. An’ if that onery Jimboy’s back here, I gwine make him go, too, an’ look Jesus in de face. Annjee an’ me’s saved, chile! . . . You Sandy, bring us some drinkin’-water from de pump.” Aunt Hager rapped on the window with her knuckles to the boy playing outside. “An’ stop wrastlin’ with that gal.”

  Sandy rose triumphant from the prone body of black little Willie-Mae, lying squalling on the cinder-path near the back gate. “She started it,” he yelled, running towards the pump. The girl began a reply, but at that moment a rickety wagon drawn by a white mule and driven by a grey-haired, leather-colored old man came rattling down the alley.

  “Hy, there, Hager!” called the old Negro, tightening his reins on the mule, which immediately began to eat corn-tops over the back fence. “How you been treatin’ yo’self?”

  “Right tolable,” cried Hager, for she and Sister Whiteside had both emerged from the kitchen and were approaching the driver. “How you doin’, Brother Logan?”

  “Why, if here ain’t Sis’ Whiteside, too!” said the old beau, sitting up straight on his wagon-seat and showing a row of ivory teeth in a wide grin. “I’s doin’ purty well for a po’ widower what ain’t got nobody to bake his bread. Doin’ purty well. Hee! Hee! None o’ you all ain’t sorry for me, is you? How de storm treat you, Hager? . . . Says it carried off yo’ porch? . . . That’s certainly too bad! Well, it did some o’ these white folks worse’n that. I got ’nough work to do to last me de next fo’ weeks, cleanin’ up yards an’ haulin’ off trash, me an’ dis mule here. . . . How’s yo’ chillen, Sis’ Williams?”

  “Oh, they all right, thank yuh. Annjee’s still at Mis’ Rice’s, an’ Harriet’s in de country at de club.”

  “Is she?” said Brother Logan. “I seed her in town night ’fore last down on Pearl Street ’bout ten o’clock.”

  “You ain’t seed Harriett no night ’fore last,” disputed Hager vigorously. “She don’t come in town ’ceptin’ Thursday afternoons, an’ that’s tomorrow.”

  “Sister, I ain’t blind,” said the old man, hurt that his truth should be doubted. “I—seen—Harriett Williams on Pearl Street . . . with Maudel Smothers an’ two boys ’bout ten o’clock day before yestidy night! An’ they was gwine to de Waiters’ Ball, ’cause I asked Maudel where they was gwine, an’ she say so. Then I says to Harriett: ‘Does yo’ mammy know you’s out this late?’ an’ she laughed an’ say: ‘Oh, that’s all right!’ . . . Don’t tell me I ain’t seen Harriett, Hager.”

  “Well, Lawd help!” Aunt Hager cried, her mouth open. “You done seed my chile in town an’ she ain’t come anear home! Stayed all night at Maudel’s, I reckon. . . . I tells her ’bout runnin’ with that gal from de Bottoms. That’s what makes her lie to me—tellin’ me she don’t come in town o’ nights. Maudel’s folks don’t keep no kind o’ house, and mens goes there, an’ they sells licker, an’ they gambles an’ fights. . . . Is you sho that’s right, Brother Logan, ma chile done been in town an’ ain’t come home?”

  “It ain’t wrong!” said old man Logan, cracking his long whip on the white mule’s haunches. “Gittiyap! You ole jinny!” and he drove off.

  “Um-uh!” said Sister Whiteside to Hager as the two toil-worn old women walked toward the house. “That’s de way they does you!” The peddler gathered up her things. “I better be movin’, ’cause I got these greens to sell yit, an’ it’s gittin’ ’long towards evenin’. . . . That’s de way chillens does you, Sister Williams! I knows! That’s de way they does!”

  THREE

  Jimboy’s Letter

  * * *

  KANSAS CITY, MO.

  13 June 1912

  DEAR ANNJELICA,

  I been laying off to written you ever since I left home but you know how it is. Work has not been so good here. Am with a section gang of coloreds and greeks and somehow strained my back on the Union Pacific laying ties so I will be home on Saturday. Will do my best to try and finish out weak here. Love my darling wife also kiss my son Sandy for me. Am dying to see you,

  affectionately as ever and allways

  till the judgment day,

  Jimboy Rogers

  “Strained his back, has he? Unhuh! An’ then comes writin’ ’bout till de judgment day!” Hager muttered when she heard it. “Always something wrong with that nigger! He’ll be back here now, layin’ ’round, doin’ nothin’ fo’ de rest o’ de summer, turnin’ ma house into a theatre with him an’ Harriett singin’ their rag-time, an’ that guitar o’ his’n wangin’ ever’ evenin’! ’Tween him an’ Harriett both it’s a wonder I ain’t plumb crazy. But Harriett do work fo’ her livin’. She ain’t no loafer. . . . Huh! . . . Annjee, you was sho a fool when you married that boy, an’ you still is! . . . I’s gwine next do’ to Sister Johnson’s!” Aunt Hager went out the back and across the yard, where, next door, Tom and Sarah Johnson, Willie-Mae’s grandparents, sat on a bench against the side-wall of an unpainted shanty. They were both quietly smoking their corn-cob pipes in the evening dusk.

  Sandy, looking at the back of the letter that his mother held, stood at the kitchen-table rapidly devouring a large piece of fresh lemon pie, which she had brought from Mrs. J. J. Rice’s. Annjee had said to save the two cold fried lamb chops until tomorrow, or Sandy would have eaten those, too.

  “Wish you’d brought home some more pie,” the boy declared, his lips white with meringue, but Annjee, who had just got in from work, paid no attention to her son’s appreciative remarks on her cookery.

  Instead she said: “Ma certainly ain’t got no time for Jimboy, has she?” and then sat down with the open letter still in her hand—a single sheet of white paper pencilled in large awkward letters. She put it on the table, rested her dark face in her hands, and began to read it again. . . . She knew how it was, of course, that her husband hadn’t written before. That was all right now. Working all day in the hot sun with a gang of Greeks, a man was tired at night, besides living in a box-car, where there was no place to write a letter anyway. He was a great big kid, that’s what Jimboy was, cut out for playing. But when he did work, he tried to outdo everybody else. Annjee could see him in her mind, tall and well-built, his legs apart, muscles bulging as he swung the big hammer above his head, driving steel. No wonder he hurt his back, trying to lay more ties a day than anybody else on the railroad. That was just like Jimboy. But she was kind of pleased he had hurt it, since it would bring him home.

  “Ain’t you glad he’s comin’, Sandy?”

  “Sure,” answered the child, swallowing his last mouthful of pie. “I hope he brings me that gun he promised to buy last Easter.” The boy wiped his sticky hands on the dish-cloth and ran out into the back yard, calling: “Willie-Mae! Willie-Mae!”

  “Stay right over yonder!” answered his grandmother through the dusk. “Willie-Mae’s in de bed, sir, an’ we old folks settin’ out here tryin’ to have a little peace.” From the tone of Hager’s voice he knew he wasn’t wanted in the Johnson’s yard, so he went back into the house, looked at his mother reading her letter again, and then lay down on the kitchen-floor.

  “Affectionately as ever and allways till the judgment day,” she read, “Jimboy Rogers.”

  He loved her, Annjee was sure of that, and it wasn’t another woman that made him go away so often. Eight years they’d been married. No, nine—because Sandy was nine, and he was ready to be born when they had had the wedding. And Jimboy left the week after they were married, to go to Omaha, where he worked all winter. When he came back, Sandy was in the world, sitting up sucking meat skins. It was springtime and they bought a piano for the house—but later the instalment man came and took it back to the
store. All that summer her husband stayed home and worked a little, but mostly he fished, played pool, taught Harriett to buck-dance, and quarrelled with Aunt Hager. Then in the winter he went to Jefferson City and got a job at the Capitol.

  Jimboy was always going, but Aunt Hager was wrong about his never working. It was just that he couldn’t stay in one place all the time. He’d been born running, he said, and had run ever since. Besides, what was there in Stanton anyhow for a young colored fellow to do except dig sewer ditches for a few cents an hour or maybe porter around a store for seven dollars a week. Colored men couldn’t get many jobs in Stanton, and foreigners were coming in, taking away what little work they did have. No wonder he didn’t stay home. Hadn’t Annjee’s father been in Stanton forty years and hadn’t he died with Aunt Hager still taking in washings to help keep up the house?

  There was no well-paid work for Negro men, so Annjee didn’t blame Jimboy for going away looking for something better. She’d go with him if it wasn’t for her mother. If she went, though, Aunt Hager wouldn’t have anybody for company but Harriett, and Harriett was the youngest and wildest of the three children. With Pa Williams dead going on ten years, Hager washing every day, Tempy married, and Annjee herself out working, there had been nobody to take much care of the little sister as she grew up. Harriett had had no raising, even though she was smart and in high school. A female child needed care. But she could sing! Lawdy! And dance, too! That was another reason why Aunt Hager didn’t like Jimboy. The devil’s musicianer, she called him, straight from hell, teaching Harriett buck-and-winging! But when he took his soft-playing guitar and picked out spirituals and old-time Christian hymns on its sweet strings, Hager forgot she was his enemy, and sang and rocked with the rest of them. When Jimboy was home, you couldn’t get lonesome or blue.

  “Gee, I’ll be glad when he comes!” Annjee said to herself. “But if he goes off again, I’ll feel like dying in this dead old town. I ain’t never been away from here nohow.” She spoke aloud to the dim oil-lamp smoking on the table and the sleeping boy on the floor. “I believe I’ll go with him next time. I declare I do!” And then, realizing that Jimboy had never once told her when he was leaving or for what destination, she amended her utterance. “I’ll follow him, though, as soon as he writes.” Because, almost always after he had been away two or three weeks, he would write. “I’ll follow him, sure, if he goes off again. I’ll leave Sandy here and send money back to mama. Then Harriett could settle down and take care of ma and stop runnin’ the streets so much. . . . Yes, that’s what I’ll do next time!”

  This going away was a new thought, and the dark, strong-bodied young woman at the table suddenly began to dream of the cities she had never seen to which Jimboy would lead her. Why, he had been as far north as Canada and as far south as New Orleans, and it wasn’t anything for him to go to Chicago or Denver any time! He was a travelling man—and she, Annjee, was too meek and quiet, that’s what she was—too stay-at-homish. Never going nowhere, never saying nothing back to those who scolded her or talked about her, not even sassing white folks when they got beside themselves. And every colored girl in town said that Mrs. J. J. Rice was no easy white woman to work for, yet she had been there now five years, accepting everything without a murmur! Most young folks, girls and boys, left Stanton as soon as they could for the outside world, but here she was, Annjelica Williams, going on twenty-eight, and had never been as far as Kansas City!

  “I want to travel,” she said to herself. “I want to go places, too.”

  But that was why Jimboy married her, because she wasn’t a runabout. He’d had enough of those kind of women before he struck Stanton, he said. St. Louis was full of them, and Chicago running over. She was the first nice girl he’d ever met who lived at home, so he took her. . . . There were mighty few dark women had a light, strong, good-looking young husband, really a married husband, like Jimboy, and a little brown kid like Sandy.

  “I’m mighty lucky,” Annjee thought, “even if he ain’t here.” And two tears of foolish pride fell from the bright eyes in her round black face. They trickled down on the letter, with its blue lines and pencil-scrawled message, and some of the words on the paper began to blur into purple blots because the pencil had been an indelible one. Quickly she fumbled for a handkerchief to wipe the tears away, when a voice made her start.

  “You Annjee!” cried Aunt Hager in the open door. “Go to bed, chile! Go on! Settin’ up here this late, burnin’ de light an’ lurin’ all sorts o’ night-bugs an’ creepers into de house!” The old woman came in out of the dark. “Lawd! I might anigh stumbled over this boy in de middle o’ de flo’! An’ you ain’t even took off yo’ hat since you got home from work! Is you crazy? Settin’ up here at night with yo’ hat on, an’ lettin’ this chile catch his death o’ cold sleepin’ down on de flo’ long after his bedtime!”

  Sheepishly Annjee folded her letter and got up. It was true that she still had on her hat and the sweater she had worn to Mrs. Rice’s. True, too, the whole room was alive with soft-winged moths fluttering against the hot glass of the light—and on the kitchen floor a small, brown-skin, infinitely lovable edition of Jimboy lay sprawled contentedly in his grandmother’s path, asleep!

  “He’s my baby!” Annjee said gently, stooping to pick him up. “He’s my baby—me and Jimboy’s baby!”

  FOUR

  Thursday Afternoon

  * * *

  HAGER had risen at sunrise. On Thursdays she did the Reinharts’ washing, on Fridays she ironed it, and on Saturdays she sent it home, clean and beautifully white, and received as pay the sum of seventy-five cents. During the winter Hager usually did half a dozen washings a week, but during the hot season her customers had gone away, and only the Reinharts, on account of an invalid grandmother with whom they could not travel, remained in Stanton.

  Wednesday afternoon Sandy, with a boy named Jimmy Lane, called at the back door for their soiled clothes. Each child took a handle and between them carried the large wicker basket seven blocks to Aunt Hager’s kitchen. For this service Jimmy Lane received five cents a trip, although Sister Lane had repeatedly said to Hager that he needn’t be given anything. She wanted him to learn his Christian duties by being useful to old folks. But Jimmy was not inclined to be Christian. On the contrary, he was a very bad little boy of thirteen, who often led Sandy astray. Sometimes they would run with the basket for no reason at all, then stumble and spill the clothes out on the sidewalk—Mrs. Reinhart’s summer dresses, and drawers, and Mr. Reinhart’s extra-large B.V.D.’s lying generously exposed to the public. Sometimes, if occasion offered, the youngsters would stop to exchange uncouth epithets with strange little white boys who called them “niggers.” Or, again, they might neglect their job for a game of marbles, or a quarter-hour of scrub baseball on a vacant lot; or to tease any little colored girl who might tip timidly by with her hair in tight, well-oiled braids—while the basket of garments would be left forlornly in the street without guardian. But when the clothes were safe in Aunt Hager’s kitchen, Jimmy would usually buy candy with his nickel and share it with Sandy before he went home.

  After soaking all night, the garments were rubbed through the suds in the morning; and in the afternoon the colored articles were on the line while the white pieces were boiling seriously in a large tin boiler on the kitchen-stove.

  “They sho had plenty this week,” Hager said to her grandson, who sat on the stoop eating a slice of bread and apple butter. “I’s mighty late gettin’ ’em hung out to dry, too. Had no business stoppin’ this mawnin’ to go see sick folks, and me here got all I can do maself! Looks like this warm weather old Mis’ Reinhart must change ever’ piece from her dress to her shimmy three times a day—sendin’ me a washin’ like this here!” They heard the screen-door at the front of the house open and slam. “It’s a good thing they got me to do it fo’ ’em! . . . Sandy, see who’s that at de do’.”

  It was Harriett, home from the country club for the afternoon, cool and slender and
pretty in her black uniform with its white collar, her smooth black face and neck powdered pearly, and her crinkly hair shining with pomade. She smelled nice and perfumy as Sandy jumped on her like a dog greeting a favorite friend. Harriett kissed him and let him hang to her arm as they went through the bedroom to the kitchen. She carried a brown cardboard suit-case and a wide straw hat in one hand.

  “Hello, mama,” she said.

  Hager poked the boiling clothes with a vigorous splash of her round stick. The steam rose in clouds of soapy vapor.

  “I been waitin’ for you, madam!” her mother replied in tones that were not calculated to welcome pleasantly an erring daughter. “I wants to know de truth—was you in town last Monday night or not?”

  Harriett dropped her suit-case against the wall. “You seem to have the truth,” she said carelessly. “How’d you get it? . . . Here, Sandy, take this out in the yard and eat it, seed and all.” She gave her nephew a plum she had brought in her pocket. “I was in town, but I didn’t have time to come home. I had to go to Maudel’s because she’s making me a dress.”

  “To Maudel’s! . . . Unhuh! An’ to de Waiters’ Ball, besides galavantin’ up an’ down Pearl Street after ten o’clock! I wouldn’t cared so much if you’d told me beforehand, but you said you didn’t come in town ’ceptin’ Thursday afternoon, an’ here I was believing yo’ lies.”

  “It’s no lies! I haven’t been in town before.”

  “Who brung you here at night anyhow—an’ there ain’t no trains runnin’?”

  “O, I came in with the cook and some of the boys, mama, that’s who! They hired an auto for the dance. What would be the use coming home, when you and Annjee go to bed before dark like chickens?”