All the neighborhood, white or colored, called his grandmother when something happened. She was a good nurse, they said, and sick folks liked her around. Aunt Hager always came when they called, too, bringing maybe a little soup that she had made or a jelly. Sometimes they paid her and sometimes they didn’t. But Sandy had never had to sit outdoors in the darkness waiting for her before. He leaned his small back against the top step and rested his elbows on the porch behind him. It was growing late and the people in the streets had all disappeared.
There, in the dark, the little fellow began to think about his mother, who worked on the other side of town for a rich white lady named Mrs. J. J. Rice. And suddenly frightful thoughts came into his mind. Suppose she had left for home just as the storm came up! Almost always his mother was home before dark—but she wasn’t there tonight when the storm came—and she should have been home! This thought appalled him. She should have been there! But maybe she had been caught by the storm and blown away as she walked down Main Street! Maybe Annjee had been carried off by the great black wind that had overturned the Gavitts’ house and taken his grandma’s porch flying through the air! Maybe the cyclone had gotten his mother, Sandy thought. He wanted her! Where was she? Had something terrible happened to her? Where was she now?
The big tears began to roll down his cheeks—but the little fellow held back the sobs that wanted to come. He decided he wasn’t going to cry and make a racket there by himself on the strange steps of these white folks’ house. He wasn’t going to cry like a big baby in the dark. So he wiped his eyes, kicked his heels against the cement walk, lay down on the top step, and, by and by, sniffled himself to sleep.
“Wake up, son!” Someone was shaking him. “You’ll catch your death o’ cold sleeping on the wet steps like this. We’re going home now. Don’t want me to have to carry a big man like you, do you, boy? … Wake up, Sandy!” His mother stooped to lift his long little body from the wide steps. She held him against her soft heavy breasts and let his head rest on one of her shoulders while his feet, in their muddy rubbers, hung down against her dress.
“Where you been, mama?” the boy asked drowsily, tightening his arms about her neck. “I been waiting for you.”
“Oh, I been home a long time, worried to death about you and ma till I heard from Madam Carter that you-all was down here nursing the sick. I stopped at your Aunt Tempy’s house when I seen the storm coming.”
“I was afraid you got blowed away, mama,” murmured Sandy sleepily. “Let’s go home, mama. I’m glad you ain’t got blowed away.”
On the porch Aunt Hager was talking to a pale white man and two thin white women standing at the door of the lighted hallway. “Just let Mis’ Agnes sleep,” she was saying. “She’ll be all right now, an’ I’ll come back in de mawnin’ to see ’bout her. … Good night, you-all.”
The old colored woman joined her daughter and they started home, walking through the streets filled with debris and puddles of muddy water reflecting the moon.
“You’re certainly heavy, boy,” remarked Sandy’s mother to the child she held, but he didn’t answer.
“I’m right glad you come for me, Annjee,” Hager said. “I wonder is yo’ sister all right out yonder at de country club. … An’ I was so worried ’bout you I didn’t know what to do—skeared you might a got caught in this twister, ’cause it were cert’ly awful!”
“I was at Tempy’s!” Annjee replied. “And I was nearly crazy, but I just left everything in the hands o’ God. That’s all.” In silence they walked on, a piece; then hesitantly, to her mother: “There wasn’t any mail for me today, was there, ma?”
“Not a speck!” the old woman replied shortly. “Mailman passed on by.”
For a few minutes there was silence again as they walked. Then, “It’s goin’ on three weeks he’s been gone, and he ain’t written a line,” the younger woman complained, shifting the child to her right arm. “Seems like Jimboy would let a body know where he is, ma, wouldn’t it?”
“Huh! That ain’t nothin’! He’s been gone before this an’ he ain’t wrote, ain’t he? Here you is worryin’ ’bout a letter from that good-for-nothing husband o’ your’n—an’ there’s ma house settin’ up without a porch to its name! … Ain’t you seed what de devil’s done done on earth this evenin’, chile? … An’ yet de first thing you ask me ’bout is de mailman! … Lawd! Lawd! … You an’ that Jimboy!”
Aunt Hager lifted her heavy body over fallen tree-trunks and across puddles, but between puffs she managed to voice her indignation, so Annjee said no more concerning letters from her husband. Instead they went back to the subject of the cyclone. “I’m just thankful, ma, it didn’t blow the whole house down and you with it, that’s all! I was certainly worried! … And then you-all was gone when I got home! Gone on out—nursing that white woman. … It’s too bad ’bout poor Mis’ Gavitt, though,
