“Is you give Sandy a nickel to buy candy this mawnin’?” Hager asked her as soon as she entered the parlor.
“Why, no, Sister Williams, I isn’t. I had no coins about me a-tall at services this morning.”
“Umn-huh! I thought so!” said Hager. “You, Sandy!”
The little boy, guilt written all over his face, came in from the front porch, where he had been sitting with his father after Buster went home.
“Where’d you tell me you got that nickel this mawnin’?” And before he could answer, she spat out: “I’m gonna whip you!”
“Jehovah help us! Children sure is bad these days,” said Madam de Carter, shaking her head as she left to go next door to her own house. “They sure are bad,” she added, self-consciously correcting her English.
“I’m gonna whip you,” Hager continued, sitting down, amazed, in her plush chair. “De idee o’ withholdin’ yo’ Sunday School money from de Lawd an’ buyin’ candy.”
“I only spent a penny,” Sandy lied, wriggling.
“How you gwine get so much candy fo’ a penny that you has some left to gum up in yo’ pocket? Tell me that, how you gonna do it?”
Sandy, at a loss for an answer, was standing with lowered eyelids, when the screen-door opened and Jimboy came in. Sandy looked up at him for aid, but his father’s usually amiable face was stern this time.
“Come here!” he said. The man towered very tall above the little fellow who looked up at him helplessly.
“I’s gwine whip him!” interposed Hager.
“Is that right, you spent your Sunday School nickel for candy?” Jimboy demanded gravely.
Sandy nodded his head. He couldn’t lie to his father, and had he spoken now, the sobs would have come.
“Then you told a lie to your grandma—and I’m ashamed of you,” his father said.
Sandy wanted to turn his head away and escape the slow gaze of Jimboy’s eyes, but he couldn’t. If Aunt Hager would only whip him, it would be better; then maybe his father wouldn’t say any more. But it was awful to stand still and listen to Jimboy talk to him this way—yet there he stood, stiffly holding back the sobs.
“To take money and use it for what it ain’t s’posed to be used is the same as stealing,” Jimboy went on gravely to his son. “That’s what you done today, and then come home and lie about it. Nobody’s ugly as a liar, you know that! … I’m not much, maybe. Don’t mean to say I am. I won’t work a lot, but what I do I do honest. White folks gets rich lyin’ and stealin’—and some niggers gets rich that way, too—but I don’t need money if I got to get it dishonest, with a lot o’ lies trailing behind me, and can’t look folks in the face. It makes you feel dirty! It’s no good! … Don’t I give you nickels for candy whenever you want ’em?”
The boy nodded silently, with the tears trickling down his chin.
“And don’t I go with you to the store and buy you ice-cream and soda-pop any time you ask me?”
The child nodded again.
“And then you go and take the Sunday School nickel that your grandma’s worked hard for all the week, spend it on candy, and come back home and lie about it. So that’s what you do! And then lie!”
Jimboy turned his back and went out on the porch, slamming the screen-door behind him. Aunt Hager did not whip her grandson, but returned to the kitchen and left him standing disgraced in the parlor. Then Sandy began to cry, with one hand in his mouth so no one could hear him, and when Annjee came home from work in the late afternoon, she found him lying across her bed, head under the pillows, still sobbing because Jimboy had called him a liar.
XI
School
Some weeks later the neighbors were treated to an early morning concert:
I got a high yaller
An’ a little short black,
But a brown-skin gal
Can bring me right on back!
I’m singin’ brown-skin!
Lawdy! … Lawd!
Brown-skin! … O, ma Lawd!
“It must be Jimboy,” said Hager from the kitchen. “A lazy coon, settin’ out there in the cool, singin’, an’ me in here sweatin’ and washin’ maself to dust!”
Kansas City Southern!
I mean de W. & A.!
I’m gonna ride de first train
I catch goin’ out ma way.
I’m got de railroad blues—
“I wish to God you’d go on, then!” mumbled Hager over the wash-boilers.
But I ain’t got no railroad fare!
I’m gwine to pack ma grip an’
Beat ma way away from here!
“Learn me how to pick a chord, papa,” Sandy begged as he sat beside his father under the apple-tree, loaded with ripe fruit.
“All right, look a-here! … You put your thumb like this. …” Jimboy began to explain. “But, dog-gone, your fingers ain’t long enough yet!”
Still they managed to spend a half-day twanging at the old instrument, with Sandy trying to learn a simple tune.
The sunny August mornings had become September mornings, and most of Aunt Hager’s “white folks” had returned from their vacations; her kitchen was once more a daily laundry. Great boilers of clothes steamed on the stove and, beside the clothes, pans of apple juice boiled to jelly, and the peelings of peaches simmered to jam.
There was no news from the runaway Harriett. … Mrs. Lane died one sultry night, with Hager at the bedside, and was buried by the lodge with three hacks and a fifty-dollar coffin. … The following week the Drill of All Nations, after much practising by the women, was given with great success and Annjee, dressed in white and wrapped in a Scandinavian flag, marched proudly as Sweden. … Madam de Carter’s house was now locked and barred, as she had departed for Oklahoma to organize branches of the lodge there. … Tempy had stopped to see Hager one afternoon, but she didn’t stay
