Not Without Laughter

morning. How fine this hard snow would be to coast on, down the long hill past the Hickory Woods! How light and swift he would fly with his new sled! Certainly he had been a good boy, carrying Aunt Hager’s clothes for her, waiting on his mother when she was in bed, emptying the slops and cutting wood every day. And at night when he said his prayers:

Now I lay me down to sleep.
Pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
Pray the Lord my soul to take.⁠ ⁠…

he had added with great earnestness: “And let Santa bring me a Golden Flyer sled, please, Lord. Amen.”

But Sandy knew very well that there wasn’t really any Santa Claus! He knew in his heart that Hager and his mother were Santa Claus⁠—and that they didn’t have any money. They were poor people. He was wearing his mama’s shoes, as Jimmy Lane had once done. And his father and Harriett, who used to make the house gay, laughing and singing, were far away somewhere.⁠ ⁠… There wasn’t any Santa Claus.

“I don’t care,” he said, tramping over the snow in the twilight on his way from the Reinharts’.

Christmas Eve. Candles and poinsettia flowers. Wreaths of evergreen. Baby trees hung with long strands of tinsel and fragile ornaments of colored glass. Sandy passed the windows of many white folks’ houses where the curtains were up and warm floods of electric light made bright the cozy rooms. In Negro shacks, too, there was the dim warmth of oil-lamps and Christmas candles glowing. But at home there wasn’t even a holly wreath. And the snow was whiter and harder than ever on the ground.

Tonight, though, there were no clothes drying in the kitchen when he went in. The ironing-board had been put away behind the door, and the whole place was made tidy and clean. The fire blazed and crackled in the little range; but nothing else said Christmas⁠—no laughter, no tinsel, no tree.

Annjee had been about all day, still weak, but this afternoon she had made a trip to the store for a quarter’s worth of mixed candies and nuts and a single orange, which she had hidden away until morning. Hager had baked a little cake, but there was no frosting on it such as there had been in other years, and there were no strange tissue-wrapped packages stuck away in the corners of trunks and drawers days ahead of time.

Although the little kitchen was warm enough, the two bedrooms were chilly, and the front room was freezing-cold because they kept the door there closed all the time. It was hard to afford a fire in one stove, let alone two, Aunt Hager kept saying, with nobody working but herself.

“I’s thinking about Harriett,” she remarked after their Christmas Eve supper as she rocked before the fire, “and how I’s always tried to raise her right.”

“And I’m thinking about⁠—well, there ain’t no use mentionin’ him,” Annjee said.

A sleigh slid by with jingling bells and shouts of laughter from the occupants, and a band of young people passed on their way to church, singing carols. After a while another sleigh came along with a jolly sound.

“Santa Claus!” said Annjee, smiling at her serious little son. “You better hurry and go to bed, because he’ll be coming soon. And be sure to hang up your stocking.”

But Sandy was afraid that she was fooling, and, as he pulled off his clothes, he left his stockings on the floor, stuck into the women’s shoes he had been wearing. Then, leaving the bedroom door half open so that the heat and a little light from the kitchen would come in, he climbed into his mother’s bed. But he wasn’t going to close his eyes yet. Sandy had discovered long ago that you could hear and see many things by not going to sleep when the family expected you to; therefore he remained awake tonight.

His mother was talking to Aunt Hager now: “I don’t think he’ll charge us anything, do you, ma?” And the old woman answered: “No, chile, Brother Logan’s been tryin’ to be ma beau for twenty years, an’ he ain’t gonna charge us nothin’.”

Annjee came into the half-dark bedroom and looked at Sandy, lying still on the side of the bed towards the window. Then she took down her heavy coat from the wall and, sitting on the edge of a chair, began to pull on her rubbers. In a few moments he heard the front door close softly. His mother had gone out.

Where could she be going, he wondered, this time of night? He heard her footsteps crunching the hard snow and, rolling over close to the window, he pulled aside the shade a little and looked out. In the moonlight he saw Annjee moving slowly down the street past Sister Johnson’s house, walking carefully over the snow like a very weak woman.

“Mama’s still sick,” the child thought, with his nose pressed against the cold windowpane. “I wish I could a bought her a present today.”

Soon an occasional snore from the kitchen told Sandy that Hager dozed peacefully in her rocker beside the stove. He sat up in bed, wrapped a quilt about his shoulders, and remained looking out the window, with the shade hanging behind his back.

The white snow sparkled in the moonlight, and the trees made striking black shadows across the yard. Next door at the Johnsons’ all was dark and quiet, but across the street, where white folks lived, the lights were burning brightly and a big Christmas-tree with all its candles aglow stood in the large bay window while a woman loaded it with toys. Sandy knew that four children lived there, three boys and a girl, whom he had often watched playing on the lawn. Sometimes he wished he had a brother or sister to play with him, too, because it was very quiet in a house with only grownups about. And right now it was dismal and lonely