“Yes, indeedy!” said Aunt Hager. “It’s sho too bad. They was certainly good old white folks! An’ her married niece is takin’ it mighty hard, po’ little soul. I was nigh two hours, her husband an’ me, tryin’ to bring her out o’ de hysterics. Tremblin’ like a lamb all over, she was.” They were turning into the yard. “Be careful with that chile, Annjee, you don’t trip on none o’ them boards nor branches an’ fall with him.”
“Put me down, ’cause I’m awake,” said Sandy.
The old house looked queer without a porch. In the moonlight he could see the long nails that had held the porch roof to the weatherboarding. His grandmother climbed slowly over the doorsill, and his mother lifted him to the floor level as Aunt Hager lit the large oil-lamp on the parlor table. Then they went back to the bedroom, where the youngster took off his clothes, said his prayers, and climbed into the high feather bed where he slept with Annjee. Aunt Hager went to the next room, but for a long time she talked back and forth through the doorway to her daughter about the storm.
“We was just startin’ out fo’ Mis’ Carter’s cellar, me an’ Sandy,” she said several times. “But de Lawd was with us! He held us back! Praise His name! We ain’t harmed, none of us—’ceptin’ I don’t know ’bout ma Harriett at de club. But you’s all right. An’ you say Tempy’s all right, too. An’ I prays that Harriett ain’t been touched out there in de country where she’s workin’. Maybe de storm ain’t passed that way.”
Then they spoke about the white people where Annjee worked … and about the elder sister Tempy’s prosperity. Then Sandy heard his grandmother climb into bed, and a few minutes after the springs screaked under her, she had begun to snore. Annjee closed the door between their rooms and slowly began to unlace her wet shoes.
“Sandy,” she whispered, “we ain’t had no word yet from your father since he left. I know he goes away and stays away like this and don’t write, but I’m sure worried. Hope the cyclone ain’t passed nowhere near wherever he is, and I hope ain’t nothin’ hurt him. … I’m gonna pray for him, Sandy. I’m gonna ask God right now to take care o’ Jimboy. … The Lawd knows, I wants him to come back! … I loves him. … We both loves him, don’t we, child? And we want him to come on back!”
She knelt down beside the bed in her nightdress and kept her head bowed for a long time. Before she got up, Sandy had gone to sleep.
II
Conversation
It was broad daylight in the town of Stanton and had been for a long time.
“Get out o’ that bed, boy!” Aunt Hager yelled. “Here’s Buster waitin’ out in de yard to play with you, an’ you still sleepin’!”
“Aw, tell him to cut off his curls,” retorted Sandy, but his grandmother was in no mood for fooling.
“Stop talkin’ ’bout that chile’s haid and put yo’ clothes on. Nine o’clock an’ you ain’t up yet! Shame on you!” She shouted from the kitchen, where Sandy could hear the fire crackling and smell coffee boiling.
He kicked the sheet off with his bare feet and rolled over and over on the soft feather tick. There was plenty of room to roll now, because his mother had long since got up and gone to Mrs. J. J. Rice’s to work.
“Tell Bus I’m coming,” Sandy yelled, jumping into his trousers and running with bare feet towards the door. “Is he got his marbles?”
“Come back here, sir, an’ put them shoes on,” cried Hager, stopping him on his way out. “Yo’ feet’ll get long as yardsticks and flat as pancakes runnin’ round barefooted all de time. An’ wash yo’ face, sir. Buster ain’t got a thing to do but wait. An’ eat yo’ breakfast.”
The air was warm with sunlight, and hundreds of purple and white morning-glories laughed on the back fence. Earth and sky were fresh and clean after the heavy night-rain, and the young corn-shoots stood straight in the garden, and green pea-vines wound themselves around their crooked sticks. There was the mingled scent of wet soil and golden pollen on the breeze that blew carelessly through the clear air.
Buster sat under the green apple-tree with a pile of black mud from the alley in front of him.
“Hey, Sandy, gonna make marbles and put ’em in the sun to dry,” he said.
“All right,” agreed Sandy, and they began to roll mud balls in the palms of their hands. But instead of putting them in the sun to dry they threw them against the back of the house, where they flattened and stuck beautifully. Then they began to throw them at each other.
Sandy’s playmate was a small ivory-white Negro child with straight golden hair, which his mother made him wear in curls. His eyes were blue and doll-like and he in no way resembled a colored youngster; but he was colored. Sandy himself was the shade of a nicely browned piece of toast, with dark, brown-black eyes and a head of rather kinky, sandy hair that would lie smooth only after a rigorous application of vaseline and water. That was why folks called him Annjee’s sandy-headed child, and then just—Sandy.
“He takes after his father,” Sister Lowry said, “ ’cept he’s not so light. But he’s gonna be a mighty good-lookin’ boy when he grows up, that’s sho!”
“Well, I hopes he does,” Aunt Hager said. “But I’d rather he’d be ugly ’fore he turns out anything like that good-for-nothing Jimboy what comes here an’ stays a month, goes away an’ stays six, an’ don’t hit a tap o’ work ’cept when he feels like it. If it wasn’t for Annjee, don’t know how we’d eat, ’cause Sandy’s father sho don’t do nothin’ to support him.”
All the colored people in Stanton knew that Hager bore
