Harriett’s eyes lowered and her shoulders drooped. “No, mama, thank you. I’m—not hungry.”
Then a long, embarrassing silence followed while Hager gulped at her tea, Sandy tried to swallow a mouthful of bread that seemed to choke him, and Annjee stared stupidly at the stove.
Finally Harriett said: “I got to go now.” She stood up to button her coat and put on her hat. Then she took her metal purse from the table.
“Maudel’ll be waiting for me, but I’ll be seeing you-all again soon, I guess. Goodbye, Sandy honey! I got to go. … Annjee, I got to go now. … Goodbye, mama!” She was trembling. As she bent down to kiss Hager, her purse slipped out of her hands and fell in a little metal heap on the floor. She stooped to pick it up.
“I got to go now.”
A tiny perfume-bottle in the bag had broken from the fall, and as she went through the cold front room towards the door, the odor of cheap and poignant drugstore violets dripped across the house.
XV
One by One
You could smell the spring.
“ ’Tain’t gwine be warm fo’ weeks yet!” Hager said.
Nevertheless, you could smell the spring. Little boys were already running in the streets without their overcoats, and the groundhog had seen its shadow. Snow remained in the fence corners, but it had melted on the roofs. The yards were wet and muddy, but no longer white.
It was a sunny afternoon in late March that a letter came. On his last delivery the mailman stopped, dropped it in the box—and Sandy saw him. It was addressed to his mother and he knew it must be from Jimboy.
“Go on an’ take it to her,” his grandma said, as soon as she saw the boy coming with it in his hand. “I knows that’s what you want to do. Go on an’ take it.” And she bent over her ironing again.
Sandy ran almost all the way to Mrs. Rice’s, dropping the letter more than once on the muddy sidewalk, so excited he did not think to put it in his pocket. Into the big yard and around to the white lady’s back door he sped—and it was locked! He knocked loudly for a long time, and finally an upper window opened and Annjee, a dust-rag around her head, looked down, squinting in the sunlight.
“Who’s there?” she called stridently, thinking of some peddler or belated tradesman for whom she did not wish to stop her cleaning.
Sandy pantingly held up the letter and was about to say something when the window closed with a bang. He could hear his mother almost falling down the back stairs, she was coming so fast. Then the key turned swiftly in the lock, the door opened, and, without closing it, Annjee took the letter from him and tore it open where she stood.
“It’s from Jimboy!”
Sandy stood on the steps looking at his mother, her bosom heaving, her sleeves rolled up, and the white cloth tied about her head, doubly white against her dark-brown face.
“He’s in Detroit, it says. … Umn! I ain’t never seen him write such a long letter. ‘I had a hard time this winter till I landed here,’ it says, ‘but things look pretty good now, and there is lots of building going on and plenty of work opening up in the automobile plants … a mighty lot of colored folks here … hope you and Sandy been well. Sorry couldn’t send you nothing Xmas, but I was in St. Paul broke. … Kiss my son for me. … Tell ma hello even if she don’t want to hear it. Your loving husband, Jimboy Rodgers.’ ”
Annjee did her best to hold the letter with one hand and pick up Sandy with the other, but he had grown considerably during the winter and she was still a little weak from her illness; so she bent down to his level and kissed him several times before she reread the letter.
“From your daddy!” she said. “Umn-mn. … Come on in here and warm yourself. Lemme see what he says again!” … She lighted the gas oven in the white kitchen and sat down in front of it with her letter, forgetting the clock and the approaching time for Mrs. Rice’s dinner, forgetting everything. “A letter from my daddy! From my far-off sugar-daddy!”
“From my daddy,” corrected Sandy. … “Say, gimme a nickel to buy some marbles, mama. I wanta go play.”
Without taking her eyes from the precious note Annjee fumbled in her apron and found a coin. “Take it and go on!” she said.
It was a dime. Sandy skipped around the house and down the street in the chilly sunshine. He decided to stop at Buster’s for a while before going home, since he had to pass there anyway, and he found his friend in the house trying to carve boats from clothespins with a rusty jackknife.
Buster’s mother was a seamstress, and, after opening the front door and greeting Sandy with a cheery “Hello,” she returned to her machine and a friend who was calling on her. She was a tall young light-mulatto woman, with skin like old ivory. Maybe that was why Buster was so white. But her husband was a black man who worked on the city’s garbage-trucks and was active politically when election time came, getting colored men to vote Republican. Everybody said he made lots of money, but that he wasn’t really Buster’s father.
The golden-haired child gave Sandy a butcher-knife and together they whacked at the clothespins. You could hear the two women talking plainly in the little sewing-room, where the machine ran between snatches of conversation.
“Yes,” Buster’s mother was saying, “I
