Blues and spirituals Tempy and her husband hated because they were too Negro. In their house Sandy dared not sing a word of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for what had darky slave songs to do with respectable people? And ragtime belonged in the Bottoms with the sinners. (It was ironically strange that the Bottoms should be the only section of Stanton where Negroes and whites mingled freely on equal terms.) That part of town, according to Tempy, was lost to God, and the fact that she had a sister living there burned like a hidden cancer in her breast. She never mentioned Harriett to anyone.
Tempy’s friends were all people of standing in the darker world—doctors, schoolteachers, a dentist, a lawyer, a hairdresser. And she moved among these friends as importantly as Mrs. Barr-Grant had moved among a similar group in the white race. Many of them had had washwomen for mothers and day-laborers for fathers; but none ever spoke of that. And while Aunt Hager lived, Tempy, after getting her position with Mrs. Barr-Grant, was seldom seen with the old woman. After her marriage she was even more ashamed of her family connections—a little sister running wild, and another sister married for the sake of love—Tempy could never abide Jimboy, or understand why Annjee had taken up with a rounder from the South. One’s family as a topic of conversation, however, was not popular in high circles, for too many of Stanton’s dark society folks had sprung from humble family trees and low black bottoms.
“But back in Washington, where I was born,” said Mrs. Doctor Mitchell once, “we really have blood! All the best people at the capital come from noted ancestry—Senator Bruce, John M. Langston, Governor Pinchback, Frederick Douglass. Why, one of our colored families on their white side can even trace its lineage back to George Washington! … O, yes, we have a background! But, of course, we are too refined to boast about it.”
Tempy thought of her mother then and wished that black Aunt Hager had not always worn her apron in the streets, uptown and everywhere! Of course, it was clean and white and seemed to suit the old lady, but aprons weren’t worn by the best people. When Tempy was in the hospital for an operation shortly after her marriage, they wouldn’t let Hager enter by the front door—and Tempy never knew whether it was on account of her color or the apron! The Presbyterian Hospital was prejudiced against Negroes and didn’t like them to use the elevator, but certainly her mother should not have come there in an apron!
Well, Aunt Hager had meant well, Tempy thought, even if she didn’t dress right. And now this child, Sandy—James was his correct name! At that first breakfast they ate together, she asked him if he had a comb and brush of his own.
“No’m, I ain’t,” said Sandy.
“I haven’t,” she corrected him. “I certainly don’t want my white neighbors to hear you saying ‘ain’t’. … You’ve come to live with me now and you must talk like a gentleman.”
XXIV
A Shelf of Books
That spring, shortly after Sandy went to stay with Tempy, there was an epidemic of mumps among the schoolchildren in Stanton, and, old as he was, he was among its early victims. With jaws swollen to twice their normal size and a red sign, mumps, on the house, he was forced to remain at home for three weeks. It was then that the boy began to read books other than the ones he had had to study for his lessons. At Aunt Hager’s house there had been no books, anyway, except the Bible and the few fairy tales that he had been given at Christmas; but Tempy had a case full of dusty volumes that were used to give dignity to her sitting-room: a row of English classics bound in red, an Encyclopedia of World Knowledge in twelve volumes, a book on household medicine full of queer drawings, and some modern novels—The Rosary, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, the newest Harold Bell Wright, and all that had ever been written by Gene Stratton Porter, Tempy’s favorite author. The Negro was represented by Chesnutt’s House Behind the Cedars, and the Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, whom Tempy tolerated on account of his fame, but condemned because he had written so much in dialect and so often of the lower classes of colored people. Tempy subscribed to Harper’s Magazine, too, because Mrs. Barr-Grant had taken it. And in her sewing-room closet there was also a pile of The Crisis, the thin Negro monthly that she had been taking from the beginning of its publication.
Sandy had heard of that magazine, but he had never seen a copy; so he went through them all, looking at the pictures of prominent Negroes and reading about racial activities all over the country, and about racial wrongs in the South. In every issue he found, too, stirring and beautifully written editorials about the frustrated longings of the black race, and the hidden beauties in the Negro soul. A man named Du Bois wrote them.
“Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois,” said Tempy, “and he is a great man.”
“Great like Booker T. Washington?” asked Sandy.
“Teaching Negroes to be servants, that’s all Washington did!” Tempy snorted in so acid a tone that Sandy was silent. “Du Bois wants our rights. He wants us to be real men and women. He believes in social equality. But Washington—huh!” The fact that he had established an industrial school damned Washington in Tempy’s eyes, for there were enough colored workers already. But Du Bois was a doctor of philosophy and had studied in Europe! … That’s what Negroes needed to do, get smart, study books, go to Europe! “Don’t talk to me about Washington,” Tempy
