“Well, Aunt Hager said—” then Sandy stopped. His grandmother had thought that Booker T. was the greatest of men, but maybe she had been wrong. Anyway, this Du Bois could write! Gee, it made you burn all over to read what he said about a lynching. But Sandy did not mention Booker Washington again to Tempy, although, months later, at the library he read his book called Up from Slavery, and he was sure that Aunt Hager hadn’t been wrong. “I guess they are both great men,” he thought.
Sandy’s range of reading increased, too, when his aunt found a job for him that winter in Mr. Prentiss’s gift-card and printing-shop, where he kept the place clean and acted as delivery boy. This shop kept a shelf of current novels and some volumes of the new poetry—Sandburg, Lindsay, Masters—which the Young Women’s Club of Stanton was then studying, to the shocked horror of the older white ladies of the town. Sandy knew of this because Mr. Prentiss’s daughter, a student at Goucher College, used to keep shop and she pointed out volumes for the boy to read and told him who their authors were and what the books meant. She said that none of the colored boys they had employed before had ever been interested in reading; so she often lent him, by way of encouragement, shopworn copies to be taken home at night and returned the next day. Thus Sandy spent much of his first year with Tempy deep in novels too mature for a fourteen-year-old boy. But Tempy was very proud of her studious young nephew. She began to decide that she had made no mistake in keeping him with her, and when he entered the high school, she bought him his first long-trouser suit as a spur towards further application.
Sandy became taller week by week, and it seemed to Tempy as if his shirtsleeves became too short for him overnight. His voice was changing, too, and he had acquired a liking for football, but his after-school job at Prentiss’s kept him from playing much. At night he read, or sometimes went to the movies with Buster—but Tempy kept him home as much as she could. Occasionally he saw Willie-Mae, who was keeping company with the second cook at Wright’s Hotel. And sometimes he saw Jimmy Lane, who was a bellhop now and hung out with a sporty crowd in the rear room of Cudge Windsor’s pool hall. But whenever Sandy went into his old neighborhood, he felt sad, remembering Aunt Hager and his mother, and Jimboy, and Harriett—for his young aunt had gone away from Stanton, too, and the last he heard about her rumored that she was on the stage in Kansas City. Now the little house where Sandy had lived with his grandmother belonged to Tempy, who kept it rented to a family of strangers.
In high school Sandy was taking, at his aunt’s request, the classical course, which included Latin, ancient history, and English, and which required a great deal of reading. His teacher of English was a large, masculine woman named Martha Fry, who had once been to Europe and who loved to talk about the splendors of old England and to read aloud in a deep, mannish kind of voice, dramatizing the printed words. It was from her that Sandy received an introduction to Shakespeare, for in the spring term they studied The Merchant of Venice. In the spring also, under Miss Fry’s direction, the first-year students were required to write an essay for the freshman essay prizes of both money and medals. And in this contest Sandy won the second prize. It was the first time in the history of the school that a colored pupil had ever done anything of the sort, and Tempy was greatly elated. There was a note in the papers about it, and Sandy brought his five dollars home for his aunt to put away. But he gave his bronze medal to a girl named Pansetta Young, who was his classmate and a newfound friend.
From the first moment in school that he saw Pansetta, he knew that he liked her, and he would sit looking at her for hours in every class that they had together—for she was a little baby-doll kind of girl, with big black eyes and a smooth pinkish-brown skin, and her hair was curly on top of her head. Her widowed mother was a cook at the Goucher College dining-hall; and she was an all-alone little girl, for Pansetta had no brothers or sisters. After Thanksgiving Sandy began to walk part of the way home with her every day. He could not accompany her all the way because he had to go to work at Mr. Prentiss’s shop. But on Christmas he bought her a box of candy—and sent it to her by mail. And at Easter-time she gave him a chocolate egg.
“Unh-huh! You got a girl now, ain’t you?” teased Buster one April afternoon when he caught Sandy standing in front of the high school waiting for Pansetta to come out.
“Aw, go chase yourself!” said Sandy, for Buster had a way of talking dirty about girls, and Sandy was afraid he would begin that with Pansetta; but today his friend changed the subject instead.
“Say come on round to the pool hall tonight and I’ll teach you to play billiards.”
“Don’t think I’d better, Bus. Aunt Tempy might get sore,” Sandy replied, shaking his head. “Besides, I have to study.”
“Are you gonna read yourself to death?” Buster demanded indignantly. “You’ve got to come out some time, man! Tell her you’re going to the movies and we’ll go down to Cudge’s instead.”
Sandy thought for a moment.
“All the boys come round there at night.”
“Well, I might.”
“Little apron-string boy!” teased Buster.
“If I hit you a couple of times, you’ll find out I’m not!” Sandy doubled up his fists in pretended anger. “I’ll black your
