But who were nice people anyway? Sandy hated the word “nice.” His Aunt Tempy was always using it. All of her friends were nice, she said, respectable and refined. They went around with their noses in the air and they didn’t speak to porters and washwomen—though they weren’t nearly so much fun as the folks they tried to scorn. Sandy liked Cudge Windsor or Jap Logan better than he did Dr. Mitchell, who had been to college—and never forgotten it.
Sandy wondered if Booker T. Washington had been like Tempy’s friends? Or if Dr. Du Bois was a snob just because he was a college man? He wondered if those two men had a good time being great. Booker T. was dead, but he had left a living school in the South. Maybe he could teach in the South, too, Sandy thought, if he ever learned enough. Did colored folks need to know the things he was studying in books now? Did French and Latin and Shakespeare make people wise and happy? Jap Logan never went beyond the seventh grade and he was happy. And Jimboy never attended school much either. Maybe school didn’t matter. Yet to get a good job you had to be smart—and white, too. That was the trouble, you had to be white!
“But I want to learn!” thought Sandy as he lay awake in the dark after he had gone to bed at night. “I want to go to college. I want to go to Europe and study.” “Work and make ready and maybe your chance will come,” it said under the picture of Lincoln on the calendar given away by the First National Bank, where Earl, his white friend, already had a job promised him when he came out of school. … It was not nearly so difficult for white boys. They could work at anything—in stores, on newspapers, in offices. They could become president of the United States if they were clever enough. But a colored boy. … No wonder Buster was going to pass for white when he left Stanton.
“I don’t blame him,” thought Sandy. “Sometimes I hate white people, too, like Aunt Harrie used to say she did. Still, some of them are pretty decent—my English-teacher, and Mr. Prentiss where I work. Yet even Mr. Prentiss wouldn’t give me a job clerking in his shop. All I can do there is run errands and scrub the floor when everybody else is gone. There’s no advancement for colored fellows. If they start as porters, they stay porters forever and they can’t come up. Being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred—and the white folks live upstairs. They don’t want us up there with them, even when we’re respectable like Dr. Mitchell, or smart like Dr. Du Bois. … And guys like Jap Logan—well, Jap don’t care anyway! Maybe it’s best not to care, and stay poor and meek waiting for heaven like Aunt Hager did. … But I don’t want heaven! I want to live first!” Sandy thought. “I want to live!”
He understood then why many old Negroes said: “Take all this world and give me Jesus!” It was because they couldn’t get this world anyway—it belonged to the white folks. They alone had the power to give or withhold at their back doors. Always back doors—even for Tempy and Dr. Mitchell if they chose to go into Wright’s Hotel or the New Albert Restaurant. And no door at all for Negroes if they wanted to attend the Rialto Theatre, or join the Stanton Y.M.C.A., or work behind the grilling at the National Bank.
The Doors of Life. … God damn that simple-minded book that Tempy had given him! What did an old white minister know about the doors of life for him and Pansetta and Jimmy Lane, for Willie-Mae and Buster and Jap Logan and all the black and brown and yellow youngsters standing on the threshold of the great beginning in a Western town called Stanton? What did an old white minister know about the doors of life anywhere? And, least of all, the doors to a Negro’s life? … Black youth. … Dark hands knocking, knocking! Pansetta’s little brown hands knocking on the doors of life! Baby-doll hands, tiny autumn-leaf girl-hands! … Gee, Pansetta! … The Doors of Life … the great big doors. … Sandy was asleep … of life.
XXVII
Beware of Women
“I won’t permit it,” said Tempy. “I won’t stand for it. You’ll have to mend your ways, young man! Spending your evenings in Windsor’s pool parlor and running the streets with a gang of common boys that have had no raising, that Jimmy Lane among them. I won’t stand for it while you stay in my house. … But that’s not the worst of it. Mr. Prentiss tells me you’ve been getting to work late after school three times this week. And what have you been doing? O, don’t think I don’t know! I saw you with my own eyes yesterday walking home with that girl Pansetta Young! … Well, I want you to understand that I won’t
