“I didn’t walk home with her,” said Sandy. “I only go part way with her every day. She’s in my class in high school and we have to talk over our lessons. She’s the only colored kid in my class I have to talk to.”
“Lessons! Yes, I know it’s lessons,” said Tempy sarcastically. “If she were a girl of our own kind, it would be all right. I don’t see why you don’t associate more with the young people of the church. Marie Steward or Grace Mitchell are both nice girls and you don’t notice them. No, you have to take up with this Pansetta, whose mother works out all day, leaving her daughter to do as she chooses. Well, she’s not going to ruin you, after all I’ve done to try to make something out of you.”
“Beware of women, son,” said Mr. Siles pontifically from his deep morris-chair. It was one of his few evenings home and Tempy had asked him to talk to her nephew, who had gotten beyond her control, for Sandy no longer remained in at night even when she expressly commanded it; and he no longer attended church regularly, but slept on Sunday mornings instead. He kept up his schoolwork, it was true, but he seemed to have lost all interest in acquiring the respectable bearing and attitude towards life that Tempy thought he should have. She bought him fine clothes and he went about with ruffians.
“In other words, he has been acting just like a nigger, Mr. Siles!” she told her husband. “And he’s taken up with a girl who’s not of the best, to say the least, even if she does go to the high school. Mrs. Francis Cannon, who lives near her, tells me that this Pansetta has boys at her house all the time, and her mother is never at home until after dark. She’s a cook or something somewhere. … A fine person for a nephew of ours to associate with, this Pansy daughter of hers!”
“Pansetta’s a nice girl,” said Sandy. “And she’s smart in school, too. She helps me get my Latin every day, and I might fail if she didn’t.”
“Huh! It’s little help you need with your Latin, young man! Bring it here and I’ll help you. I had Latin when I was in school. And certainly you don’t need to walk on the streets with her in order to study Latin, do you? First thing you know you’ll be getting in trouble with her and she’ll be having a baby—I see I have to be plain—and whether it’s yours or not, she’ll say it is. Common girls like that always want to marry a boy they think is going to amount to something—going to college and be somebody in the world. Besides, you’re from the Williams family and you’re good-looking! But I’m going to stop this affair right now. … From now on you are to leave that girl alone, do you understand me? She’s dangerous!”
“Yes,” grunted Mr. Siles. “She’s dangerous.”
Angry and confused, Sandy left the room and went upstairs to bed, but he could not sleep. What right had they to talk that way about his friends? Besides, what did they mean about her being dangerous? About his getting in trouble with her? About her wanting to marry him because her mother was a cook and he was going to college?
A white boy in Sandy’s high-school class had “got in trouble” with an Italian girl and they had had to go to the juvenile court to fix it up, but it had been kept quiet. Even now Sandy couldn’t quite give an exact explanation of what getting in trouble with a girl meant. Did a girl have to have a baby just because a fellow walked home with her when he didn’t even go in? Pansetta had asked him into her house often, but he always had to go back uptown to work. He was due at work at four o’clock—besides he knew it wasn’t quite correct to call on a young lady if her mother was not at home. But it wasn’t necessarily bad, was it? And how could a girl have a baby and say it was his if it wasn’t his? Why couldn’t he talk to his Aunt Tempy about such things and get a clear and simple answer instead of being given an old book like The Doors of Life that didn’t explain anything at all?
Pansetta hadn’t said a word to him about babies, or anything like that, but she let him kiss her once and hold her on his lap at Sadie Butler’s Christmas party. Gee, but she could kiss—and such a long time! He wouldn’t care if she did make him marry her, only he wanted to travel first. If his mother would send for him now, he would like to go to Chicago. His Aunt Tempy was too cranky, and too proper. She didn’t like any of his friends, and she hated the pool hall. But where else was there for a fellow to play? Who wanted to go to those high-toned people’s houses, like the Mitchells’, and look bored all the time while they put Caruso’s Italian records on their new victrola? Even if it was the finest victrola owned by a Negro in Stanton, as they always informed you, Sandy got tired of listening to records in a language that none of them understood.
“But this is opera!” they said. Well, maybe it was, but he thought that his father and Harriett used to sing better. And they sang nicer songs. One of them was:
Love, O love, O careless Love—
Goes to your head like wine!
“And maybe I really am in love with Pansetta. … But if she thinks she can fool me into marrying her before I’ve travelled all around the world, like my father, she’s wrong,” Sandy thought. “She can’t trick me, not this kid!” Then he was immediately sorry that he had allowed Tempy’s insinuations to
