“Gee, that’s nice,” panted Sandy, grinning as he stood looking at the pictures in front of the vaudeville house, while hundreds of dark people passed up and down on the sidewalk behind him. Lots of folks were going into the theatre, laughing and pushing, for one of the great blues-singing Smiths was appearing there. Sandy walked towards the ticket-booth to see what the prices were.
“Buy me a ticket, will you?” said a feminine voice beside him. This time it was a girl—a very ugly, skinny girl, whose smile revealed a row of dirty teeth. She sidled up to the startled boy whom she had accosted and took his hand.
“I’m not going in,” Sandy said shortly, as he backed away, wiping the palm of his hand on his coat-sleeve.
“All right then, stingy!” hissed the girl, flouncing her hips and digging into her own purse for the coins to buy a ticket. “I got money.”
Some men standing on the edge of the sidewalk laughed as Sandy went up the street. A little black child in front of him toddled along in the crowd, seemingly by itself, licking a big chocolate ice-cream cone that dripped down the front of its dress.
So this was Chicago where the buildings were like towers and the lake was like a sea … State Street, the greatest Negro street in the world, where people were always happy, lights forever bright; and where the prettiest brown-skin women on earth could be found—so the men in Stanton said.
“I guess I didn’t walk the right way. But maybe tomorrow I’ll see other things,” Sandy thought, “the Loop and the lake and the museum and the library. Maybe they’ll be better.”
He turned into a side street going back towards Wabash Avenue. It was darker there, and near the alley a painted woman called him, stepping out from among the shadows.
“Say, baby, com’ere!” But the boy went on.
Crossing overhead an L train thundered by, flashing its flow of yellow light on the pavement beneath.
Sandy turned into Wabash Avenue and cut across the street. As he approached the colored Y.M.C.A., three boys came out with swimming suits on their arms, and one of them said: “Damn, but it’s hot!” They went up the street laughing and talking with friendly voices, and at the corner they turned off.
“I must be nearly home,” Sandy thought, as he made out a group of kids still playing under the streetlight. Then he distinguished, among the other shabby buildings, the brick house where he lived. The front porch was still crowded with roomers trying to keep cool, and as the boy came up to the foot of the steps, some of the fellows seated there moved to let him pass.
“Good-evenin’, Mr. Rodgers,” Mrs. Harris called, and as Sandy had never been called Mr. Rodgers before, it made him feel very manly and a little embarrassed as he threaded his way through the group on the porch.
Upstairs he found his mother sleeping deeply on one side of the bed. He undressed, keeping on his underwear, and crawled in on the other side, but he lay awake a long while because it was suffocatingly hot, and very close in their room. The bedbugs bit him on the legs. Every time he got half asleep, an L train roared by, shrieking outside their open windows, lighting up the room, and shaking the whole house. Each time the train came, he started and trembled as though a sudden dragon were rushing at the bed. But then, after midnight, when the elevated cars passed less frequently, and he became more used to their passing, he went to sleep.
XXIX
Elevator
The following day Sandy went to work as elevator-boy at the hotel in the Loop where Mr. Harris was head bellman, and during the hot summer months that followed, his life in Chicago gradually settled into a groove of work and home—work, and home to Annjee’s stuffy little room against the elevated tracks, where at night his mother read the war news and cried because there had been no letter from Jimboy. Whether Sandy’s father was in Brest or Saint-Nazaire with the labor battalions, or at the front, she did not know. The Chicago Defender said that colored troops were fighting in the Champagne sector with great distinction, but Annjee cried anew when she read that.
“No news is good news,” Sandy repeated every night to comfort his mother, for he couldn’t imagine Jimboy dead. “Papa’s all right!” But Annjee worried and wept, half sick all the time, forever reading the death lists fearfully for her husband’s name.
That summer the heat was unbearable. Uptown in the Black Belt the air was like a steaming blanket around your head. In the Loop the sky was white-hot metal. Even on the lake front there was no relief unless you hurried into the crowded water. And there were long stretches of beach where the whites did not want Negroes to swim; so it was often dangerous to bathe if you were colored.
Sandy sweltered as he stood at the door of his boxlike, mirrored car in the big hotel lobby. He wore a red uniform with brass buttons and a tight coat that had to be kept fastened no matter how warm it was. But he felt very proud of himself holding his first full-time job, helping his mother with the room rent, and trying to save a little money out of each pay in order to return to high school in the fall.
The prospects of returning to school, however, were not bright. Some weeks it was impossible for Sandy to save even a half-dollar. And Annjee said now that she believed he should stay out of school and work
