At the hotel Sandy’s hours on duty were long, and his legs and back ached with weariness from standing straight in one spot all the time, opening and closing the bronze door of the elevator. He had been assigned the last car in a row of six, each manned by a colored youth standing inside his metal box in a red uniform, operating the lever that sent the car up from the basement grill to the roof-garden restaurant on the fifteenth floor and then back down again all day. Repeating up-down—up-down—up-down interminably, carrying white guests.
After two months of this there were times when Sandy felt as though he could stand it no longer. The same flow of people week after week—fashionable women, officers, business men; the fetid air of the elevator-shaft, heavy with breath and the perfume of bodies; the same doors opening at the same unchanging levels hundreds of times each innumerable, monotonous day. The L in the morning; the L again at night. The street or the porch for a few minutes of air. Then bed. And the same thing tomorrow.
“I’ve got to get out of this,” Sandy thought. “It’s an awful job.” Yet some of the fellows had been there for years. Three of the elevator-men on Sandy’s shift were more than forty years old—and had never gotten ahead in life. Mr. Harris had been a bellhop since his boyhood, doing the same thing day after day—and now he was very proud of being head bellboy in Chicago.
“I’ve got to get out of this,” Sandy kept repeating. “Or maybe I’ll get stuck here, too, like they are, and never get away. I’ve got to go back to school.”
Yet he knew that his mother was making very little money—serving more or less as an apprentice in the hairdressing-shop, trying to learn the trade. And if he quit work, how would he live? Annjee did not favor his returning to school. And could he study if he were hungry? Could he study if he were worried about having no money? Worried about Annjee’s displeasure?
“Yes! I can!” he said. “I’m going to study!” He thought about Booker Washington sleeping under the wooden pavements at Richmond—because he had had no place to stay on his way to Hampton in search of an education. He thought about Frederick Douglass—a fugitive slave, owning not even himself, and yet a student. “If they could study, I can, too! When school opens, I’m going to quit this job. Maybe I can get another one at night or in the late afternoon—but it doesn’t matter—I’m going back to my classes in September. … I’m through with elevators.”
Jimboy! Jimboy! Like Jimboy! something inside him warned, quitting work with no money, uncaring.
“Not like Jimboy,” Sandy countered against himself. “Not like my father, always wanting to go somewhere. I’d get as tired of travelling all the time as I do of running this elevator up and down day after day. … I’m more like Harriett—not wanting to be a servant at the mercies of white people forever. … I want to do something for myself, by myself. … Free. … I want a house to live in, too, when I’m older—like Tempy’s and Mr. Siles’s. … But I wouldn’t want to be like Tempy’s friends—or her husband, dull and colorless, putting all his money away in a white bank, ashamed of colored people.”
“A lot of minstrels—that’s all niggers are!” Mr. Siles had said once. “Clowns, jazzers, just a band of dancers—that’s why they never have anything. Never be anything but servants to the white people.”
Clowns! Jazzers! Band of dancers! … Harriett! Jimboy! Aunt Hager! … A band of dancers! … Sandy remembered his grandmother whirling around in front of the altar at revival meetings in the midst of the other sisters, her face shining with light, arms outstretched as though all the cares of the world had been cast away; Harriett in the backyard under the apple-tree, eagle-rocking in the summer evenings to the tunes of the guitar; Jimboy singing. … But was that why Negroes were poor, because they were dancers, jazzers, clowns? … The other way round would be better: dancers because of their poverty; singers because they suffered; laughing all the time because they must forget. … It’s more like that, thought Sandy.
A band of dancers. … Black dancers—captured in a white world. … Dancers of the spirit, too. Each black dreamer a captured dancer of the spirit. … Aunt Hager’s dreams for Sandy dancing far beyond the limitations of their poverty, of their humble station in life, of their dark skins.
“I wants you to be a great man, son,” she often told him, sitting on the porch in the darkness, singing, dreaming, calling up the deep past, creating dreams within the child. “I wants you to be a great man.”
“And I won’t disappoint you!” Sandy said that hot Chicago summer, just as though Hager were still there, planning for him. “I won’t disappoint you!” he said, standing straight in his sweltering red suit in the cage of the hotel elevator. “I won’t disappoint you, Aunt Hager,” dreaming at night in the stuffy little room in the great Black Belt of Chicago. “I won’t disappoint you now,” opening his eyes at dawn when Annjee shook him to get up and go to work again.
XXX
Princess of the Blues
One hot Monday in August Harrietta Williams, billed as “The Princess of the Blues,” opened at the Monogram Theatre on State Street. The screen had carried a slide of her act the week previous, so Sandy knew she would be there, and he and his mother were waiting anxiously
