Not Without Laughter quotes

The air was very still. Not a leaf stirred on the green apple-tree. Not a single closed flower of the morning-glories trembled on the back fence.

The air was very still and yellow.

Something sultry and oppressive made a small boy in the doorway stand closer to his grandmother, clutching her apron with his brown hands.

Through the rubbish-filled streets men drove slowly with horse and buggy or automobile. The fire-engine was out, banging away, and the soft tang-tang-tang of the motor ambulance could be heard in the distance carrying off the injured.

Black Aunt Hager and her brown grandson put their rubbers on and stood in the water-soaked front yard looking at the porchless house where they lived.

Platform, steps, pillars, roof, and all had been blown away. Not a semblance of a porch was left and the front door opened bare into the yard. It was grotesque and funny. Hager laughed.

Platform, steps, pillars, roof, and all had been blown away. Not a semblance of a porch was left and the front door opened bare into the yard. It was grotesque and funny. Hager laughed.

“Cyclone sho did a good job,” she said. “Looks like I ain’t never had no porch.”

Madam de Carter, from next door, came across the grass, her large mouth full of chattering sympathy for her neighbor.

Good white folks, the Gavitts, Aunt Hager had often said, and now their large frame dwelling lay on its side like a doll’s mansion, with broken furniture strewn carelessly on the wet lawn—and they were dead.

Sandy saw a piano flat on its back in the grass. Its ivory keys gleamed in the moonlight like grinning teeth, and the strange sight made his little body shiver, so he hurried back through the crowd looking for his grandmother.

As he passed the corner, he heard a woman sobbing hysterically within the wide house there.

That was all right now. Working all day in the hot sun with a gang of Greeks, a man was tired at night, besides living in a boxcar, where there was no place to write a letter anyway.

He was a great big kid, that’s what Jimboy was, cut out for playing.

But when he did work, he tried to outdo everybody else. Annjee could see him in her mind, tall and well-built, his legs apart, muscles bulging as he swung the big hammer above his head, driving steel.

“Don’t never let no one woman worry you,” said the boy’s father softly, picking the moist wriggling worms from the upturned loam.

“Treat ’em like chickens, son. Throw ’em a little corn and they’ll run after you, but don’t give ’em too much. If you do, they’ll stop layin’ and expect you to wait on ’em.”

The warm afternoon sun made the river a languid sheet of muddy gold, glittering away towards the bridge and the flour-mills a mile and a half off.

Mrs. Rice went out again through the swinging door, but Sandy stood near the sink with a burning face and eyes that had suddenly filled with angry tears. He couldn’t help it—hearing his sweating mother reprimanded by this tall white woman in the flowered dress.

Black, hardworking Annjee answered: “Yes, ma’am,” and that was all⁠—but Sandy cried.

“Dry up,” his mother said crossly when she saw him, thinking he was crying because she had asked him to work. “What’s come over you, anyway?—can’t even wipe a few plates for me and act nice about it!”

Once Annjee spoke to her son.

“Evening’s the only time we niggers have to ourselves!” she said. “Thank God for night⁠ ⁠… ’cause all day you gives to white folks.”

“O, they’ve got us cornered, all right,” said Jimboy.

“The white folks are like farmers that own all the cows and let the niggers take care of ’em. Then they make you pay a sweet price for skimmed milk and keep the cream for themselves⁠—but I reckon cream’s too rich for rusty-kneed niggers anyhow!”

“That’s a good one!” said Harriett. “You know old man Wright, what owns the flour-mill and the new hotel—how he made his start off colored women working in his canning factory?

“Ever’body shake!” cried Benbow, as a ribbon of laughter swirled round the hall.

Couples began to sway languidly, melting together like candy in the sun as hips rotated effortlessly to the music.

Girls snuggled pomaded heads on men’s chests, or rested powdered chins on men’s shoulders, while wild young boys put both arms tightly around their partners’ waists and let their hands hang down carelessly over female haunches.

Eu‑o‑oo‑ooo‑oooo! moaned the cornet titillating with pain, as the banjo cried in stop-time, and the piano sobbed aloud with a rhythmical, secret passion.

But the drums kept up their hard steady laughter⁠—like somebody who don’t care.

“I see you plowin’, Uncle Walt,” called a little autumn-leaf brown with switching skirts to a dark-purple man grinding down the center of the floor with a yellow woman. Two short prancing blacks stopped in their tracks to quiver violently.

“Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!” somebody cried.

The earth rolls relentlessly, and the sun blazes forever on the earth, breeding, breeding.

But why do you insist like the earth, music? Rolling and breeding, earth and sun forever, relentlessly. But why do you insist like the sun? Like the lips of women? Like the bodies of men, relentlessly?

Dresses and suits of all shades and colors, and a vast confusion of bushy heads on swaying bodies.

Faces gleaming like circus balloons⁠—lemon-yellow, coal-black, powder-grey, ebony-black, blue-black faces; chocolate, brown, orange, tan, creamy-gold faces⁠—the room full of floating balloon faces

—Sandy’s eyes were beginning to blur with sleep—colored balloons with strings, and the music pulling the strings. No! Girls pulling the strings—each boy a balloon by a string. Each face a balloon.

“I’m jazzin’ it, creepers!” he sometimes yelled as he rolled his eyes towards the dancers and let his fingers beat the keys to a frenzy. … But now the piano was cryin’ the blues!

Four homeless, plug-ugly niggers, that’s all they were, playing mean old loveless blues in a hot, crowded little dance-hall in a Kansas town on Friday night. Playing the heart out of loneliness with a wide-mouthed leader, who sang everybody’s troubles until they became his own.

The improvising piano, the whanging banjo, the throbbing bass-drum, the hard-hearted little snare-drum, the brassy comet that laughed, Whaw-whaw-whaw. … Whaw! were the waves in this lonesome sea of harmony from which Benbow’s melancholy voice rose:

And all the while Sandy said nothing to his father about having seen Harriett dancing in the minstrel tent that afternoon.

Sandy had lived too long with three women not to have learned to hold his tongue about the private doings of each of them.

When Annjee paid two dollars a week on a blue silk shirt for his father at Cohn’s cut-rate credit store, and Sandy saw her make the payments, he knew without being told that the matter was never to be mentioned to Aunt Hager.

And if his grandmother sometimes threw Harriett’s rouge out in the alley,

Sandy saw it with his eyes, but not with his mouth.

Because he loved all three of them—Harriett and Annjee and Hager—he didn’t carry tales on any one of them to the others.

An’ Ah can’t be satisfied, ’Cause all Ah love has Done laid down an’ died.

And to Sandy it seemed like the saddest music in the world⁠—but the white people around him laughed.

Then the stage lights went on, the band blared, and all the black actors came trooping back, clapping their hands before the cotton-field curtain as each one in turn danced like fury, vigorously distorting agile limbs into the most amazing positions, while the scene ended …

“And you won’t forget Aunt Harrie?”

“I’m leaving with the carnival,” she told him.

For a moment they sat close together on the bed. Then she kissed him, went into the other room and picked up her suitcases—and the door closed.

“To take money and use it for what it ain’t s’posed to be used is the same as stealing,” Jimboy went on gravely to his son. “That’s what you done today, and then come home and lie about it.

Nobody’s ugly as a liar, you know that!

… I’m not much, maybe. Don’t mean to say I am. I won’t work a lot, but what I do I do honest.

But the sled! Homemade by some rough carpenter, with strips of rusty tin nailed along the wooden runners, and a piece of clothesline to pull it with!

“It’s fine,” Sandy lied, as he tried to lift it and place it on the floor as you would in coasting; but it was very heavy, and too wide for a boy to run with in his hands.

You could never get a swift start. And a board was warped in the middle.

then Tempy distributed her gifts, kissed them all as though it were her Christian duty, and went her way, saying that she had calls to make at Lawyer and Mrs. Moore’s, and Professor Booth’s, and Madam Temple’s before she returned home.

When she had gone, everybody felt relieved⁠—as though a white person had left the house.

Willie-Mae began to play again, and Hager pushed her feet out of her shoes once more, while Annjee went into the bedroom and lay down.

“Nothin’,” Hager replied, “ ’ceptin’ this chile’s done got beside hisself an’ I has to hit him—that’s all!”

But Sandy was not hurt by his grandmother’s easy rap. He was used to being struck on the back of the head for misdemeanors, and this time he welcomed the blow because it gave him, at last, what he had been looking for all day⁠—a sufficient excuse to cry.

Now his pent-up tears flowed without ceasing while Willie-Mae sat in a corner clutching her rag doll to her breast, and Tempy’s expensive gift lay in the ashes beneath the stove.

You could smell the spring.

“ ’Tain’t gwine be warm fo’ weeks yet!” Hager said.

And when the apple-blossoms came in full bloom, there was no one living in the little house but a grey-headed old woman and her grandchild.

“One by one they leaves you,” Hager said slowly. “One by one yo’ chillen goes.”

I loved her an’ she loved me. Miss Jeanne were de mistress’ daughter, but warn’t no difference ’tween us ’ceptin’ she called me Hager an’ I called her Miss Jeanne.

But what difference do one word like ‘Miss’ make in yo’ heart? None, chile, none. De words don’t make no difference if de love’s there.

“I disremembers what year it were de war broke out, but white folks was scared, an’ niggers, too. Didn’t know what might happen. An’ we heard talk o’ Abraham Lincoln ’way down yonder in de South.

The band was playing gaily inside. … They were almost to the entrance now. … There were just two boys in front of them … Willie-Mae held out her black little hand clutching the coupons. They moved forward. The man looked down.

“Sorry,” he said. “This party’s for white kids.”

Willie-Mae did not understand. She stood holding out the coupons, waiting for the tall white man to take them.

The thought that he himself had created this brightness with his own hands, aided by a can of brass-polish, never failed to make Sandy happy.

He liked to clean things, to make them beautiful, to make them shine.

Aunt Hager did, too. When she wasn’t washing clothes, she was always cleaning something about the house, dusting, polishing the range, or scrubbing the kitchen floor until it was white enough to eat from.

They had never looked at life through the spectacles of the Sunday School. The glasses good people wore wouldn’t have fitted their eyes, for they hung no curtain of words between themselves and reality.

To them, things were⁠—what they were.

Ma bed is hard, but I’m layin’ in it jest de same!

Her favorite fruits were tangerines and grapefruit, for Mrs. Barr-Grant had always eaten those, and Tempy had admired Mrs. Barr-Grant more than anybody else—more, of course, than she had admired Aunt Hager, who spent her days at the washtub, and had loved watermelon.

Colored people certainly needed to come up in the world, Tempy thought, up to the level of white people⁠—dress like white people, talk like white people, think like white people⁠—and then they would no longer be called “niggers.”

In Tempy this feeling was an emotional reaction, born of white admiration, but in Mr. Siles, who shared his wife’s views, the same attitude was born of practical thought.

… for here at Cudge’s everybody was alive, and the girls who passed in front swinging their arms and grinning at the men were warm-bodied and gay, while the boys rolling dice in the rear room or playing pool at the tables were loud-mouthed and careless.

Life sat easily on their muscular shoulders.

Adventurers and vagabonds who passed through Stanton on the main line would often drop in at Cudge’s to play a game or get a bite to eat, and many times on summer nights reckless black boys, a long way from home, kept the natives entertained …

“Yep,” added Jimmy Lane.

“Better be healthy and dumb than smart and sick like some o’ these college darkies I see with goggles on their eyes and breath smellin’ bad.”

“O, I’m not sick,” objected Sandy, “but I just get to thinking about things at night—the war, and white folks, and God, and girls, and—O, I don’t know—everything in general.”

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!

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.

“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!”

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.