Not Without Laughter

by Langston Hughes

he noticed that the address written on it was somewhere in the Bottoms. He felt vaguely worried, so he did not show it to his grandmother, because he had often heard her say that the Bottoms was a bad place.

people of all colors came together for the sake of joy,

“My! I’m glad to see you, honey! How’d you happen to come? How’d you find me?” “Grandma’s sick,” said Sandy. “She’s awful sick and Aunt Tempy sent you this note.” The girl opened the letter. It read: Your mother is not expected to live. You better come to see her since she has asked for you. Tempy. “O! . . . Wait a minute,” said Harriett softly. “I’ll hurry.”

“No, honey.” Then, in her usual tones of assumed anger: “Go on away from here an’ let a body rest. Ain’t I told you they ain’t nothin’ the matter ’ceptin’ I’s all washed out an’ just got to lay down a minute? Go on an’ fetch in yo’ wood . . . an’ spin yo’ top out yonder with Buster and them. Go on!” It was nearly five o’clock when the boy came in again. Aunt Hager was sitting in the rocker near the stove then, her face drawn and ashy. She had been trying to finish her washing.

“It’s cuttin’ me in two.” She gasped. “Send fo’ old Doc McDillors an’ he’ll come.” Madam de Carter, proud and important at the prospect of using her white neighbor’s phone, rushed away. “I didn’t know you were so sick, grandma!” Sandy’s eyes were wide with fright and sympathy. “I’m gonna get Mis’ Johnson to come rub you again.”

Tempy quickly put the house in order, bathed her mother, and spread the bed with clean sheets and a white counterpane. Before evening, members of Hager’s lodge began to drop in bringing soups and custards. White people of the neighborhood stopped, too, to inquire if there was anything they could do for the old woman who had so often waited on them in their illnesses. About six o’clock old man Logan drove up the alley and tied his white mule to the back fence.

James, you had better send this telegram to your mother. Now, here is a dollar bill and you can bring back the change. Look on her last letter and get the correct address.”

he felt strangely alone in the world, as though Aunt Hager had already gone away, and when he reached the house, it was full of lodge members who had come to keep watch. Tempy went home, but Sister Johnson remained in the sick-room, changing the hot-water bottles and administering, every three hours, the medicine the doctor had left.

He wished they would all go away. He could take care of his grandmother himself until she got well—he and Sister Johnson. They didn’t even need Tempy, who, he felt, shouldn’t be there, because he didn’t like her.

“Is they takin’ care o’ you?” she asked weakly. “Ain’t it bedtime, honey? Is you had something to eat? Come on an’ kiss yo’ old grandma befo’ you go to sleep. She’ll be better in de mawnin’.”

“Well, that’s strange,” said Tempy. “I suppose, as careless and irresponsible as Jimboy is, they’ve got it wrong, or else moved.... Do you know where Harriett can be? I don’t suppose you do, but mother has been calling for her all night. I suppose we’ll have to try to get her, wherever she is.” “I got her address,” said Sandy. “She wrote it down for me when I was working at the hotel this winter. I can find her.”

“Is you happy, chile?” Hager asked. “You looks so nice. Yo’ clothes is right purty. I hopes you’s findin’ what you wants in life. You’s young, honey, an’ you needs to be happy.... Sandy!” She called so weakly that he could hardly hear her, though he was standing at the head of the bed. “Sandy, look in that drawer, chile, under ma night-gowns an’ things, an’ hand me that there little box you sees down in de corner.”

The old woman took it eagerly and tried to hold it out towards her daughter. Harriett unwound the handkerchief and opened the lid of the box. Then she saw that it contained the tiny gold watch that her mother had given her on her sixteenth birthday, which she had pawned months ago in order to run away with the carnival. Quick tears came to the girl’s eyes.

“That’s all right, mama,” Harriett sobbed to the body in the long, black box. “You won’t get lonesome out here. Harrie’ll come back tomorrow. Harrie’ll come back every day and bring you flowers. You won’t get lonesome, mama.”

Jimboy was working on a lake steamer and was seldom home, and she couldn’t have Sandy with her anyway until they got a nicer place to stay; so would Tempy please keep him a little while?

“And I think it would be only fair to the boy that you let him stay with us, because, Annjee, you are certainly not the person to bring him up as he should be reared.” The letter was signed: “Your sister, Tempy,” and written properly with pen and ink. So it happened that Sandy came to live with Mr. and Mrs. Arkins Siles, for that was the name by which his aunt and uncle were known in the Negro society of the town. Mr. Siles was a mail-clerk on the railroad—a position that colored people considered a high one because you were working for “Uncle Sam.” He was a paste-colored man of forty-eight who had inherited three houses from his father. Tempy, when she married, had owned houses too, one of which had been willed her by Mrs. Barr-Grant, for whom she had worked for years as personal maid. She had acquired her job while yet in high school, and Mrs. Barr-Grant, who travelled a great deal in the interest of woman suffrage and prohibition, had taken Tempy east with her. On their return to Stanton she allowed the colored maid to take charge of her home, where she also employed a cook and a parlor girl. Thus was the mistress left free to write pamphlets and prepare lectures on the various evils of the world standing in need of correction.

Several times the mistress had remarked to her maid: “You’re so smart and such a good, clean, quick little worker, Tempy, that it’s too bad you aren’t white.” And Tempy had taken this to heart, not as an insult, but as a compliment.

Tempy no longer worked out, but stayed home, keeping house, except that she went each month to collect her rents and those of her husband. She had a woman to do the laundry and help with the cleaning, but Tempy herself did the cooking, and all her meals were models of economical preparation. Just enough food was prepared each time for three people.

White people were for ever picturing colored folks with huge slices of watermelon in their hands.

than she had admired Aunt Hager, who spent her days at the wash-tub, 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.”

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. The whites had the money, and if Negroes wanted any, the quicker they learned to be like the whites, the better. Stop being lazy, stop singing all the time, stop attending revivals, ...

(It was ironically strange that that Bottoms should be the only section of Stanton where Negroes and whites mingled freely on equal terms.)

Tempy, after getting her position with Mrs. Barr-Grant, was seldom seen with the old woman. After her marriage she was even more ashamed of her family connections—a little sister running wild, and another sister married for the sake of love—Tempy could never abide Jimboy, or understand why Annjee had taken up with a rounder from the South.

When Tempy was in the hospital for an operation shortly after her marriage, they wouldn’t let Hager enter by the front door—and Tempy never knew whether it was on account of her color or the apron!

“No’m, I ain’t,” said Sandy. “I haven’t,” she corrected him. “I certainly don’t want my white neighbors to hear you saying ‘ain’t’ . . . You’ve come to live with me now and you must talk like a gentleman.”

In every issue he found, too, stirring and beautifully written editorials about the frustrated longings of the black race, and the hidden beauties in the Negro soul. A man called Du Bois wrote them.

“Du Bois wants our rights. He wants us to be real men and women. He believes in social equality.

She said that none of the colored boys they had employed before had ever been interested in reading; so she often lent him, by way of encouragement, shopworn copies to be taken home at night and returned the next day. Thus Sandy spent much of his first year with Tempy deep in novels too mature for a fourteen-year-old boy. But Tempy was very proud of her studious young nephew.

His voice was changing, too, and he had acquired a liking for football, but his after-school job at Prentiss’s kept him from playing much. At night he read, or sometimes went to the movies with Buster—but Tempy kept him home as much as she could.