Not Without Laughter

by Langston Hughes

epithets

petulant

lugubrious

White folks sure is a case!” She laid three slices of bread on top of the stove. “So spoiled with colored folks waiting on ’em all their days! Don’t know what they’ll do in heaven, ’cause I’m gonna sit down up there myself.”

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

If you don’t like ’em, pray for ’em, but don’t feel evil against ’em.

I won’t work a lot, but what I do I do honest. White folks gets rich lyin’ and stealin’—and some niggers gets rich that way, too—but I don’t need money if I got to get it dishonest, with a lot o’ lies trailing behind me, and can’t look folks in the face.

“Well, he ain’t beat her, has he?” asked Sister Johnson, who, for the sake of conversation, often took a contrary view-point.

peremptorily

when you gets old, you knows they ain’t no sense in gettin’ mad an’ sourin’ yo’ soul with hatin’ peoples.

When you starts hatin’ people, you gets uglier than they is—an’ I ain’t never had no time for ugliness, ’cause that’s where de devil comes in—in ugliness!

But I’s been sorry fo’ white folks, fo’ I knows something inside must be aggravatin’ de po’ souls. An’ I’s kept a room in ma heart fo’ ’em, ’cause white folks needs us, honey, even if they don’t know it. They’s like spoilt chillens what’s got too much o’ ever’thing—an’ they needs us niggers, what ain’t got nothin’.

“I’s been livin’ a long time in yesterday, Sandy chile, an’ I knows there ain’t no room in de world fo’ nothin’ mo’n love. I knows, chile! Ever’thing there is but lovin’ leaves a rust on yo’ soul.

“Boy, you’s too dark to have hair like that. Ain’t nobody but white folks s’posed to have sandy-colored hair. An’ your’n’s nappy at that!” Then Sandy would blush with embarrassment—if the change from a dry chocolate to a damp chocolate can be called a blush, as he grew warm and perspired—because he didn’t like to be kidded about his hair. And he hadn’t been around uncouth fellows long enough to learn the protective art of turning back a joke.

He had discovered already, though, that so-called jokes are often not really jokes at all, but rather unpleasant realities that hurt unless you can think of something equally funny and unpleasant to say in return.

Sitting there in the back room of the hotel, Sandy wondered how people got to be great, as, one by one, he made the spittoons bright and beautiful. He wondered how people made themselves great.

for in the Bottoms folks ceased to struggle against the boundaries between good and bad, or white and black, and surrendered amiably to immorality.

To those who lived on the other side of the railroad and never realized the utter stupidity of the word “sin,” the Bottoms was vile and wicked.

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.

“Gone Home.”

When Mr. Siles asked her to be his wife, everybody said it was a fine match, for both owned property, both were old enough to know what they wanted, and both were eminently respectable.... Now they prospered together.

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, and learn to get the dollar—because money buys everything, even the respect of white people.

maelstrom

“I wish I had a brother,” Sandy thought as he stood there. “Maybe I could talk to him about things and I wouldn’t have to think so much. It’s no fun being the only kid in the family, and your father never home either.... When I get married, I’m gonna have a lot of children; then they won’t have to grow up by themselves.”

I’m more like Harriett—not wanting to be a servant at the mercies of white people for ever.... 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.”

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.