Not Without Laughter

by Langston Hughes

“They do that all right,” said Jimboy. “They don’t mind firin’ you. Wasn’t I layin’ brick on the Daily Leader building and the white union men started sayin’ they couldn’t work with me because I wasn’t in the union? So the boss come up and paid me off. ‘Good man, too,’ he says to me, ‘but I can’t buck the union.’ So I said I’d join, but I knew they wouldn’t let me before I went to the office. Anyhow, I tried. I told the guys there I was a bricklayer and asked ’em how I was gonna work if I couldn’t be in the union. And the fellow who had the cards, secretary I guess he was, says kinder sharp, like he didn’t want to be bothered: ‘That’s your look-out, big boy, not mine.’ So you see how much the union cares if a black man works or not.”

Racism in unions

So from that time on, Harriett had been uncomfortable in the presence of whiteness, and that early hurt had grown with each new incident into a rancor that she could not hide and a dislike that had become pain.

Now, because she could sing and dance and was always amusing, many of the white girls in high school were her friends. But when the three-thirty bell rang and it was time to go home, Harriett knew their polite “Good-bye” was really a kind way of saying: “We can’t be seen on the streets with a colored girl.” To loiter with these same young ladies had been all right during their grade-school years, when they were all younger, but now they had begun to feel the eyes of young white boys staring from the windows of pool halls, or from the tennis-courts near the park—so it was not proper to be seen with Harriett.

His light was on until after twelve almost every night. And when he did not study late, his old habit of lying awake clung to him and he could not go to sleep early.

‘Work and make ready and maybe your chance will come,’ it said under the picture of Lincoln on the calendar given away by the First National Bank, where Earl, his white friend, already had a job promised him when he came out of school.... It was not nearly so difficult for white boys. They could work at anything—in stores, on newspapers, in offices. They could become president of the United States if they were clever enough. But a colored boy. . . . No wonder Buster was going to pass for white when he left Stanton.