Not Without Laughter

by Langston Hughes

Chillens don’t care—but I reckon we old ones can’t kick much. They’s got to get off fo’ themselves.

When niggers get up in the world, they act just like white folks—don’t pay you no mind.

Seems like all the good-time people are bad, and all the old Uncle Toms and mean, dried-up, long-faced niggers fill the churches.

In the starry blackness the singing notes of the guitar became a plaintive hum, like a breeze in a grove of palmettos; became a low moan, like the wind in a forest of live-oaks strung with long strands of hanging moss.

“Thank God for night … ’cause all day you gives to white folks.”

I was in slavery, Harrie, an’ I been knowin’ white folks all ma life, an’ they’s good as far as they can see—but when it comes to po’ niggers, they just can’t see far, that’s all.”

“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!”

Cruel, desolate, unadorned was their music now, like the body of a ravished woman on the sun-baked earth; violent and hard, like a giant standing over his bleeding mate in the blazing sun. The odors of bodies, the stings of flesh, and the utter emptiness of soul when all is done—these things the piano and the drums, the cornet and the twanging banjo insisted on hoarsely to a beat that made the dancers move, in that little hall, like pawns on a frenetic checker-board.

It was true that men and women were dancing together, but their feet had gone down through the floor into the earth, each dancer’s alone—down into the center of things—and their minds had gone off to the heart of loneliness, where they didn’t even hear the words, the sometimes lying, sometimes laughing words that Benbow, leaning on the piano, was singing against this background of utterly despondent music:

BETWEEN the tent of Christ and the tents of sin there stretched scarcely a half-mile. Rivalry reigned: the revival and the carnival held sway in Stanton at the same time.

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

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.

He wondered sometimes whether if he washed and washed his face and hands, he would ever be white. Someone had told him once that blackness was only skin-deep.…

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.

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’.

“White peoples maybe mistreats you an’ hates you, but when you hates ’em back, you’s de one what’s hurted, ’cause hate makes yo’ heart ugly—that’s all it does. It closes up de sweet door to life an’ makes ever’thing small an’ mean an’ dirty. Honey, there ain’t no room in de world fo’ hate, white folks hatin’ niggers, an’ niggers hatin’ white folks. There ain’t no room in this world fo’ nothin’ but love, Sandy chile. That’s all they’s room fo’—nothin’ but love.”

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.

If I can’t be the table-cloth, I won’t be the dish-rag—that’s my motto. And if I can’t buy the seats I want at a show, I sure God can keep my change!”

It was a gay place—people did what they wanted to, or what they had to do, and didn’t care—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. But to the girls who lived there, and the boys who pimped and fought and sold licker there, “sin” was a silly word that did not enter their heads. 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.

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.

To the uninitiated it would seem that a fight was imminent. But underneath, all was good-natured and friendly—and through and above everything went laughter. No matter how belligerent or lewd their talk was, or how sordid the tales they told—of dangerous pleasures and strange perversities—these black men laughed. That must be the reason, thought Sandy, why poverty-stricken old Negroes like Uncle Dan Givens lived so long—because to them, no matter how hard life might be, it was not without laughter.

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.

He understood then why many old Negroes said: “Take all this world and give me Jesus!” It was because they couldn’t get this world anyway—it belonged to the white folks. They alone had the power to give or withhold at their back doors.

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.

This boy’s gotta get ahead—all of us niggers are too far back in this white man’s country to let any brains go to waste! Don’t you realize that?…