Not Without Laughter

by Langston Hughes

That’s what’s the matter with colored folks now—work all week and then set up in church all day Sunday, and don’t even know what’s goin’ on in the rest of the world.”

“They wouldn’t have a single one of us around if they could help it. It don’t matter to them if we’re shut out of a job. It don’t matter to them if niggers have only the back row at the movies. It don’t matter to them when they hurt our feelings without caring and treat us like slaves down South and like beggars up North. No, it don’t matter to them... White folks run the world, and the only thing colored folks are expected to do is work and grin and take off their hats as though it don’t matter... O, I hate ’em!”

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

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!

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. An’ to love sho ’nough, you got to have a spot in yo’ heart fo’ ever’body—great an’ small, white an’ black, an’ them what’s good an’ them what’s evil—’cause love ain’t got no crowded-out places where de good ones stays an’ de bad ones can’t come in. When it gets that way, then it ain’t love.

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.

“I’ve got to get out of this,” Sandy kept repeating. “Or maybe I’ll get stuck here, too, like they are, and never get away. I’ve got to go back to school.”

“Not like Jimboy,” Sandy countered against himself. “Not like my father, always wanting to go somewhere. I’d get as tired of travelling all the time, as I do of running this elevator up and down day after day... 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.”

Clowns! Jazzers! Band of dancers!... Harriett! Jimboy! Aunt Hager!... A band of dancers!... Sandy remembered his grandmother whirling around in front of the altar at revival meetings in the midst of the other sisters, her face shining with light, arms outstretched as though all the cares of the world had been cast away; Harriett in the back yard under the apple-tree, eagle-rocking in the summer evenings to the tunes of the guitar; Jimboy singing... 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.