Aunt Hager Williams stood in her doorway and looked out at the sun. The western sky was a sulphurous yellow and the sun a red ball dropping slowly behind the trees and housetops. Its setting left the ...

It was broad daylight in the town of Stanton and had been for a long time. “Get out o’ that bed, boy!” Aunt Hager yelled. “Here’s Buster waitin’ out in de yard to play with you, an’ you still sleepin’...

Kansas City, MO 13 June 1912 Dear Annjelica, I been laying off to written you ever since I left home but you know how it is. Work has not been so good here. Am with a section gang of coloreds and gree...

Hager had risen at sunrise. On Thursday she did the Reinharts’ washing, on Fridays she ironed it, and on Saturdays she sent it home, clean and beautifully white, and received as pay the sum of seventy...

Throw yo’ arms around me, baby. Like de circle round de sun! Baby, throw yo’ arms around me Like de circle round de sun, An’ tell yo’ pretty papa How you want yo’ lovin’ done! Jimboy was home. All the...

The sunflowers in Willie-Mae’s backyard were taller than Tom Johnson’s head, and the hollyhocks in the fence corners were almost as high. The nasturtiums, blood-orange and gold, tumbled over themselve...

When they got home, Aunt Hager was sitting in the cool of the evening on her new porch, which had been rebuilt for thirty-five dollars added to the mortgage. The old woman was in her rocking-chair, wi...

Mrs. J. J. Rice and family usually spent ten days during the August heat at Lake Dale, and thither they had gone now, giving Annjee a forced vacation with no pay. Jimboy was not working, and so his wi...

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. Both were at the south edge o...

Old white Dr. McDillors, beloved of all the Negroes in Stanton, came on Sunday morning, swabbed Sandy’s festering foot with iodine, bound it up, and gave him a bottle of green medicine to take, and by...

Some weeks later the neighbors were treated to an early morning concert: I got a high yaller An’ a little short black, But a brown-skin gal Can bring me right on back! I’m singin’ brown-skin! Lawdy!⁠ ...

September passed and the cornstalks in the garden were cut. There were no more apples left on the trees, and chilly rains came to beat down the falling leaves from the maples and the elms. Cold and dr...

“Po’ little thing,” said Hager. “Po’ little thing. An’ here we ain’t got no money.” The night before, on Saturday, Hager had bought a sack of flour, a chunk of salt pork, and some groceries. Old Dr. M...

After Christmas there followed a period of cold weather, made bright by the winter sun shining on the hard crusty snow, where children slid and rolled, and over which hay-wagons made into sleighs on g...

You could smell the spring. “ ’Tain’t gwine be warm fo’ weeks yet!” Hager said. Nevertheless, you could smell the spring. Little boys were already running in the streets without their overcoats, and t...

“A year ago tonight was de storm what blowed ma porch away! You ’members, honey?⁠ ⁠… Done seem like this year took more’n ma porch, too. My baby chile’s left home an’ gone to stay down yonder in de Bo...

Mr. Logan, hearing that Aunt Hager had an empty room since all her daughters were gone, sent her one evening a newcomer in town looking for a place to stay. His name was Wim Dogberry and he was a bric...

When Easter came that spring, Sandy had saved enough money to buy himself a suit and a new cap from his earnings at the barbershop. He was very proud of this accomplishment and so was Aunt Hager. “You...

In the fall Sandy found a job that occupied him after school hours, as well as on Saturday and Sunday. One afternoon at the barbershop, Charlie Nutter, a bellhop who had come to have his hair cut, ask...

In the lobby of the Drummer’s Hotel there were six large brass spittoons⁠—one in the center of the place, one in each corner, and one near the clerk’s desk. It was Sandy’s duty to clean these spittoon...

Several days later, when Sandy took out of his pocket the piece of paper that his Aunt Harriett had given him that day in front of the hotel, he noticed that the address written on it was somewhere in...

During the day the lodge members went to their work in the various kitchens and restaurants and laundries of the town. And Madam de Carter was ordered to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a split in her organiza...

“James, you must get up on time in this house. Breakfast has been ready twenty minutes. I can’t come upstairs every morning to call you. You are old enough now to wake yourself and you must learn to d...

That spring, shortly after Sandy went to stay with Tempy, there was an epidemic of mumps among the schoolchildren in Stanton, and, old as he was, he was among its early victims. With jaws swollen to t...

There were no community houses in Stanton and no recreation centers for young men except the Y.M.C.A., which was closed to you if you were not a white boy; so, for the Negro youths of the town, Cudge ...

During Sandy’s second year at high school Tempy was busy sewing for the local Red Cross and organizing Liberty Bond clubs among the colored population of Stanton. She earnestly believed that the world...

“I won’t permit it,” said Tempy. “I won’t stand for it. You’ll have to mend your ways, young man! Spending your evenings in Windsor’s pool parlor and running the streets with a gang of common boys tha...

Chicago, IL May 16, 1918 Dear Sandy: Have just come home from work and am very tired but thought I would write you this letter right now while I had time and wasn’t sleepy. You are a big boy and I thi...

The following day Sandy went to work as elevator-boy at the hotel in the Loop where Mr. Harris was head bellman, and during the hot summer months that followed, his life in Chicago gradually settled i...

One hot Monday in August Harrietta Williams, billed as “The Princess of the Blues,” opened at the Monogram Theatre on State Street. The screen had carried a slide of her act the week previous, so Sand...