Not Without Laughter

After buying food and paying the doctor, Hager is out of money. Her attempt to get money by adding on to her mortgage fails because the mortgage holder is out of town. Annjee writes a letter to Harriet to explain their difficult financial situation. Sandy sees his mother put three dollars—money she had been saving for Sandy’s Christmas gifts, she tells him—into the envelope with the letter.

As it gets closer to Christmas, Sandy continues to stare at the sled in the shop window where it is on sale, imagining how envious both the white and black boys would be if he had the sled. He describes the sled at home and wonders out loud what gifts will come with Christmas. Hager tells him that Santa works for money like everyone else, but his mother says she will see what she can get him for Christmas despite their hard financial situation.

Sandy sees his mother rummaging in a pile of leftover lumber one day, despite her continued physical weakness. He overhears the tail end of a conversation between his mother and Hager about getting Mister Logan to build something for them. After supper, Hager leaves to see Mr. Logan. Hager tells Annjee that Mr. Logan will complete the as yet unnamed job for them.

The next day, after a night of heavy snow, Sandy delivers a load of laundry to one of his grandmother’s customers, the Reinharts. The smell of baking in the house and the cheerful Christmas decorations Sandy sees as he walks home make him wish he could make his own home more cheerful. He muses about the possibility of the Golden Flyer sled. That night as he prays, he even includes a plea for Santa Claus to bring him the sled, despite his knowledge that “Hager and his mother were Santa Claus—and that they didn't have any money” and that his father and Harriet, the only light-hearted people in his family, were gone somewhere (105).

The fancy decorations in the homes of white people and the spare ones in the homes owned by African Americans further depress Sandy because “at home there wasn't even a holly wreath. And the snow was whiter and harder than ever on the ground” (105). Back at home, Sandy finds that his grandmother has tidied up the place and put away the laundry things. The house still lacks Christmas decorations, however. Hager had made a cake that lacked the usual frosting, and Annjee had bought an orange, nuts, and candies. Sandy doesn’t see any wrapped Christmas gifts, however—a change from years past.

On Christmas Eve, the boy and two women sit in the cold house. Hager talks about how she tried to raise Harriet correctly, while Annjee hints that she is thinking of Jimboy. Annjee sends Sandy to bed and tells him to hang up his stocking in case Santa comes. Sandy doesn’t believe Santa will come, so he leaves his stocking on the floor. He pretends to sleep and overhears the two women talking about whether Logan will charge them anything. His mother, despite her illness, slips out later.

Sandy watches for her return. He sees the white woman across the street place many toys under the big Christmas tree in their home for the four children that live there. Sandy is lonely as an only child living with adults and wishes he had siblings and a warm home like the children across the street. When Annjee finally returns, Sandy sees that she is dragging “behind her a solid, homemade sled bumping rudely over the snow” (107). Sandy jumps back in the bed and pretends to sleep.

In the morning, Sandy cries in his bed as he thinks about not getting the Golden Flyer. He pretends to be delighted by the homemade sled when his mother and grandmother present it to him. The sled is so poorly made that it will never be able to slide quickly. Sandy doesn’t begin to feel any sense of happiness about his Christmas until his grandmother sits him on her lap and begins to read to him from some cheap picture books that were among his gifts.

Later that afternoon, Aunt Tempy comes by while Willie Mae and Buster are visiting Sandy. Tempy is visibly uncomfortable with the shabby surroundings. She tells them she couldn’t invite them to dinner at her home because her husband doesn’t care for company, although some important people will drop by later that day. She brags to her mother about her new piano. When Hager, “embarrassed in the presence of her finely dressed society daughter,” asks about her daughter’s new church, Tempy explains that she loves it because the minister is "refined" and refuses to include anything "niggerish" in the services. After some perfunctory hugs and distribution of her gifts, she leaves, and "everybody felt relieved—as if a white person had left the house" (111).

Sandy open Tempy's gift to him, a fancy, illustrated book beside which the books his mother bought him for Christmas look cheap. Tempy's gift "made his mother’s sled look cheap, too, and changed all the other gifts the ones he loved had given him" (111). He throws the book from Tempy in the ashes beneath the stove, earning him a spanking from Hager and giving him an excuse to release the tears he has been holding in all day.

As the winter goes on, Sandy hides his ugly sled by using it only when others are not around, his mother returns to work, complaining about Tempy not helping them out financially, and Hager—too proud to ask for money from her children—continues to support her family by taking in more washing. Sandy completes the second part of fourth grade required of African-American children once they begin attending the integrated school. He is now in the fifth grade.

One of his African American classmates fails, however, an outcome that brings the girl's mother to school to confront the teacher. As the mother criticizes the teacher for failing her daughter and forcing the African-American children to sit in the back, the white children "giggled," but the African American children "in the class couldn't laugh" (113).

Back at home, Annjee is still waiting for a letter from Jimboy and has yet to hear back from Harriet. Annjee returns to a heavy workload with the Rice family. Her return to work allows her to save some money and have Sandy's portrait taken in a new suit. Sandy comes home to a tasty meal one night; his mother brings oysters with her to add to the dinner.

As they are eating dinner, Harriet returns. She is shabbily dressed, thinner, and heavily made up. She tells her family that she left the carnival in Memphis and couldn’t get her last paycheck. She simply never got around to acknowledging the money they sent. She is glad to be out of the South, which she describes as a terrible place where African Americans are always hungry. She wishes Jimboy were back.

Annjee, noting that her sister's hands bear no marks of physical labor, asks her if she found a job in Memphis. Harriet's curt response that she did find a job ends this line of questioning. It is clear to Sandy that she is no longer a girl: "She was grown up and is hard and strange now, but he still loved her" (115). She praises Sandy when he tells her that he passed the fifth grade.

When asked about her luggage, Sandy tells her family that she left it at the station since she will be staying with her friend Maudel down in the Bottoms. Hager and Annjee are even more disappointed when she refuses to eat with them. Harriet trembles as she hugs Sandy when it is time to go, and a bottle of cheap perfume inside of her purse breaks when she drops the purse.

Signs of spring begin to appear. In March, the family receives a letter from Jimboy. Hager, knowing that her daughter has looked for a letter every day, sends Sandy to the Rice home with the letter. Jimboy writes that he had been unable to find work in St. Paul, Minnesota, but he is now in Detroit, where there is ample work. Sandy asks his mother for money.

Sandy heads to Buster's house, where he finds Buster's mother, an African-American woman with "skin like old ivory"(118), talking with a visiting friend about her son's behavior, which she sees as being more typical of white people. For example, her son cut all the flowers off her geraniums to give to a white girl on whom he had a crush. Her friend laughs it off, then tells Buster's mother than when the family first moved here, she assumed that they were white until she saw Buster's father, a dark-skinned man. The two boys go out to play and stop by a store to buy some candy and marbles.

Sandy returns home for dinner, and Annjee—still elated because of Jimboy's letter—comes home as well. She announces that she is going to join Jimboy in Detroit once she saves some money. Her mother angrily asks her what will happen to Sandy and what she will do when Jimboy wanders off to another place as usual. Annjee says she will follow him wherever he goes and asks if Sandy can just stay with Hager. Annjee says that she and Jimboy could possibly come back once they earn enough money to get a mortgage to pay for a house. She is adamant, however, that she must go to be with Jimboy.

After listening to this announcement, Hager complains that all of her children leave her in the end. She is committed, however, to raising Sandy so that he can grow up to be a good man even if she has failed with her other children.

The next morning, Sandy daydreams in bed instead of getting up. He does this every morning. On these mornings, he wonders if repeated washing will make him white or if he will one day have a big house like Aunty Tempy. Only white people have such fine things, however, and most white people (with the exception of his white friend at school) are mean to African Americans. Jesus was white, too. At church, Jimmy Lane was not destroyed after he cursed Jesus. Jimboy and all the boys Sandy knows curse, in fact, despite Hager's admonishment that to do so is a sin. When he grows up, he wants to travel like his father and be a railroad engineer or a doctor despite his mother's warning that those occupations are only open to whites.

Sandy wishes his mother would take him to Detroit, but he doesn’t want to leave Hager alone. He will stay with Hager, but when he grows up, he will go to Detroit or New York. He wonders if African Americans live in New York. He hates the pictures of Africans in his geography book because they are portrayed with "bushy hair and wild eyes" and look ugly (122). Hager told him her mother had been an African, and she was not at all ugly. Hager and Willie Mae are dark like the Africans, and they are not ugly either. The minister was dark like an African, yet could talk to God.

Sometimes Sandy thinks about his fair-skinned friend Buster, who looks white but is still identified as African American. "What made Buster not colored?...and what made girls different from boys?" Sandy wonders. Sandy also wonders why he has a navel and where babies come from. People claimed they came from storks, but just like Santa Claus as the giver of gifts, Sandy thinks this is a lie. "God damn Santa Claus for not bringing him the sled he wanted!" thinks Sandy (122). 

After all these thoughts, Sandy usually gets dressed after more scolding by Hager, then heads to school. Sometimes, he calls to Willie Mae before heading out, but other times, he walks with just the other boys.

All through the spring, Annjee works hard to save extra money and imagines a better life with Jimboy by her side. Later that spring, Annjee finally leaves Sandy and Hager so she can join Jimboy.

A year has passed since the storm blew away the front porch, Hager reminds Sandy. In that time, all of her children have left her, but not Sandy, Hager says. With Sandy as her only constant companion, Hager talks to him constantly. She tells him "slavery-time stories, myths, folk-tales, like the Rabbit and the Tar Baby; the war, Abe Lincoln, freedom; visions of the Lord; years of faith and labor, love and struggle" (125).

Sometimes she talks to Sandy, who sits on a stool now that he is too big to sit on her lap, about love and hate. Despite the way younger people criticize their elders for refusing to hate whites, Hager believes that neither blacks nor whites are as bad as the respective races claim. Hating people is sinful and makes the people doing the hating worse than what they hate.

People talk about the days of slavery as if they were uniformly terrible. The truth, according to Hager, is that it "weren't all that bad" compared to the Jim Crow age in which they live now (126). African Americans are now forced to work for less money than they need to buy food, but during slavery, whites were at least forced to feed them.

Hager admits that her view might be warped because she and her mother, the cook for the family that owned them, worked in the house instead of the fields. Hager grew up beside Jeanne, the slave owner's daughter, and eventually became her maid. Although Hager always addressed Jeanne as "Miss" and Jeanne always called her by her first name, there was love there.

Hager remembers the day Master Winfield took all the men, including his son, to go fight against the Union during the Civil War. Everyone—white women and slave alike—cried. Miss Jeanne married her fiancé, a Confederate officer, just before he left to go fight. The mistress of the house had died by then, so Miss Jeanne was left with just Hager and Granny Jones, who ran the household. Most enslaved people, in fact, stayed by the sides of the white women, given to "a-cryin' and a-faintin' like they did in them days," and never took advantage by stealing (127).

Miss Jeanne collapsed as she received news of the deaths of her brothers, relatives, and husband in a short period of time. When the war ended, Hager stayed with Miss Jeanne rather than leaving, as did other African Americans who had gained their freedom at last. The house began to deteriorate, but the two women clung to each other, each convinced that the other was the only person left to her in the world. They would sit on the porch of the big house and Miss Jeanne would tell stories about the short time with her husband. Hager would wear her apron and a small chain—one she still wears about her neck—given to her by Miss Jeanne.

One night, Miss Jeanne woke up after having a vision of her husband having come home. She stepped off the balcony into his waiting arms (actually the stump of a tree with broken branches). Since she left no will, the entire estate went to the government and Hager received nothing. Although Hager has met both kind and cruel white people since then, her relationship with Miss Jeanne has left her convinced that white people need African Americans. Whites are "like spoilt chillens" with too much; they need African Americans, who have nothing (129).

"Ever'thing there is but lovin' leaves a rust on yo' soul,'' Hager tells Sandy, and the refusal to love unconditionally everyone—good and bad alike, white and black alike—will only damage him. Hating white people, regardless of how they might mistreat him, will only damage him. In the end, there is room for "nothin' but love" in the world (129).