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 the groundhog had seen its shadow. Snow remained in the fence corners, but it had melted on the roofs. The yards were wet and muddy, but no longer white.

It was a sunny afternoon in late March that a letter came. On his last delivery the mailman stopped, dropped it in the box⁠—and Sandy saw him. It was addressed to his mother and he knew it must be from Jimboy.

“Go on an’ take it to her,” his grandma said, as soon as she saw the boy coming with it in his hand. “I knows that’s what you want to do. Go on an’ take it.” And she bent over her ironing again.

Sandy ran almost all the way to Mrs. Rice’s, dropping the letter more than once on the muddy sidewalk, so excited he did not think to put it in his pocket. Into the big yard and around to the white lady’s back door he sped⁠—and it was locked! He knocked loudly for a long time, and finally an upper window opened and Annjee, a dust-rag around her head, looked down, squinting in the sunlight.

“Who’s there?” she called stridently, thinking of some peddler or belated tradesman for whom she did not wish to stop her cleaning.

Sandy pantingly held up the letter and was about to say something when the window closed with a bang. He could hear his mother almost falling down the back stairs, she was coming so fast. Then the key turned swiftly in the lock, the door opened, and, without closing it, Annjee took the letter from him and tore it open where she stood.

“It’s from Jimboy!”

Sandy stood on the steps looking at his mother, her bosom heaving, her sleeves rolled up, and the white cloth tied about her head, doubly white against her dark-brown face.

“He’s in Detroit, it says.⁠ ⁠… Umn! I ain’t never seen him write such a long letter. ‘I had a hard time this winter till I landed here,’ it says, ‘but things look pretty good now, and there is lots of building going on and plenty of work opening up in the automobile plants⁠ ⁠… a mighty lot of colored folks here⁠ ⁠… hope you and Sandy been well. Sorry couldn’t send you nothing Xmas, but I was in St. Paul broke.⁠ ⁠… Kiss my son for me.⁠ ⁠… Tell ma hello even if she don’t want to hear it. Your loving husband, Jimboy Rodgers.’ ”

Annjee did her best to hold the letter with one hand and pick up Sandy with the other, but he had grown considerably during the winter and she was still a little weak from her illness; so she bent down to his level and kissed him several times before she reread the letter.

“From your daddy!” she said. “Umn-mn.⁠ ⁠… Come on in here and warm yourself. Lemme see what he says again!”⁠ ⁠… She lighted the gas oven in the white kitchen and sat down in front of it with her letter, forgetting the clock and the approaching time for Mrs. Rice’s dinner, forgetting everything. “A letter from my daddy! From my far-off sugar-daddy!”

“From my daddy,” corrected Sandy.⁠ ⁠… “Say, gimme a nickel to buy some marbles, mama. I wanta go play.”

Without taking her eyes from the precious note Annjee fumbled in her apron and found a coin. “Take it and go on!” she said.

It was a dime. Sandy skipped around the house and down the street in the chilly sunshine. He decided to stop at Buster’s for a while before going home, since he had to pass there anyway, and he found his friend in the house trying to carve boats from clothespins with a rusty jackknife.

Buster’s mother was a seamstress, and, after opening the front door and greeting Sandy with a cheery “Hello,” she returned to her machine and a friend who was calling on her. She was a tall young light-mulatto woman, with skin like old ivory. Maybe that was why Buster was so white. But her husband was a black man who worked on the city’s garbage-trucks and was active politically when election time came, getting colored men to vote Republican. Everybody said he made lots of money, but that he wasn’t really Buster’s father.

The golden-haired child gave Sandy a butcher-knife and together they whacked at the clothespins. You could hear the two women talking plainly in the little sewing-room, where the machine ran between snatches of conversation.

“Yes,” Buster’s mother was saying, “I have the hardest time keeping that boy colored! He goes on just like he was white. Do you know what he did last week? Cut all the blossoms off my geranium plants here in the house, took them to school, and gave them to Dorothy Marlow, in his grade. And you know who Dorothy is, don’t you? Senator Marlow’s daughter!⁠ ⁠… I said: ‘Buster, if you ever cut my flowers to carry to any little girl again, I’ll punish you severely, but if you cut them to carry to little white girls, I don’t know what I’ll do with you.⁠ ⁠… Don’t you know they hang colored boys for things like that?’ I wanted to scare him⁠—because you know there might be trouble even among kids in school over such things.⁠ ⁠… But I had to laugh.”

Her friend laughed too. “He’s a hot one, taking flowers to the women already, and a white girl at that! You’ve got a fast-working son, Elvira, I must say.⁠ ⁠… But, do you know, when you first moved here and I saw you and the boy going in and out, I thought sure you were both white folks. I didn’t know you was colored till my husband said: ‘That’s Eddie’s wife!’ You-all sure looked white to me.”

The machine started to whir, making the conversation inaudible for a few minutes, and when Sandy caught their words again, they were talking about the Elks’ clubhouse that the colored people were planning to build.

“Can you go out?” Sandy demanded of Buster, sure they were making no headway with the tough clothespins and dull knives.

“Maybe,” said Buster. “I’ll go see.” And he went into the other room and asked his mother.

“Put on your overcoat,” she commanded. “It’s not summer yet. And be back in here before dark.”

“All right, Vira,” the child said.

The two children went to Mrs. Rumford’s shop on the corner and bought three cents’ worth of candy and seven cents’ worth of peewees with which to play marbles when it got warm. Then Sandy walked back past Buster’s house with him and they played for a while in the street before Sandy turned to run home.

Aunt Hager was making mush for supper. She sent him to the store for a pint bottle of milk as soon as he arrived, but he forgot to take the bottle and had to come back for it.

“You’d forget yo’ head if it wasn’t tied to you!” the old woman reminded him.

They were just finishing supper when Annjee got home with two chocolate eclairs in her coat-pocket, mashed together against Jimboy’s letter.

“Huh! I’m crazy!” she said, running her hand down into the sticky mess. “But listen, ma! He’s got a job and is doing well in Detroit, Jimboy says.⁠ ⁠… And I’m going to him!”

“You what?” Hager gasped, dropping her spoon in her mush-bowl. “What you sayin’?”

“I said I’m going to him, ma! I got to!” Annjee stood with her coat and hat still on, holding the sticky letter. “I’m going where my heart is, ma!⁠ ⁠… Oh, not today.” She put her arms around her mother’s neck. “I don’t mean today, mama, nor next week. I got to save some money first. I only got a little now. But I mean I’m going to him soon’s I can. I can’t help it, ma⁠—I love him!”

“Lawd, is you foolish?” cried Hager. “What’s you gwine do with this chile, trapesin’ round after Jimboy? What you gwine do if he leaves you in Detroiter or wherever he are? What you gwine do then? You loves him! Huh!”

“But he ain’t gonna leave me in Detroit, ’cause I’m going with him everywhere he goes,” she said, her eyes shining. “He ain’t gonna leave me no more!”

“An’ Sandy?”

“Couldn’t he stay with you, mama? And then maybe we’d come back here and live, Jimboy and me, some time, when we get a little money ahead, and could pay off the mortgage on the house.⁠ ⁠… But there ain’t no use arguing, mama, I got to go!”

Hager had never seen Annjee so positive before; she sat speechless, looking at the bowl of mush.

“I got to go where it ain’t lonesome and where I ain’t unhappy⁠—and that’s where Jimboy is! I got to go soon as I can.”

Hager rose to put some water on the stove to heat for the dishes.

“One by one you leaves me⁠—Tempy, then Harriett, then you,” she said. “But Sandy’s gonna stick by me, ain’t you, son? He ain’t gwine leave his grandma.”

The youngster looked at Hager, moving slowly about the kitchen putting away the supper things.

“And I’s gwine to make a fine man out o’ you, Sandy. I’s gwine raise one chile right yet, if de Lawd lets me live⁠—just one chile right!” she murmured.

That night the March wind began to blow and the windowpanes rattled. Sandy woke up in the dark, lying close and warm beside his mother. When he went back to sleep again, he dreamed that his Aunt Tempy’s Christmas book had been turned into a chariot, and that he was riding through the sky with Tempy standing very dignifiedly beside him as he drove. And he couldn’t see anybody down on earth, not even Hager.

When his mother rolled out at six o’clock to go to work, he woke up again, and while she dressed, he lay watching his breath curl mistily upwards in the cold room. Outside the window it was bleak and grey and the March wind, humming through the leafless branches of the trees, blew terrifically. He heard Aunt Hager in the kitchen poking at the stove, making up a blaze to start the coffee boiling. Then the front door closed when his mother went out and, as the door slammed, the wind howled fiercely. It was nice and warm in bed, so he lay under the heavy quilts half dreaming, half thinking, until his grandmother shook him to get up. And many were the queer, dream-drowsy thoughts that floated through his mind⁠—not only that morning, but almost every morning while he lay beneath the warm quilts until Hager had called him three or four times to get ready for school.

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.⁠ ⁠… And would he ever have a big house with electric lights in it, like his Aunt Tempy⁠—but it was mostly white people who had such fine things, and they were mean to colored.⁠ ⁠… Some white folks were nice, though. Earl was nice at school, but not the little boys across the street, who called him “nigger” every day⁠ ⁠… and not Mrs. Rice, who scolded his mother.⁠ ⁠… Aunt Harrie didn’t like any white folks at all.⁠ ⁠… But Jesus was white and wore a long, white robe, like a woman’s, on the Sunday-school cards.⁠ ⁠… Once Jimmy Lane said: “God damn Jesus” when the teacher scolded him for not knowing his Bible lesson. He said it out loud in church, too, and the church didn’t fall down on him, as Sandy thought it might.⁠ ⁠… Grandma said it was a sin to cuss and swear, but all the fellows at school swore⁠—and Jimboy did, too. But every time Sandy said “God damn,” he felt bad, because Aunt Hager said God was mighty good and it was wrong to take His name in vain. But he would like to learn to say “God damn” without feeling anything like most boys said it⁠—just “God damn!⁠ ⁠… God damn!⁠ ⁠… God damn!” without being ashamed of himself.⁠ ⁠… The Lord never seemed to notice, anyhow.⁠ ⁠… And when he got big, he wanted to travel like Jimboy. He wanted to be a railroad engineer, but Harriett had said there weren’t any colored engineers on trains.⁠ ⁠… What would he be, then? Maybe a doctor; but it was more fun being an engineer and travelling far away.

Sandy wished Annjee would take him with her when she went to join Jimboy⁠—but then Aunt Hager would be all by herself, and grandma was so nice to him he would hate to leave her alone. Who would cut wood for her then?⁠ ⁠… But when he got big, he would go to Detroit. And maybe New York, too, where his geography said they had the tallest buildings in the world, and trains that ran under the river.⁠ ⁠… He wondered if there were any colored people in New York.⁠ ⁠… How ugly African colored folks looked in the geography⁠—with bushy heads and wild eyes! Aunt Hager said her mother was an African, but she wasn’t ugly and wild; neither was Aunt Hager; neither was little dark Willie-Mae, and they were all black like Africans.⁠ ⁠… And Reverend Braswell was as black as ink, but he knew God.⁠ ⁠… God didn’t care if people were black, did He?⁠ ⁠… What was God? Was He a man or a lamb or what? Buster’s mother said God was a light, but Aunt Hager said He was a King and had a throne and wore a crown⁠—she intended to sit down by His side by and by.⁠ ⁠… Was Buster’s father white? Buster was white and colored both. But he didn’t look like he was colored. What made Buster not colored?⁠ ⁠… And what made girls different from boys?⁠ ⁠… Once when they were playing house, Willie-Mae told him how girls were different from boys, but they didn’t know why. Now Willie-Mae was in the seventh grade and had hard little breasts that stuck out sharp-like, and Jimmy Lane said dirty things about Willie-Mae.⁠ ⁠… Once he asked his mother what his navel was for and she said, “Layovers to catch meddlers.” What did that mean?⁠ ⁠… And how come ladies got sick and stayed in bed when they had babies? Where did babies come from, anyhow? Not from storks⁠—a fairy-story like Santa Claus.⁠ ⁠… Did God love people who told fairy-stories and lied to kids about storks and Santa Claus?⁠ ⁠… Santa Claus was no good, anyhow! God damn Santa Claus for not bringing him the sled he wanted Christmas! It was all a lie about Santa Claus!

The sound of Hager pouring coal on the fire and dragging her washtubs across the kitchen floor to get ready for work broke in on Sandy’s drowsy half-dreams, and as he rolled over in bed, his grandmother, hearing the springs creak, called loudly: “You Sandy! Get up from there! It’s seven and past! You want to be late gettin’ to yo’ school?”

“Yes’m, I’m coming, grandma!” he said under the quilts. “But it’s cold in here.”

“You knows you don’t dress in yonder! Bring them clothes on out behind this stove, sir.”

“Yes’m.” So with a kick of the feet his covers went flying back and Sandy ran to the warmth of the little kitchen, where he dressed, washed, and ate. Then he yelled for Willie-Mae⁠—when he felt like it⁠—or else went on to school without her, joining some of the boys on the way.

So spring was coming and Annjee worked diligently at Mrs. Rice’s day after day. Often she did something extra for Mrs. Rice’s sister and her children⁠—pressed a shirtwaist or ironed some stockings⁠—and so added a few quarters or maybe even a dollar to her weekly wages, all of which she saved to help carry her to Jimboy in Detroit.

For ten years she had been cooking, washing, ironing, scrubbing⁠—and for what? For only the few weeks in a year, or a half-year, when Jimboy would come home from some strange place and take her in his strong arms and kiss her and murmur: “Annjee, baby!” That’s what she had been working for⁠—then the dreary months were as nothing, and the hard years faded away. But now he had been gone all winter, and, from his letter, he might not come back soon, because he said Detroit was a fine place for colored folks.⁠ ⁠… But Stanton⁠—well, Annjee thought there must surely be better towns, where a woman wouldn’t have to work so hard to live.⁠ ⁠… And where Jimboy was.

So before the first buds opened on the apple-tree in the backyard, Annjee had gone to Detroit, leaving Sandy behind with his grandmother. And when the apple-blossoms came in full bloom, there was no one living in the little house but a grey-headed old woman and her grandchild.

“One by one they leaves you,” Hager said slowly. “One by one yo’ chillen goes.”