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 spittoons. Every evening that winter after school he came in the back door of the hotel, put his books in the closet where he kept his brooms and cleaning rags, swept the two short upper halls and the two flights of stairs, swept the lobby and dusted, then took the spittoons, emptied their slimy contents into the alley, rinsed them out, and polished them until they shone as brightly as if they were made of gold. Except for the stench of emptying them, Sandy rather liked this job. He always felt very proud of himself when, about six o’clock, he could look around the dingy old lobby and see the six gleaming brass bowls catching the glow of the electric lamps on their shining surfaces before they were again covered with spit. The thought that he himself had created this brightness with his own hands, aided by a can of brass-polish, never failed to make Sandy happy.

He liked to clean things, to make them beautiful, to make them shine. Aunt Hager did, too. When she wasn’t washing clothes, she was always cleaning something about the house, dusting, polishing the range, or scrubbing the kitchen floor until it was white enough to eat from. To Hager a clean thing was beautiful⁠—also to Sandy, proud every evening of his six unblemished brass spittoons. Yet each day when he came to work, they were covered anew with tobacco juice, cigarette-butts, wads of chewing-gum, and phlegm. But to make them clean was Sandy’s job⁠—and they were beautiful when they were clean.

Charlie Nutter was right⁠—there was nothing very hard about the work and he liked it for a while. The new kinds of life which he saw in the hotel interested and puzzled him, but, being naturally a silent child, he asked no questions, and, beyond the directions for his work, nobody told him anything. Sandy did his cleaning well and the boss had not yet had occasion to bellow at him, as he often bellowed at the two bellboys.

The Drummer’s Hotel was not a large hotel, nor a nice one. A three-story frame structure, dilapidated and run down, it had not been painted for years. In the lobby two large panes of plate glass looked on the street, and in front of these were rows of hard wooden chairs. At the rear of the lobby was the clerk’s desk, a case of cigars and cigarettes, a cooler for water, and the door to the men’s room. It was Sandy’s duty to clean this toilet, too.

Upstairs on the second and third floors were the bedrooms. Only the poorest of travelling salesmen, transient railroad workers, occasionally a few show-people, and the ladies of the streets with their clients rented them. The night trade was always the most brisk at the Drummer’s Hotel, but it was only on Saturdays that Sandy worked after six o’clock. That night he would not get home until ten or eleven, but Aunt Hager would always be waiting for him, keeping the fire warm, with the washtub full of water for his weekly bath.

There was no dining-room attached to the hotel, and, aside from Sandy, there were only five employees. The boss himself, Joe Willis, was usually at the desk. There were two chambermaids who worked in the mornings, an old man who did the heavy cleaning and scrubbing once or twice a week, and two bellboys⁠—one night boy and one day boy supposedly, but both bellmen had been there so long that they arranged the hours to suit themselves. Charlie Nutter had started small, like Sandy, and had grown up there. The other bellboy, really no boy at all, but an old man, had been in the hotel ever since it opened, and Sandy was as much afraid of him as he was of the boss.

This bellman’s name was Mr. George Clark. His uniform was frayed and greasy, but he wore it with the air of a major, and he acted as though all the burdens of running the hotel were on his shoulders. He knew how everything was to be done, where everything was kept, what every old guest liked. And he could divine the tastes of each new guest before he had been there a day. Subservient and grinning to white folks, evil and tyrannical to the colored help, George was the chief authority, next to Joe Willis, in the Drummer’s Hotel. It was he who found some fault with Sandy’s work every day until he learned to like the child because Sandy never answered back or tried to be fly, as George said most young niggers were. After a time the old fellow seldom bothered to inspect Sandy’s spittoons or to look in the corners for dust, but, nevertheless, he remained a person to be humored and obeyed if one wished to work at the Drummer’s Hotel.

Besides being the boss’s right-hand man, George Clark was the official bootlegger for the house, too. In fact, he kept his liquor-supply in the hotel cellar. When he was off duty, Charlie, the other bellhop, sold it for him if there were any calls from the rooms above. They made no sales other than to guests of the house, but such sales were frequent. Some of the white women who used the rooms collected a commission from George for the sales they helped make to their men visitors.

Sandy was a long time learning the tricks of hotel work. “Yuh sure a dumb little joker,” Charlie was constantly informing him. “But just stay around awhile and yuh’ll get on to it.”

Christmas came and Sandy sent his mother in Detroit a big box of drugstore candy. For Aunt Hager he started to buy a long pair of green earrings for fifty cents, but he was afraid she might not like them, so he bought her white handkerchiefs instead. And he sent a pretty card to Harriett, for one snowy December day his aunt had seen him through the windows sweeping out the lobby of the hotel and she had called him to the door to talk to her. She thrust a little piece of paper into his hand with her new address on it.

“Maudel’s moved to Kansas City,” she said, “so I don’t live there any more. You better keep this address yourself and if mama ever needs me, you can know where I am.”

Then she went on through the snow, looking very pretty in a cheap fur coat and black high-heeled slippers, with grey silk stockings. Sandy saw her pass the hotel often with different men. Sometimes she went by with Cudge Windsor, the owner of the pool hall, or Billy Sanderlee. Almost always she was with sporty-looking fellows who wore derbies and had gold teeth. Sandy noticed that she didn’t urge him to come to see her at this new house-number she had given him, so he put the paper in his pocket and went back to his sweeping, glad, anyway, to have seen his Aunt Harriett.

One Saturday afternoon several white men were sitting in the lobby smoking and reading the papers. Sandy swept around their chairs, dusted, and then took the spittoons out to clean. This work did not require his attention; while he applied the polish with a handful of soft rags, he could let his mind wander to other things. He thought about Harriett. Then he thought about school and what he would do when he was a man; about Willie-Mae, who had a job washing dinner dishes for a white family; about Jimmy Lane, who had no mama; and Sandy wondered what his own mother and father were doing in another town, and if they wanted him with them. He thought how old and tired and grey-headed Aunt Hager had become; how she puffed and blowed over the washtubs now, but never complained; how she waited for him on Saturday nights with the kitchen-stove blazing, so he would be warm after walking so far in the cold; and how she prayed he would be a great man some day.⁠ ⁠… Sitting there in the back room of the hotel, Sandy wondered how people got to be great, as, one by one, he made the spittoons bright and beautiful. He wondered how people made themselves great.

That night he would have to work late picking up papers in the lobby, running errands for the boss, and shining shoes. After he had put the spittoons around, he would go out and get a hamburger sandwich and a cup of coffee for supper; then he would come back and help Charlie if he could.⁠ ⁠… Charlie was a good old boy. He had taken only a dollar for getting Sandy his job and he often helped him make tips by allowing Sandy to run to the telegraph office or do some other little odd job for a guest upstairs.⁠ ⁠… Sure, Charlie was a nice guy.

Things were pretty busy tonight. Several men had their shoes shined as they sat tipped back in the lobby chairs while Sandy with his bootblack box let them put up a foot at a time to be polished. One tall farmer gave him a quarter tip and a pat on the head.

“Bright little feller, that,” he remarked to the boss.

About ten o’clock the blond Miss Marcia McKay’s bell rang, and, Charlie being engaged, Joe Willis sent Sandy up to see what she wanted. Miss McKay had just come in out of the snow a short time before with a heavyset man. Both of them were drunk. Sandy knocked timidly outside her room.

“Come in,” growled the man’s voice.

Sandy opened the door and saw Miss McKay standing naked in the middle of the floor combing her hair. He stopped on the threshold.

“Aw, come in,” said the man. “She won’t bite you! Where’s that other bellboy? We want some licker!⁠ ⁠… Damn it! Say, send Charlie up here! He knows what I want!”

Sandy scampered away, and when he found Charlie, he told him about Miss McKay. The child was scared because he had often heard of colored boys’ being lynched for looking at white women, even with their clothes on⁠—but the bellboy only laughed.

“Yuh’re a dumb little joker!” he said. “Just stay around here awhile and yuh’ll see lots more’n that!” He winked and gave Sandy a nudge in the ribs. “Boy, I done sold ten quarts o’ licker tonight,” he whispered jubilantly. “And some a it was mine, too!”

Sandy went back to the lobby and the shining of shoes. A big, red-necked stranger smoking and drinking with a crowd of drummers in one corner of the room called to him “Hey, boy! Shine me up here!” So he edged into the center of the group of men with his blacking-box, got down on his knees before the big fellow, took out his cans and his cloths, and went to work.

The white men were telling dirty stories, uglier than any Sandy had heard at the colored barbershop and not very funny⁠—and some of them made him sick at the stomach.

The big man whose shoes he was shining said: “Now I’m gonna tell one.” He talked with a Southern drawl and a soft slurring of word-endings like some old colored folks. He had been drinking, too. “This is ’bout a nigger went to see Aunt Hanner one night.⁠ ⁠…”

A roar of laughter greeted his first effort and he was encouraged to tell another.

“Old darky caught a gal on the levee⁠ ⁠…” he commenced.

Sandy finished polishing the shoes and put the cloths inside his wooden box and stood up waiting for his pay, but the speaker did not notice the colored boy until he had finished his tale and laughed heartily with the other men. Then he looked at Sandy. Suddenly he grinned.

“Say, little coon, let’s see you hit a step for the boys!⁠ ⁠… Down where I live, folks, all our niggers can dance!⁠ ⁠… Come on, boy, snap it up!”

“I can’t,” Sandy said, frowning instead of smiling, and growing warm as he stood there in the smoky circle of grinning white men. “I don’t know how to dance.”

“O, you’re one of them stubborn Kansas coons, heh?” said the red-necked fellow disgustedly, the thickness of whisky on his tongue. “You Northern darkies are dumb as hell, anyhow!” Then, turning to the crowd of amused lobby loungers, he announced: “Now down in Mississippi, whar I come from, if you offer a nigger a dime, he’ll dance his can off⁠ ⁠… an’ they better dance, what I mean!”

He turned to the men around him for approbation, while Sandy still waited uncomfortably to be paid for the shine. But the man kept him standing there, looking at him drunkenly, then at the amused crowd of Saturday-night loungers.

“Now, a nigger his size down South would no more think o’ not dancin’ if a white man asked him than he would think o’ flyin’. This boy’s jest tryin’ to be smart, that’s all. Up here you-all’ve got darkies spoilt, believin’ they’re somebody. Now, in my home we keep ’em in their places.” He again turned his attention to Sandy. “Boy! I want to see you dance!” he commanded.

But Sandy picked up his blacking-box and had begun to push through the circle of chairs, not caring any longer about his pay, when the Southerner rose and grabbed him roughly by the arm, exhaling alcoholic breath in the boy’s face as he jokingly pulled him back.

“Com’ere, you little⁠—” but he got no further, for Sandy, strengthened by the anger that suddenly possessed him at the touch of this white man’s hand, uttered a yell that could be heard for blocks.

Everyone in the lobby turned to see what had happened, but before Joe Willis got out from behind the clerk’s desk, the boy, wriggling free, had reached the street-door. There Sandy turned, raised his bootblack box furiously above his head, and flung it with all his strength at the group of laughing white men in which the drunken Southerner was standing. From one end of the whizzing box a stream of polish-bottles, brushes, and cans fell clattering across the lobby while Sandy disappeared through the door, running as fast as his legs could carry him in the falling snow.

“Hey! You black bastard!” Joe Willis yelled from the hotel entrance, but his voice was blown away in the darkness. As Sandy ran, he felt the snowflakes falling in his face.