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 would really become safe for democracy, even in America, when the war ended, and that colored folks would no longer be snubbed in private and discriminated against in public.

“Colored boys are over there fighting,” she said. “Our men are buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of bonds, colored women are aiding the Red Cross, our clubs are sending boxes to the camps and to the front. White folks will see that the Negro can be trusted in war as well as peace. Times will be better after this for all of us.”

One day a letter came from Annjee, who had moved to Chicago. She said that Sandy’s father had not long remained in camp, but had been sent to France almost immediately after he enlisted, and she didn’t know what she was going to do, she was so worried and alone! There had been but one letter from Jimboy since he left. And now she needed Sandy with her, but she wasn’t able to send for him yet. She said she hoped and prayed that nothing would happen to his father at the front, but every day there were colored soldiers’ names on the casualty list.

“Good thing he’s gone,” grunted Tempy when she read the letter as they were seated at the supper-table. Then, suddenly changing the subject, she asked Sandy: “Did you see Dr. Frank Crane’s beautiful article this morning?”

“No, I didn’t,” said the boy.

“You certainly don’t read as much as you did last winter,” complained his aunt. “And you’re staying out entirely too late to suit me. I’m quite sure you’re not at the movies all that time, either. I want these late hours stopped, young man. Every night in the week out somewhere until ten and eleven o’clock!”

“Well, boys do have to get around a little, Tempy,” Mr. Siles objected. “It’s not like when you and I were coming up.”

“I’m raising this boy, Mr. Siles,” Tempy snapped. “When do you study, James? That’s what I want to know.”

“When I come in,” said Sandy, which was true. His light was on until after twelve almost every night. And when he did not study late, his old habit of lying awake clung to him and he could not go to sleep early.

“You think too much,” Buster once said. “Stop being so smart; then you’ll sleep better.”

“Yep,” added Jimmy Lane. “Better be healthy and dumb than smart and sick like some o’ these college darkies I see with goggles on their eyes and breath smellin’ bad.”

“O, I’m not sick,” objected Sandy, “but I just get to thinking about things at night⁠—the war, and white folks, and God, and girls, and⁠—O, I don’t know⁠—everything in general.”

“Sure, keep on thinking,” jeered Buster, “and turn right ashy after while and be all stoop-shouldered like Father Hill.” (The Episcopalian rector was said to be the smartest colored man in town.) “But I’m not gonna worry about being smart myself. A few more years, boy, and I’ll be in some big town passing for white, making money, and getting along swell. And I won’t need to be smart, either⁠—I’ll be ofay! So if you see me some time in St. Louis or Chi with a little blond on my arm⁠—don’t recognize me, hear! I want my kids to be so yellow-headed they won’t have to think about a color line.”

And Sandy knew that Buster meant what he said, for his light-skinned friend was one of those people who always go directly towards the things they want, as though the road is straight before them and they can see clearly all the way. But to Sandy himself nothing ever seemed quite that clear. Why was his country going stupidly to war?⁠ ⁠… Why were white people and colored people so far apart?⁠ ⁠… Why was it wrong to desire the bodies of women?⁠ ⁠… With his mind a maelstrom of thoughts as he lay in bed night after night unable to go to sleep quickly, Sandy wondered many things and asked himself many questions.

Sometimes he would think about Pansetta Young, his classmate with the soft brown skin, and the pointed and delicate breasts of her doll-like body. He had never been alone with Pansetta, never even kissed her, yet she was “his girl” and he liked her a great deal. Maybe he loved her!⁠ ⁠… But what did it mean to love a girl? Were you supposed to marry her then and live with her forever?⁠ ⁠… His father had married his mother⁠—good-natured, guitar-playing Jimboy⁠—but they weren’t always together, and Sandy knew that Jimboy was enjoying the war now, just as he had always enjoyed everything else.

“Gee, he must of married early to be my father and still look so young!” he thought. “Suppose I marry Pansetta now!” But what did he really know about marriage other than the dirty fragments he had picked up from Jimmy and Buster and the fellows at the pool hall?

On his fifteenth birthday Tempy had given him a book written for young men on the subject of love and living, called The Doors of Life, addressed to all Christian youths in their teens⁠—but it had been written by a white New England minister of the Presbyterian faith who stood aghast before the flesh; so its advice consisted almost entirely in how to pray in the orthodox manner, and in how not to love.

“Avoid evil companions lest they be your undoing (see Psalms 119:115⁠–⁠20); and beware of lewd women, for their footsteps lead down to hell (see Proverbs 7:25⁠–⁠7),” said the book, and that was the extent of its instructions on sex, except that it urged everyone to marry early and settle down to a healthy, moral, Christian life.⁠ ⁠… But how could you marry early when you had no money and no home to which to take a wife? Sandy wondered. And who were evil companions? Neither Aunt Hager nor Annjee had ever said anything to Sandy about love in its bodily sense; Jimboy had gone away too soon to talk with him; and Tempy and her husband were too proper to discuss such subjects; so the boy’s sex knowledge consisted only in the distorted ideas that youngsters whisper; the dirty stories heard in the hotel lobby where he had worked; and the fact that they sold in drugstores articles that weren’t mentioned in the company of nice people.

But who were nice people anyway? Sandy hated the word “nice.” His Aunt Tempy was always using it. All of her friends were nice, she said, respectable and refined. They went around with their noses in the air and they didn’t speak to porters and washwomen⁠—though they weren’t nearly so much fun as the folks they tried to scorn. Sandy liked Cudge Windsor or Jap Logan better than he did Dr. Mitchell, who had been to college⁠—and never forgotten it.

Sandy wondered if Booker T. Washington had been like Tempy’s friends? Or if Dr. Du Bois was a snob just because he was a college man? He wondered if those two men had a good time being great. Booker T. was dead, but he had left a living school in the South. Maybe he could teach in the South, too, Sandy thought, if he ever learned enough. Did colored folks need to know the things he was studying in books now? Did French and Latin and Shakespeare make people wise and happy? Jap Logan never went beyond the seventh grade and he was happy. And Jimboy never attended school much either. Maybe school didn’t matter. Yet to get a good job you had to be smart⁠—and white, too. That was the trouble, you had to be white!

“But I want to learn!” thought Sandy as he lay awake in the dark after he had gone to bed at night. “I want to go to college. I want to go to Europe and study.” “Work and make ready and maybe your chance will come,” it said under the picture of Lincoln on the calendar given away by the First National Bank, where Earl, his white friend, already had a job promised him when he came out of school.⁠ ⁠… It was not nearly so difficult for white boys. They could work at anything⁠—in stores, on newspapers, in offices. They could become president of the United States if they were clever enough. But a colored boy.⁠ ⁠… No wonder Buster was going to pass for white when he left Stanton.

“I don’t blame him,” thought Sandy. “Sometimes I hate white people, too, like Aunt Harrie used to say she did. Still, some of them are pretty decent⁠—my English-teacher, and Mr. Prentiss where I work. Yet even Mr. Prentiss wouldn’t give me a job clerking in his shop. All I can do there is run errands and scrub the floor when everybody else is gone. There’s no advancement for colored fellows. If they start as porters, they stay porters forever and they can’t come up. Being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred⁠—and the white folks live upstairs. They don’t want us up there with them, even when we’re respectable like Dr. Mitchell, or smart like Dr. Du Bois.⁠ ⁠… And guys like Jap Logan⁠—well, Jap don’t care anyway! Maybe it’s best not to care, and stay poor and meek waiting for heaven like Aunt Hager did.⁠ ⁠… But I don’t want heaven! I want to live first!” Sandy thought. “I want to live!”

He understood then why many old Negroes said: “Take all this world and give me Jesus!” It was because they couldn’t get this world anyway⁠—it belonged to the white folks. They alone had the power to give or withhold at their back doors. Always back doors⁠—even for Tempy and Dr. Mitchell if they chose to go into Wright’s Hotel or the New Albert Restaurant. And no door at all for Negroes if they wanted to attend the Rialto Theatre, or join the Stanton Y.M.C.A., or work behind the grilling at the National Bank.

The Doors of Life.⁠ ⁠… God damn that simple-minded book that Tempy had given him! What did an old white minister know about the doors of life for him and Pansetta and Jimmy Lane, for Willie-Mae and Buster and Jap Logan and all the black and brown and yellow youngsters standing on the threshold of the great beginning in a Western town called Stanton? What did an old white minister know about the doors of life anywhere? And, least of all, the doors to a Negro’s life?⁠ ⁠… Black youth.⁠ ⁠… Dark hands knocking, knocking! Pansetta’s little brown hands knocking on the doors of life! Baby-doll hands, tiny autumn-leaf girl-hands!⁠ ⁠… Gee, Pansetta!⁠ ⁠… The Doors of Life⁠ ⁠… the great big doors.⁠ ⁠… Sandy was asleep⁠ ⁠… of life.