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 greeks and somehow strained my back on the Union Pacific laying ties so I will be home on Saturday. Will do my best to try and finish out weak here. Love my darling wife also kiss my son Sandy for me. Am dying to see you,

“Strained his back, has he? Unhuh! An’ then comes writin’ ’bout till de judgment day!” Hager muttered when she heard it. “Always something wrong with that nigger! He’ll be back here now, layin’ round, doin’ nothin’ fo’ de rest o’ de summer, turnin’ ma house into a theatre with him an’ Harriett singin’ their ragtime, an’ that guitar o’ his’n wangin’ ever’ evenin’! ’Tween him an’ Harriett both it’s a wonder I ain’t plumb crazy. But Harriett do work fo’ her livin’. She ain’t no loafer.⁠ ⁠… Huh!⁠ ⁠… Annjee, you was sho a fool when you married that boy, an’ you still is!⁠ ⁠… I’s gwine next do’ to Sister Johnson’s!” Aunt Hager went out the back and across the yard, where, next door, Tom and Sarah Johnson, Willie-Mae’s grandparents, sat on a bench against the sidewall of an unpainted shanty. They were both quietly smoking their corncob pipes in the evening dusk.

Sandy, looking at the back of the letter that his mother held, stood at the kitchen-table rapidly devouring a large piece of fresh lemon pie, which she had brought from Mrs. J. J. Rice’s. Annjee had said to save the two cold fried lamb chops until tomorrow, or Sandy would have eaten those, too.

“Wish you’d brought home some more pie,” the boy declared, his lips white with meringue, but Annjee, who had just got in from work, paid no attention to her son’s appreciative remarks on her cookery.

Instead she said: “Ma certainly ain’t got no time for Jimboy, has she?” and then sat down with the open letter still in her hand⁠—a single sheet of white paper pencilled in large awkward letters. She put it on the table, rested her dark face in her hands, and began to read it again.⁠ ⁠… She knew how it was, of course, that her husband hadn’t written before. That was all right now. Working all day in the hot sun with a gang of Greeks, a man was tired at night, besides living in a boxcar, where there was no place to write a letter anyway. He was a great big kid, that’s what Jimboy was, cut out for playing. But when he did work, he tried to outdo everybody else. Annjee could see him in her mind, tall and well-built, his legs apart, muscles bulging as he swung the big hammer above his head, driving steel. No wonder he hurt his back, trying to lay more ties a day than anybody else on the railroad. That was just like Jimboy. But she was kind of pleased he had hurt it, since it would bring him home.

“Ain’t you glad he’s comin’, Sandy?”

“Sure,” answered the child, swallowing his last mouthful of pie. “I hope he brings me that gun he promised to buy last Easter.” The boy wiped his sticky hands on the dishcloth and ran out into the backyard, calling: “Willie-Mae! Willie-Mae!”

“Stay right over yonder!” answered his grandmother through the dusk. “Willie-Mae’s in de bed, sir, an’ we old folks settin’ out here tryin’ to have a little peace.” From the tone of Hager’s voice he knew he wasn’t wanted in the Johnson’s yard, so he went back into the house, looked at his mother reading her letter again, and then lay down on the kitchen floor.

“Affectionately as ever and allways till the judgment day,” she read, “Jimboy Rodgers.”

He loved her, Annjee was sure of that, and it wasn’t another woman that made him go away so often. Eight years they’d been married. No, nine⁠—because Sandy was nine, and he was ready to be born when they had had the wedding. And Jimboy left the week after they were married, to go to Omaha, where he worked all winter. When he came back, Sandy was in the world, sitting up sucking meat skins. It was springtime and they bought a piano for the house⁠—but later the instalment man came and took it back to the store. All that summer her husband stayed home and worked a little, but mostly he fished, played pool, taught Harriett to buck-dance, and quarrelled with Aunt Hager. Then in the winter he went to Jefferson City and got a job at the Capitol.

Jimboy was always going, but Aunt Hager was wrong about his never working. It was just that he couldn’t stay in one place all the time. He’d been born running, he said, and had run ever since. Besides, what was there in Stanton anyhow for a young colored fellow to do except dig sewer ditches for a few cents an hour or maybe porter around a store for seven dollars a week. Colored men couldn’t get many jobs in Stanton, and foreigners were coming in, taking away what little work they did have. No wonder he didn’t stay home. Hadn’t Annjee’s father been in Stanton forty years and hadn’t he died with Aunt Hager still taking in washings to help keep up the house?

There was no well-paid work for Negro men, so Annjee didn’t blame Jimboy for going away looking for something better. She’d go with him if it wasn’t for her mother. If she went, though, Aunt Hager wouldn’t have anybody for company but Harriett, and Harriett was the youngest and wildest of the three children. With Pa Williams dead going on ten years, Hager washing every day, Tempy married, and Annjee herself out working, there had been nobody to take much care of the little sister as she grew up. Harriett had had no raising, even though she was smart and in high school. A female child needed care. But she could sing! Lawdy! And dance, too! That was another reason why Aunt Hager didn’t like Jimboy. The devil’s musicianer, she called him, straight from hell, teaching Harriett buck-and-winging! But when he took his soft-playing guitar and picked out spirituals and old-time Christian hymns on its sweet strings, Hager forgot she was his enemy, and sang and rocked with the rest of them. When Jimboy was home, you couldn’t get lonesome or blue.

“Gee, I’ll be glad when he comes!” Annjee said to herself. “But if he goes off again, I’ll feel like dying in this dead old town. I ain’t never been away from here nohow.” She spoke aloud to the dim oil-lamp smoking on the table and the sleeping boy on the floor. “I believe I’ll go with him next time. I declare I do!” And then, realizing that Jimboy had never once told her when he was leaving or for what destination, she amended her utterance. “I’ll follow him, though, as soon as he writes.” Because, almost always after he had been away two or three weeks, he would write. “I’ll follow him, sure, if he goes off again. I’ll leave Sandy here and send money back to mama. Then Harriett could settle down and take care of ma and stop runnin’ the streets so much.⁠ ⁠… Yes, that’s what I’ll do next time!”

This going away was a new thought, and the dark, strong-bodied young woman at the table suddenly began to dream of the cities she had never seen to which Jimboy would lead her. Why, he had been as far north as Canada and as far south as New Orleans, and it wasn’t anything for him to go to Chicago or Denver any time! He was a travelling man⁠—and she, Annjee, was too meek and quiet, that’s what she was⁠—too stay-at-homish. Never going nowhere, never saying nothing back to those who scolded her or talked about her, not even sassing white folks when they got beside themselves. And every colored girl in town said that Mrs. J. J. Rice was no easy white woman to work for, yet she had been there now five years, accepting everything without a murmur! Most young folks, girls and boys, left Stanton as soon as they could for the outside world, but here she was, Annjelica Williams, going on twenty-eight, and had never been as far as Kansas City!

“I want to travel,” she said to herself. “I want to go places, too.”

But that was why Jimboy married her, because she wasn’t a runabout. He’d had enough of those kind of women before he struck Stanton, he said. St. Louis was full of them, and Chicago running over. She was the first nice girl he’d ever met who lived at home, so he took her.⁠ ⁠… There were mighty few dark women had a light, strong, good-looking young husband, really a married husband, like Jimboy, and a little brown kid like Sandy.

“I’m mighty lucky,” Annjee thought, “even if he ain’t here.” And two tears of foolish pride fell from the bright eyes in her round black face. They trickled down on the letter, with its blue lines and pencil-scrawled message, and some of the words on the paper began to blur into purple blots because the pencil had been an indelible one. Quickly she fumbled for a handkerchief to wipe the tears away, when a voice made her start.

“You, Annjee!” cried Aunt Hager in the open door. “Go to bed, chile! Go on! Settin’ up here this late, burnin’ de light an’ lurin’ all sorts o’ night-bugs an’ creepers into de house!” The old woman came in out of the dark. “Lawd! I might anigh stumbled over this boy in de middle o’ de flo’! An’ you ain’t even took off yo’ hat since you got home from work! Is you crazy? Settin’ up here at night with yo’ hat on, an’ lettin’ this chile catch his death o’ cold sleepin’ down on de flo’ long after his bedtime!”

Sheepishly Annjee folded her letter and got up. It was true that she still had on her hat and the sweater she had worn to Mrs. Rice’s. True, too, the whole room was alive with soft-winged moths fluttering against the hot glass of the light⁠—and on the kitchen floor a small, brown-skin, infinitely lovable edition of Jimboy lay sprawled contentedly in his grandmother’s path, asleep!

“He’s my baby!” Annjee said gently, stooping to pick him up. “He’s my baby⁠—me and Jimboy’s baby!”