Well, Aunt Hager had meant well, Tempy thought, even if she didn’t dress right. And now this child, Sandy—James was his correct name! At that first breakfast they ate together, she asked him if he had a comb and brush of his own.

“No’m, I ain’t,” said Sandy.

“I haven’t,” she corrected him. “I certainly don’t want my white neighbors to hear you saying ‘ain’t’ . . . You’ve come to live with me now and you must talk like a gentleman.”

XXIV. A SHELF OF BOOKS

That spring, shortly after Sandy went to stay with Tempy, there was an epidemic of mumps among the schoolchildren in Stanton, and, old as he was, he was among its early victims. With jaws swollen to twice their normal size and a red sign, MUMPS, on the house, he was forced to remain at home for three weeks. It was then that the boy began to read books other than the ones he had had to study for his lessons. At Aunt Hager’s house there had been no books, anyway, except the Bible and the few fairy-tales that he had been given at Christmas; but Tempy had a case full of dusty volumes that were used to give dignity to her sitting-room: a row of English classics bound in red, an Encyclopedia of World Knowledge in twelve volumes, a book on household medicine full of queer drawings, and some modern novels—The Rosary, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, the newest Harold Bell Wright, and all that had ever been written by Gene Stratton Porter, Tempy’s favorite author. The Negro was represented by Chesnutt’s House Behind the Cedars, and the Complete Poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, whom Tempy tolerated on account of his fame, but condemned because he had written so much in dialect and so often of the lower classes of colored people. Tempy subscribed to Harper’s Magazine, too, because Mrs. Barr-Grant had taken it. And in her sewing-room closet there was also a pile of The Crisis, the thin Negro monthly that she had been taking from the beginning of its publication.

Sandy had heard of that magazine, but he had never seen a copy; so he went through them all, looking at the pictures of prominent Negroes and reading about racial activities all over the country, and about racial wrongs in the South. In every issue he found, too, stirring and beautifully written editorials about the frustrated longings of the black race, and the hidden beauties in the Negro soul. A man called Du Bois wrote them.

“Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois,” said Tempy, “and he is a great man.”

“Great like Booker T. Washington?” asked Sandy.

“Teaching Negroes to be servants, that’s all Washington did!” Tempy snorted in so acid a tone that Sandy was silent. “Du Bois wants our rights. He wants us to be real men and women. He believes in social equality. But Washington—huh!” The fact that he had established an industrial school damned Washington in Tempy’s eyes, for there were enough colored workers already. But Du Bois was a doctor of philosophy and had studied in Europe! . . . That’s what Negroes needed to do, get smart, study books, go to Europe! “Don’t talk to me about Washington,” Tempy fumed. “Take Du Bois for your model, not some white folks’ nigger.”