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 for ever 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!”