After two months of this there were times when Sandy felt as though he could stand it no longer. The same flow of people week after week—fashionable women, officers, business men; the fetid air of the elevator-shaft, heavy with breath and the perfume of bodies; the same odors opening at the same unchanging levels hundreds of times each innumerable, monotonous day. The L in the morning; the L again at night. The street or the porch for a few minutes of air. Then bed. And the same thing tomorrow.

“I’ve got to get out of this,” Sandy thought. “It’s an awful job.” Yet some of the fellows had been there for years. Three of the elevator-men on Sandy’s shift were more than forty years old—and had never gotten ahead in life. Mr. Harris had been a bell-hop since his boyhood, doing the same thing day after day—and now he was very proud of being head bell-boy in Chicago.

“I’ve got to get out of this,” Sandy kept repeating. “Or maybe I’ll get stuck here, too, like they are, and never get away. I’ve got to go back to school.”

Yet he knew that his mother was making very little money—serving more or less as an apprentice in the hairdressing-shop, trying to learn the trade. And if he quit work, how would he live? Annjee did not favor his returning to school. And could he study if he were hungry? Could he study if he were worried about having no money? Worried about Annjee’s displeasure?

“Yes! I can!” he said. “I’m going to study!” He thought about Booker Washington sleeping under the wooden pavements at Richmond—because he had had no place to stay on his way to Hampton in search of an education. He thought about Frederick Douglass—a fugitive slave, owning not even himself, and yet a student. “If they could study, I can, too! When school opens, I’m going to quit this job. Maybe I can get another one at night or in the late afternoon—but it doesn’t matter—I’m going back to my classes in September.... I’m through with elevators.”

Jimboy! Jimboy! Like Jimboy! something inside him warned, quitting work with no money, uncaring.

“Not like Jimboy,” Sandy countered against himself. “Not like my father, always wanting to go somewhere. I’d get as tired of travelling all the time, as I do of running this elevator up and down day after day.... I’m more like Harriett—not wanting to be a servant at the mercies of white people for ever.... I want to do something for myself, by myself.... Free.... I want a house to live in, too, when I’m older—like Tempy’s and Mr. Siles’s. . . . But I wouldn’t want to be like Tempy’s friends—or her husband, dull and colorless, putting all his money away in a white bank, ashamed of colored people.”

“A lot of minstrels—that’s all niggers are!” Mr. Siles had said once. “Clowns, jazzers, just a band of dancers—that’s why they never have anything. Never be anything but servants to the white people.”