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 musi-cianer, 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!