Sandy, at a loss for an answer, was standing with lowered eyelids, when the screen door opened and Jimboy came in. Sandy looked up at him for aid, but his father’s usually amiable face was stern this time.

“Come here!” he said. The man towered very tall above the little fellow who looked up at him helplessly.

“I’s gwine whip him!” interposed Hager.

“Is that right, you spent your Sunday-school nickel for candy?” Jimboy demanded gravely.

Sandy nodded his head. He couldn’t lie to his father, and had he spoken now, the sobs would have come.

“Then you told a lie to your grandma—and I’m ashamed of you,” his father said.

Sandy wanted to turn his head away and escape the slow gaze of Jimboy’s eyes, but he couldn’t. If Aunt Hager would only whip him, it would be better; then maybe his father wouldn’t say any more. But it was awful to stand still and listen to Jimboy talk to him this way—yet there he stood, stiffly holding back the sobs.

“To take money and use it for what it ain’t s’posed to be used is the same as stealing,” Jimboy went on gravely to his son. “That’s what you done today, and then come home and lie about it. Nobody’s ugly as a liar, you know that! . . . I’m not much, maybe. Don’t mean to say I am. I won’t work a lot, but what I do I do honest. White folks gets rich lyin’ and stealin’—and some niggers gets rich that way, too—but I don’t need money if I got to get it dishonest, with a lot o’ lies trailing behind me, and can’t look folks in the face. It makes you feel dirty! It’s no good! . . . Don’t I give you nickels for candy whenever you want ’em?”

The boy nodded silently, with the tears trickling down his chin.

“And don’t I go with you to the store and buy you ice-cream and soda-pop any time you ask me?”

The child nodded again.

“And then you go and take the Sunday-school nickel that your grandma’s worked hard for all the week, spend it on candy, and come back home and lie about it. So that’s what you do! And then lie!”

Jimboy turned his back and went out on the porch, slamming the screen door behind him. Aunt Hager did not whip her grandson, but returned to the kitchen and left him standing disgraced in the parlor. Then Sandy began to cry, with one hand in his mouth so no one could hear him, and when Annjee came home from work in the late afternoon, she found him lying across her bed, head under the pillows, still sobbing because Jimboy had called him a liar.

XI. SCHOOL

Some weeks later the neighbors were treated to an early morning concert:

I got a high yaller
An’ a little short black,
But a brown-skin gal
Can bring me right on back!
I’m singin’ brown-skin!
Lawdy! . . . Lawd!
Brown-skin! . . . O, ma Lawd!