“From your daddy!” she said. “Umn-mn. . . . Come on in here and warm yourself. Lemme see what he says again!” . . . She lighted the gas oven in the white kitchen and sat down in front of it with her letter, forgetting the clock and the approaching time for Mrs. Rice’s dinner, forgetting everything. “A letter from my daddy! From my far-off sugar-daddy!”

“From my daddy,” corrected Sandy.... “Say, gimme a nickel to buy some marbles, mama. I wanta go play.”

Without taking her eyes from the precious note Annjee fumbled in her apron and found a coin. “Take it and go on!” she said.

It was a dime. Sandy skipped around the house and down the street in the chilly sunshine. He decided to stop at Buster’s for a while before going home, since he had to pass there anyway, and he found his friend in the house trying to carve boats from clothes-pins with a rusty jack-knife.

Buster’s mother was a seamstress, and, after opening the front door and greeting Sandy with a cheery “Hello,” she returned to her machine and a friend who was calling on her. She was a tall young light-mulatto woman, with skin like old ivory. Maybe that was why Buster was so white. But her husband was a black man who worked on the city’s garbage-trucks and was active politically when election time came, getting colored men to vote Republican. Everybody said he made lots of money, but that he wasn’t really Buster’s father.

The golden-haired child gave Sandy a butcher-knife and together they whacked at the clothes-pins. You could hear the two women talking plainly in the little sewing-room, where the machine ran between snatches of conversation.

“Yes,” Buster’s mother was saying, “I have the hardest time keeping that boy colored! He goes on just like he was white. Do you know what he did last week? Cut all the blossoms off my geranium plants here in the house, took them to school, and gave them to Dorothy Marlow, in his grade. And you know who Dorothy is, don’t you? Senator Marlow’s daughter! . . . I said: ‘Buster, if you ever cut my flowers to carry to any little girl again, I’ll punish you severely, but if you cut them to carry to little white girls, I don’t know what I’ll do with you. . . . Don’t you know they hang colored boys for things like that?’ I wanted to scare him—because you know there might be trouble even among kids in school over such things.... But I had to laugh.”

Her friend laughed too. “He’s a hot one, taking flowers to the women already, and a white girl at that! You’ve got a fast-working son, Elvira, I must say.... But, do you know, when you first moved here and I saw you and the boy going in and out, I thought sure you were both white folks. I didn’t know you was colored till my husband said: ‘That’s Eddie’s wife!’ You-all sure looked white to me.”