XVII. BARBER-SHOP

Mr. Logan, hearing that Aunt Hager had an empty room since all her daughters were gone, sent her one evening a new-comer in town looking for a place to stay. His name was Wim Dogberry and he was a brickmason and hod-carrier, a tall, quiet, stoop-shouldered black man, neither old nor young. He took, for two dollars and a half a week, the room that had been Annjee’s, and Hager gave him a key to the front door.

Wim Dogberry was carrying hod then on a new moving-picture theatre that was being built. He rose early and came in late, face, hands, and overalls covered with mortar dust. He washed in a tin basin by the pump and went to bed, and about all he ever said to Aunt Hager and Sandy was “Good-mornin’” and “Good-evenin’,” and maybe a stumbling “How is you?” But on Sunday mornings Hager usually asked him to breakfast if he got up on time—for on Saturday nights Wim drank licker and came home mumbling to himself a little later than on a week-day evenings, so sometimes he would sleep until noon Sundays.

One Saturday night he wet the bed, and when Hager went to make it up on the Sabbath morning, she found a damp yellow spot in the middle. Of this act Dogberry was so ashamed that he did not even say “Good-mornin’” for several days, and if, from the corner, he saw Aunt Hager and her grandson sitting on the porch in the twilight when he came towards home, he would pass his street and walk until he thought they had gone inside to bed. But he was a quiet roomer, he didn’t give anyone any trouble, and he paid regularly. And since Hager was in no position to despise two dollars and a half every week, she rather liked Dogberry.

Now Hager kept the growing Sandy close by her all the time to help her while she washed and ironed and to talk to her while she sat on the porch in the evenings. Of course, he played sometimes in his own yard whenever Willie-Mae or Buster or, on Sundays, Jimmie Lane came to the house. But Jimmie Lane was running wild since his mother died, and Hager didn’t like him to visit her grandson any more. He was bad.

When Sandy wanted to go the vacant lot to play baseball with the neighbor boys, his grandmother would usually not allow him to leave her. “Stay here, sir, with Hager. I needs you to pump ma water fo’ me an’ fill up these tubs,” she would say. Or else she would yell: “Ain’t I told you you might get hurt down there with them old rough white boys? Stay here in yo’ own yard, where you can keep out o’ mischief.”

So he grew accustomed to remaining near his grandmother, and at night, when the other children would be playing duck-on-the-rock under the arc-light at the corner, he would be sitting on the front porch listening to Aunt Hager telling her tales of slavery and talking of her own far-off youth. When school opened in the fall, the old woman said: “I don’t know what I’s gwine do all day without you, Sandy. You sho been company to me, with all my own chillens gone.” But Sandy was glad to get back to a roomful of boys and girls again.