Not Without Laughter

by Langston Hughes

“Ever’body shake!” cried Benbow, as a ribbon of laughter swirled round the hall.

  Couples began to sway languidly, melting together like candy in the sun as hips rotated effortlessly to the music. Girls snuggled pomaded heads on men’s chests, or rested powdered chins on men’s shoulders, while wild young boys put both arms tightly around their partners’ waists and let their hands hang down carelessly over female haunches. Bodies moved ever so easily together—ever so easily, as Benbow turned towards his musicians and cried through cupped hands: “Aw, screech it, boys!”

  A long, tall, gangling gal stepped back from her partner, adjusted her hips, and did a few easy, gliding steps all her own before her man grabbed her again.

  “Eu-o-oo-ooo-oooo!” moaned the cornet titillating with pain, as the banjo cried in stop-time, and the piano sobbed aloud with a rhythmical, secret passion. But the drums kept up their hard steady laughter—like somebody who don’t care.

  “I see you plowin’, Uncle Walt,” called a little autumn-leaf brown with switching skirts to a dark-purple man grinding down the center of the floor with a yellow woman. Two short prancing blacks stopped in their tracks to quiver violently. A bushy-headed girl threw out her arms, snapped her fingers, and began to holler: “Hey! . . . Hey!” while her perspiring partner held doggedly to each hip in an effort to keep up with her. All over the hall, people danced their own individual movements to the scream and moan of the music.

  “Get low . . . low down . . . down!” cried the drummer, bouncing like a rubber ball in his chair. The banjo scolded in diabolic glee, and the cornet panted as though it were out of breath, and Benbow himself left the band and came out on the floor to dance slowly and ecstatically with a large Indian-brown woman covered with diamonds.

  “Aw, do it, Mister Benbow!” one of his admirers shouted frenziedly as the hall itself seemed to tremble.

  “High yallers, draw nigh! Brown-skins, come near!” somebody squalled. “But black gals, stay where you are!”

  “Whaw! Whaw! Whaw!” mocked the cornet—but the steady tomtom of the drums was no longer laughter now, no longer even pleasant: the drum-beats had become sharp with surly sound, like heavy waves that beat angrily on a granite rock. And under the dissolute spell of its own rhythm the music had got quite beyond itself. The four black men in Benbow’s wandering band were exploring depths to which mere sound had no business to go. Cruel, desolate, unadorned was their music now, like the body of a ravished woman on the sun-baked earth; violent and hard, like a giant standing over his bleeding mate in the blazing sun. The odors of bodies, the stings of flesh, and the utter emptiness of soul when all is done—these things the piano and the drums, the cornet and the twanging banjo insisted on hoarsely to a beat that made the dancers move, in that little hall, like pawns on a frenetic checker-board.

  “Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!” somebody cried.

  The earth rolls relentlessly, and the sun blazes for ever on the earth, breeding, breeding. But why do you insist like the earth, music? Rolling and breeding, earth and sun for ever relentlessly. But why do you insist like the sun? Like the lips of women? Like the bodies of men, relentlessly?

  “Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!”

  But why do you insist, music?

  Who understands the earth? Do you, Mingo? Who understands the sun? Do you, Harriett? Does anybody know—among you high yallers, you jelly-beans, you pinks and pretty daddies, among you sealskin browns, smooth blacks, and chocolates-to-the-bone—does anybody know the answer?

  “Aw, play it, Benbow!”

  “It’s midnight. De clock is strikin’ twelve, an’ . . .”

  “Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!”

  *

  During intermission, when the members of the band stopped making music to drink gin and talk to women, Harriett and Mingo bought Sandy a box of cracker-jacks and another bottle of soda and left him standing in the middle of the floor holding both. His young aunt had forgotten time, so Sandy decided to go upstairs to the narrow unused balcony that ran the length of one side of the place. It was dusty up there, but a few broken chairs stood near the railing and he sat on one of them. He leaned his arms on the banister, rested his chin in his hands, and when the music started, he looked down on the mass of moving couples crowding the floor. He had a clear view of the energetic little black drummer eagle-rocking with staccato regularity in his chair as his long, thin sticks descended upon the tightly drawn skin of his small drum, while his foot patted the pedal of his big bass-drum, on which was painted in large red letters: “BENBOW’S FAMOUS KANSAS CITY BAND.”

  As the slow shuffle gained in intensity (and his cracker-jacks gave out), Sandy looked down drowsily on the men and women, the boys and girls, circling and turning beneath him. Dresses and suits of all shades and colors, and a vast confusion of bushy heads on swaying bodies. Faces gleaming like circus balloons—lemon-yellow, coal-black, powder-grey, ebony-black, blue-black faces; chocolate, brown, orange, tan, creamy-gold faces—the room full of floating balloon faces—Sandy’s eyes were beginning to blur with sleep—colored balloons with strings, and the music pulling the strings. No! Girls pulling the strings—each boy a balloon by a string. Each face a balloon.

  Sandy put his head down on the dusty railing of the gallery. An odor of hair-oil and fish, of women and sweat came up to him as he sat there alone, tired and a little sick. It was very warm and close, and the room was full of chatter during the intervals. Sandy struggled against sleep, but his eyes were just about to close when, with a burst of hopeless sadness, the St. Louis Blues spread itself like a bitter syrup over the hall. For a moment the boy opened his eyes to the drowsy flow of sound, long enough to pull two chairs together; then he lay down on them and closed his eyes again. Somebody was singing:

  St. Louis woman with her diamond rings . . . .

  as the band said very weary things in a loud and brassy manner and the dancers moved in a dream that seemed to have forgotten itself:

  Got ma man tied to her apron-strings . . .

  Wah! Wah! Wah! . . . The cornet laughed with terrible rudeness. Then the drums began to giggle and the banjo whined an insulting leer. The piano said, over and over again: “St. Louis! That big old dirty town where the Mississippi’s deep and wide, deep and wide . . .” and the hips of the dancers rolled.

  Man’s got a heart like a rock cast in de sea . . .

  while the cynical banjo covered unplumbable depths with a plinking surface of staccato gaiety, like the sparkling bubbles that rise on deep water over a man who has just drowned himself:

  Or else he never would a gone so far from me . . .

  then the band stopped with a long-drawn-out wail from the cornet and a flippant little laugh from the drums.

  A great burst of applause swept over the room, and the musicians immediately began to play again. This time just blues, not the St. Louis, nor the Memphis, nor the Yellow Dog—but just the plain old familiar blues, heart-breaking and extravagant, ma-baby’s-gone-from-me blues.

  Nobody thought about anyone else then. Bodies sweatily close, arms locked, cheek to cheek, breast to breast, couples rocked to the pulse-like beat of the rhythm, yet quite oblivious each person of the other. It was true that men and women were dancing together, but their feet had gone down through the floor into the earth, each dancer’s alone—down into the center of things—and their minds had gone off to the heart of loneliness, where they didn’t even hear the words, the sometimes lying, sometimes laughing words that Benbow, leaning on the piano, was singing against this background of utterly despondent music:

  When de blues is got you,

  Ain’t no use to run away.

  When de blue-blues got you,

  Ain’t no use to run away,

  ’Cause de blues is like a woman

  That can turn yo’ good hair grey.

  Umn-ump! . . . Umn! . . . Umn-ump!

  Well, I tole ma baby,

  Says baby, baby, babe, be mine,

  But ma baby was deceitful.

&n
bsp; She must a thought that I was blind.

  De-da! De-da! . . . De da! De da! Dee!

  O, Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawdy,

  Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawd . . . Lawd . . . Lawd!

  She quit me fo’ a Texas gambler,

  So I had to git another broad.

  Whaw-whaw! . . . Whaw-whaw-whaw! As though the laugh­ter of a cornet could reach the heart of loneliness.

  These mean old weary blues coming from a little orchestra of four men who needed no written music because they couldn’t have read it. Four men and a leader—Rattle Benbow from Galveston; Benbow’s buddy, the drummer, from Houston; his banjoist from Birmingham; his cornetist from Atlanta; and the pianist, long-fingered, sissyfied, a coal-black lad from New Orleans who had brought with him an exaggerated rag-time which he called jazz.

  “I’m jazzin’ it, creepers!” he sometimes yelled as he rolled his eyes towards the dancers and let his fingers beat the keys to a frenzy. . . . But now the piano was cryin’ the blues!

  Four homeless, plug-ugly niggers, that’s all they were, playing mean old loveless blues in a hot, crowded little dance-hall in a Kansas town on Friday night. Playing the heart out of loneliness with a wide-mouthed leader, who sang everybody’s troubles until they became his own. The improvising piano, the whanging banjo, the throbbing bass-drum, the hard-hearted little snare-drum, the brassy cornet that laughed, “Whaw-whaw-whaw. . . . Whaw!” were the waves in this lonesome sea of harmony from which Benbow’s melancholy voice rose:

  You gonna wake up some mawnin’

  An’ turn yo’ smilin’ face.

  Wake up some early mawnin’,

  Says turn yo’ smilin’ face,

  Look at yo’ sweetie’s pillow—

  An’ find an’ empty place!

  Then the music whipped itself into a slow fury, an awkward, elemental, foot-stamping fury, with the banjo running terrifiedly away in a windy moan and then coming back again, with the cornet wailing like a woman who don’t know what it’s all about:

  Then you gonna call yo’ baby,

  Call yo’ lovin’ baby dear—

  But you can keep on callin’,

  ’Cause I won’t be here!

  And for a moment nothing was heard save the shuf-shuf-shuffle of feet and the immense booming of the bass-drum like a living vein pulsing at the heart of loneliness.

  “Sandy! . . . Sandy! . . . My stars! Where is that child? . . . Has anybody seen my little nephew?” All over the hall. . . . “Sandy! . . . Oh-o-o, Lord!” Finally, with a sigh of relief: “You little brat, darn you, hiding up here in the balcony where nobody could find you! . . . Sandy, wake up! It’s past four o’clock and I’ll get killed.”

  Harriett vigorously shook the sleeping child, who lay stretched on the dusty chairs; then she began to drag him down the narrow steps before he was scarcely awake. The hall was almost empty and the chubby little black drummer was waddling across the floor carrying his drums in canvas cases. Someone was switching off the lights one by one. A mustard-colored man stood near the door quarrelling with a black woman. She began to cry and he slapped her full in the mouth, then turned his back and left with another girl of maple-sugar brown. Harriett jerked Sandy past this linked couple and pulled the boy down the long flight of stairs into the street, where Mingo stood waiting, with a lighted cigarette making a white line against his black skin.

  “You better git a move on,” he said. “Daylight ain’t holdin’ itself back for you!” And he told the truth, for the night had already begun to pale.

  Sandy felt sick at the stomach. To be awakened precipitately made him cross and ill-humored, but the fresh, cool air soon caused him to feel less sleepy and not quite so ill. He took a deep breath as he trotted rapidly along on the sidewalk beside his striding aunt and her boy friend. He watched the blue-grey dawn blot out the night in the sky; and then pearl-grey blot out the blue, while the stars faded to points of dying fire. And he listened to the birds chirping and trilling in the trees as though they were calling the sun. Then, as he became fully awake, the child began to feel very proud of himself, for this was the first time he had ever been away from home all night.

  Harriett was fussing with Mingo. “You shouldn’t ’ve kept me out like that,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me what time it was? . . . I didn’t know.”

  And Mingo came back: “Hey, didn’t I try to drag you away at midnight and you wouldn’t come? And ain’t I called you at one o’clock and you said: ‘Wait a minute’—dancin’ with some yaller P. I. from St. Joe, with your arms round his neck like a life-preserver? . . . Don’t tell me I didn’t want to leave, and me got to go to work at eight o’clock this mornin’ with a pick and shovel when the whistle blows! What de hell?”

  But Harriett did not care to quarrel now when there would be no time to finish it properly. She was out of breath from hurrying and almost in tears. She was afraid to go home.

  “Mingo, I’m scared.”

  “Well, you know what you can do if your ma puts you out,” her escort said quickly, forgetting his anger. “I can take care of you. We could get married.”

  “Could we, Mingo?”

  “Sure!”

  She slipped her hand in his. “Aw, daddy!” and the pace became much less hurried.

  When they reached the corner near which Harriett lived, she lifted her dark little purple-powdered face for a not very lingering kiss and sent Mingo on his way. Then she frowned anxiously and ran on. The sky was a pale pearly color, waiting for the warm gold of the rising sun.

  “I’m scared to death!” said Harriett. “Lord, Sandy, I hope ma ain’t up! I hope she didn’t come home last night from Mis’ Lane’s. We shouldn’t ’ve gone, Sandy . . . I guess we shouldn’t ’ve gone.” She was breathing hard and Sandy had to run fast to keep up with her. “Gee, I’m scared!”

  The grass was diamond-like with dew, and the red bricks of the sidewalk were damp, as the small boy and his young aunt hurried under the leafy elms along the walk. They passed Madam de Carter’s house and cut through the wet grass into their own yard as the first rays of the morning sun sifted through the trees. Quietly they tiptoed towards the porch; quickly and quietly they crossed it; and softly, ever so softly, they opened the parlor door.

  In the early dusk the oil-lamp still burned on the front-room table, and in an old arm-chair, with the open Bible on her lap, sat Aunt Hager Williams, a bundle of switches on the floor at her feet.

  NINE

  Carnival

  * * *

  BETWEEN the tent of Christ and the tents of sin there stretched scarcely a half-mile. Rivalry reigned: the revival and the carnival held sway in Stanton at the same time. Both were at the south edge of town, and both were loud and musical in their activities. In a dirty white tent in the Hickory Woods the Reverend Duke Braswell conducted the services of the Lord for the annual summer tent-meeting of the First Ethiopian Baptist Church. And in Jed Galoway’s meadow lots Swank’s Combined Shows, the World’s Greatest Midway Carnival, had spread canvas for seven days of bunko games and cheap attractions. The old Negroes went to the revival, and the young Negroes went to the carnival, and after sundown these August evenings the mourning songs of the Christians could be heard rising from the Hickory Woods while the profound syncopation of the minstrel band blared from Galoway’s Lots, strangely intermingling their notes of praise and joy.

  Aunt Hager with Annjee and Sandy went to the revival every night (Sandy unwillingly), while Jimboy, Harriett, and Maudel went to the carnival. Aunt Hager prayed for her youngest daughter at the meetings, but Harriett had not spoken to her mother, if she could avoid it, since the morning after the dance, when she had been whipped. Since their return from the country Annjee and Jimboy were not so loving towards each other, either, as they had been before. Jimboy tired of Jessie’s farm, so he came back to town three days before his wife returned. And now the revival and the carnival widened the breach between the Christians and the sinners in Aunt Hager’s little household. And Sandy would rather h
ave been with the sinners—Jimboy and Harriett—but he wasn’t old enough; so he had to go to meetings until, on Thursday morning, when he and Buster were climbing over the coal-shed in the back yard, Sandy accidentally jumped down on a rusty nail, which penetrated the heel of his bare foot. He set up a wail, cried until noon over the pain, and refused to eat any dinner; so finally Jimboy said that if he would only hush hollering he’d take him to the carnival that evening.

  “Yes, take de rascal,” said Aunt Hager. “He ain’t doin’ no good at de services, wiggling and squirming so’s we can’t hardly hear de sermon. He ain’t got religion in his heart, that chile!”

  “I hope he ain’t,” said his father, yawning.

  “All you wants him to be is a good-fo’-nothin’ rounder like you is,” retorted Hager. And she and Jimboy began their daily quarrel, which lasted for hours, each of them enjoying it immensely. But Sandy kept pulling at his father and saying: “Hurry up and let’s go,” although he knew well that nothing really started at the carnival until sundown. Nevertheless, about four o’clock, Jimboy said: “All right, come on,” and they started out in the hot sun towards Galoway’s Lots, the man walking tall and easy while the boy hobbled along on his sore foot, a rag tied about his heel.

  At the old cross-bar gate on the edge of town, through which Jed Galoway drove his cows to pasture, there had been erected a portable arch strung with electric lights spelling out “SWANK’S SHOWS” in red and yellow letters, but it was not very impressive in the day-time, with the sun blazing on it, and no people about. And from this gate, extending the whole length of the meadow on either side, like a roadway, were the tents and booths of the carnival: the Galatea illusion, the seal and sea-lion circus, the Broadway musical-comedy show, the freaks, the games of chance, the pop-corn- and lemonade-stands, the colored minstrels, the merry-go-round, the fun house, the hoochie-coochie, the Ferris wheel, and, at the far end, a canvas tank under a tiny platform high in the air from which the World’s Most Dangerous and Spectacular High Dive took place nightly at ten-thirty.