who came in there putting on their millionaires' airs, the young ones and the old ones both, only
annoyed me. People like the sleep-in maid for Beacon Hill white folks who used to come in with
her "ooh, my deah" manners and order corn plasters in the Jew's drugstore for black folks. Or the
hospital cafeteria-line serving woman sitting there on her day off with a cat fur around her neck,
telling the proprietor she was a "dietitian"-both of them knowing she was lying. Even the young
ones, my age, whom Ella was always talking about. The soda fountain was one of their hangouts.
They soon had me ready to quit, with their accents so phonied upthat if you just heard them
and didn't see them, you wouldn't even know they were Negroes. I couldn't wait for eight o'clock
to get home to eat out of those soul-food pots of Ella's, then get dressed in my zoot and head for
some of my friends' places in town, to lindy-hop and get high, or something, for relief from those
Hill clowns.
Before long, I didn't see how I was going to be able to stick it out there eight hours a day; and I
nearly didn't. I remember one night, I nearly quit because I had hit the numbers for ten cents-the
first time I had ever hit-on one of the sideline bets that I'd made in the drugstore. (Yes, there were
several runners on the Hill; even dignified Negroes played the numbers.) I won sixty dollars, and
Shorty and I had a ball with it. I wished I had hit for the daily dollar that I played with my town
man, paying him by the week. I would surely have quit the drugstore. I could have bought a car.
Anyway, Laura lived in a house that was catercorner across the street from the drugstore. After a
while, as soon as I saw her coming in, I'd start making up a banana split. She was a real bug for
them, and she came in late every afternoon-after school. I imagine I'd been shoving that ice
cream dish under her nose for five or six weeks before somehow it began to sink in that she
wasn't like the rest. She was certainly the only Hill girl that came in there and acted in any way
friendly and natural.
She always had some book with her, and poring over it, she would make a thirty-minute job of
that daily dish of banana split. I began to notice the books she read, They were pretty heavy
school stuff-Latin, algebra, things like that. Watching her made me reflect that I hadn't read even
a newspaper since leaving Mason.
Laura. I heard her name called by a few of the others who came in when she was there. But I
could see they didn't know her too well; they said "hello"-thatwas about the extent of it. She kept
to herself, and she never said more than "Thank you"' to me. Nice voice. Soft. Quiet. Never
another word. But no airs like the others, no black Bostonese. She was just herself.
I liked that. Before too long, I struck up a conversation. Just what subject I got off on I don't
remember, but she readily opened up and began talking, and she was very friendly. I found out
that she was a high school junior, an honor student. Her parents had split up when she was a
baby, and she had been raised by her grandmother, an old lady on a pension, who was very strict
and old-fashioned and religious, Laura had just one close friend, a girl who lived over in
Cambridge, whom she had gone to school with. They talked on the telephone every day. Her
grandmother scarcely ever let her go to the movies, let alone on dates.
But Laura really liked school. She said she wanted to go on to college. She was keen for algebra,
and she planned to major in science. Laura never would have dreamed that she was a year older
than I was. I gauged that indirectly. She looked up to me as though she felt I had a world of
experience more than she did-which really was the truth. But sometimes, when she had gone, I
felt let down, thinking how I had turned away from the books I used to like when I was back in
Michigan.
I got to the point where I looked forward to her coming in every day after school. I stopped letting
her pay, and gave her extra ice cream. And she wasn't hiding the fact that she liked me.
It wasn't long before she had stopped reading her books when she came in, and would just sit
and eat and talk with me. And soon she began trying to get me to talk about myself. I was
immediately sorry when I dropped that I had once thought about becoming a lawyer. She didn't
want to let me rest about that. "Malcolm, there's no reason you can't pick up right where you are
and become alawyer." She had the idea that my sister Ella would help me as much as she could.
And if Ella had ever thought that she could help any member of the Little family put up any kind of
professional shingle-as a teacher, a foot-doctor, anything-why, you would have had to tie her
darsice
(darsice)
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