A cyclone rips the front porch from Hager's house while Sandy and Hager manage to shelter inside together.

A letter from Jimboy arrives saying he hurt his back on the job and is coming home to Stanton.

Harriet defies Hager and rides off with her friends to a barbecue despite her mother's desperate pleas to stay home.

Jimboy returns to Stanton and plays blues guitar for the entire neighborhood gathered outside in the evening.

Sandy accompanies his mother to work and watches Mrs. Rice berate Annjee in her kitchen while Annjee accepts the mistreatment without a word.

Harriet secretly packs her belongings and runs away with the traveling carnival, whispering a farewell to Sandy before she disappears.

Sandy receives a clumsily homemade wooden sled instead of the Golden Flyer he desperately wanted for Christmas.

Annjee saves enough money and leaves Sandy behind with Hager to join Jimboy in Detroit.

Sandy and Willie Mae are refused entry to the new amusement park on opening day because they are black.

Hager collapses from overwork and is diagnosed as gravely ill by the doctor.

Hager dies, leaving Sandy without the central anchor of his childhood home.

Sandy moves in with Tempy, who immediately begins reshaping his speech and pushing him toward a more demanding school curriculum.

Sandy works as an elevator attendant in Chicago and feels suffocated by the monotony of the job and his inability to save money for school.

Harriet performs as the celebrated Princess of the Blues at the Monogram Theatre in Chicago to a packed and enthusiastic crowd.

Harriet offers to fund Sandy's education and shames Annjee into accepting the plan by invoking everything Hager believed in.

Not Without Laughter follows Sandy Rogers from his earliest years in the Kansas home of his grandmother Hager through the forces that slowly dismantle his family. Jimboy's wandering ways and Harriet's defiant spirit create constant tension in Hager's house, while racism shapes every opportunity available to the family. One by one the people Sandy loves most depart — Harriet flees with a carnival, then Annjee follows Jimboy to Detroit — until Hager's death from overwork leaves Sandy truly adrift. Sandy finds a harder but more intellectually rich life under Tempy's roof, then follows his mother to Chicago, where the monotony of elevator work threatens to bury his ambitions. It is Harriet, now a celebrated blues performer, who steps in at the last moment to restore Sandy's path toward the future Hager always believed in.

Sandy's journey from childhood in Stanton to a young man with a future in Chicago.

Sister Whiteside visits Hager and the two women gossip over supper about their absent children and Harriet's dangerous behavior.

Brother Logan tells Hager he saw Harriet in town at the Waiter's Ball on a night she had claimed she could not visit.

Harriet announces she is quitting her job at the country club and declares flatly that she will never join the church.

Sandy accompanies Harriet and her boyfriend Mingo to an all-night dance at Chaver's Hall and eventually falls asleep alone in an empty balcony.

Hager is waiting on the porch with her Bible and a bundle of switches when Harriet and Sandy arrive home from the dance.

Sandy slips into the carnival minstrel show and watches men in the audience fondle Harriet and Maudel as they perform on stage.

Sandy spends his church offering on candy for himself and his friends and lies to Hager about where the money came from.

Sandy begins fifth grade at the integrated school and is immediately placed in the back row with all the other black children.

A letter arrives from Harriet saying she is stranded and penniless in Memphis after the carnival abandoned her.

Harriet returns to Stanton from Memphis, heavily made-up and smelling of cheap perfume, and announces she is moving into the Bottoms with Maudel.

Sandy takes a Saturday job sweeping Pete Scott's barbershop and learns how to hold his own in the rough verbal exchanges between men.

Sandy reads in the newspaper that Harriet and Maudel have been arrested for street-walking and stands helplessly as Hager weeps.

Sandy takes a job at Drummer's Hotel sweeping the lobby and cleaning spittoons, replacing his work at the barbershop.

Sandy arrives in Chicago and on his first night out alone is followed by a perfumed man who tries to lure him back to his room.

Sandy and Annjee walk home from their reunion with Harriet and pass a church where black worshippers are singing old spirituals into the Chicago night.

Beneath the headline events of Sandy's childhood lie dozens of quieter moments that reveal how the world actually works for African Americans in Stanton. Neighborhood gossip, workplace indignities, and Harriet's escalating clashes with Hager fill the early chapters with texture and tension. Sandy learns hard lessons about money, race, and manhood through jobs in a barbershop and a disreputable hotel, while Harriet's disappearance and shameful return signal how few good options exist for young black women. After Hager's death sends Sandy to Tempy's orderly household, he reads widely and earns recognition at school, but his naivety about sex and relationships costs him his first romance. The novel closes with Sandy and his mother walking home past a church, carrying the weight of the past and the uncertain promise of the future.

The smaller moments and secondary conflicts that shape Sandy's world from beginning to end.

Sandy waits alone on a neighbor's porch after the cyclone, fighting back tears in the dark until his mother finally comes for him.

Annjee quietly promises herself that the next time Jimboy sends for her she will follow him and abandon the life in Stanton she has always accepted.

Mrs. Johnson tells the porch gathering how a white mob burned her entire Mississippi neighborhood to the ground after black residents began to prosper.

Harriet recounts the personal experiences of racism — pulled braids, forced segregation at a theater, abuse as a domestic — that have made her hatred of white people absolute.

Sandy realizes at Christmas that his mother and grandmother are Santa Claus, and that they have no money left after sending Harriet funds in Memphis.

Tempy's Christmas visit and her expensive illustrated gift make his family's humble offerings look cheap, so Sandy throws her book into the ashes beneath the stove.

With Annjee gone, Hager fills the evenings telling Sandy slavery stories and urging him to answer racism with love rather than bitterness.

Sandy is summoned to a hotel room by two drunken guests and finds the white woman naked, then flees in terror knowing what happens to black boys who look at white women.

A drunk white Southerner demands Sandy dance for him at Drummer's Hotel; Sandy screams and hurls his shoeshine box at the laughing crowd before running into the snow.

Sandy goes to the Bottoms to deliver a note to Harriet and realizes the disordered house he has entered is a place where sex is for sale.

A dying Hager has Sandy retrieve Harriet's old watch, which she redeemed from the pawnshop; Harriet hides her flashier wristwatch and weeps.

Hager's funeral draws a packed church filled with neighbors, laundry customers, and strangers whose lives she had quietly sustained.

Sandy reads W.E.B. DuBois's writing in The Crisis while recovering from mumps at Tempy's and begins to question Hager's ideas about who counts as a great man.

Tempy warns Sandy that Pansetta is promiscuous and will trap an ambitious young man, and Sandy pulls away from her without explanation.

Sandy rushes to Pansetta's house overcome with regret and finds Jimmy Lane already there, having become sexually intimate with her.

Sandy's coming of age is driven less by grand events than by a series of shattering realizations about race, poverty, love, and identity. From listening to adults recount racist violence on a Kansas porch to understanding at Christmas exactly what his family's poverty means, Sandy's worldview is rebuilt piece by piece. Hager's legacy of love over bitterness gives him a moral foundation, while his experiences in a hotel — with a terrified retreat from a naked white woman and a violent confrontation with a racist Southerner — show how dangerous the world is for a young black man. The deaths and discoveries that follow, including Harriet's prostitution, Hager's final hours, and Sandy's first heartbreak, strip away his remaining innocence. By the time he reads DuBois at Tempy's and loses Pansetta to his own naivety, Sandy has become a young man capable of charting his own course.

The key discoveries, emotional shifts, and hard realizations that forge Sandy's character.