“De Lawd hears you,” said Hager.

“I don’t care if He does hear me, mama! You and Annjee are too easy. You just take whatever white folks give you—coon to your face, and nigger behind your backs—and don’t say nothing. You run to some white person’s back door for every job you get, and then they pay you one dollar for five dollars’ worth of work, and fire you whenever they get ready.”

“They do that all right,” said Jimboy. “They don’t mind firin’ you. Wasn’t I layin’ brick on the Daily Leader building and the white union men started sayin’ they couldn’t work with me because I wasn’t in the union? So the boss come up and paid me off. ‘Good man, too,’ he says to me, ‘but I can’t buck the union.’ So I said I’d join, but I knew they wouldn’t let me before I went to the office. Anyhow, I tried. I told the guys there I was a bricklayer and asked ’em how I was gonna work if I couldn’t be in the union. And the fellow who had the cards, secretary I guess he was, says kinder sharp, like he didn’t want to be bothered: ‘That’s your look-out, big boy, not mine.’ So you see how much the union cares if a black man works or not.”

“Ain’t Tom had de same trouble?” affirmed Sister Johnson. “Got put off de job mo’n once on ’count o’ de white unions.”

“O, they’ve got us cornered, all right,” said Jimboy. “The white folks are like farmers that own all the cows and let the niggers take care of ’em. Then they make you pay a sweet price for skimmed milk and keep the cream for themselves—but I reckon cream’s too rich for rusty-kneed niggers anyhow!”

They laughed.

“That’s a good one!” said Harriett. “You know old man Wright, what owns the flour-mill and the new hotel—how he made his start off colored women working in his canning factory? Well, when he built that orphan home for colored and gave it to the city last year, he had the whole place made just about the size of the dining-room at his own house. They got the little niggers in that asylum cooped up like chickens. And the reason he built it was to get the colored babies out of the city home, with its nice playgrounds, because he thinks the two races oughtn’t to mix! But he don’t care how hard he works his colored help in that canning factory of his, does he? Wasn’t I there thirteen hours a day in tomato season? Nine cents an hour and five cents overtime after ten hours—and you better work overtime if you want to keep the job! . . . As for the races mixing—ask some of those high yellow women who work there. They know a mighty lot about the races mixing!”

“Most of ’em lives in de Bottoms, where de sportin’ houses are,” said Hager. “It’s a shame de way de white mens keeps them sinful places goin’.”