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Back The Best of Simple Save as PDF
Chapters (76)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Dedication
  4. Foreword: Who Is Simple?
  5. Feet Live Their Own Life
  6. Landladies
  7. Simple Prays A Prayer
  8. Conversation on the Corner
  9. Simple on Indian Blood
  10. A Toast to Harlem
  11. Simple and His Sins
  12. Temptation
  13. Wooing the Muse
  14. Vacation
  15. Letting off Steam
  16. Jealousy
  17. Banquet in Honor
  18. A Veteran Falls
  19. High Bed
  20. Final Fear
  21. There Ought to be a Law
  22. Income Tax
  23. No Alternative
  24. Springtime
  25. Last Whipping
  26. Seeing Double
  27. Simple on Military Integration
  28. Blue Evening
  29. A Letter from Baltimore
  30. Seven Rings
  31. What Can a Man Say?
  32. Empty Room
  33. Picture for Her Dresser
  34. Cocktail Sip
  35. Apple Strudel
  36. Bop
  37. Formals and Funerals
  38. Fancy Free
  39. Midsummer Madness
  40. Morals Is Her Middle Name
  41. They Come and They Go
  42. A Million—and One
  43. Two Loving Arms
  44. All in the Family
  45. Kick for Punt
  46. Subway to Jamaica
  47. No Tea for the Fever
  48. Boys, Birds, and Bees
  49. On the Warpath
  50. A Hearty Amen
  51. Must Have a Seal
  52. Shadow of the Blues
  53. Once in a Wife-time
  54. Present for Joyce
  55. Christmas Song
  56. Tied in a Bow
  57. Sometimes I Wonder
  58. Four Rings
  59. Simply Love
  60. Bang-up Big End
  61. Duty Is Not Snooty
  62. Bones, Bombs, Chicken Necks
  63. A Dog Named Trilby
  64. Enter Cousin Minnie
  65. Radioactive Red Caps
  66. Two Sides Not Enough
  67. Puerto Ricans
  68. Minnie Again
  69. Vicious Circle
  70. Again Cousin Minnie
  71. Name in Print
  72. Minnie One More Time
  73. An Auto-Obituary
  74. Jazz, Jive, and Jam
  75. About the Author
  76. Newsletter Sign-up

“Mattie Mae had a point when she gave that boy that powerful name,” said Simple. “It has done took effect on me. I might even read one of them books you are going to lend me. I got to have something to talk about with my cousin. He’s educated. Virginia schools for colored ain’t as bad as they used to be, so he has learned a lot more than I. Of course, I can talk with you because when you drink beer you come down to my level. But F. D. is too young to drink, so I got to come up to his. Am I right?”

“I think you are very right.”

“Then pick me out a book I can read now this evening,” said Simple.

“They say Knowledge cannot be assimilated overnight,” I reminded him.

“I don’t care what they say,” said Simple. “It can be laying there ready to assimilate in the morning.”

Two Loving Arms

Two Loving Arms

“I AM glad F. D. got a job in that Jewish dress factory,” said Simple, “because he will learn something. It is good to work around some other kinds of people than Gentiles. I thought all white folks was white folks until I come North to Maryland. I did not know some were Jews. In Virginia I do not recall that it made any difference. The better-class folks is more gentlemen down there than to use bad names about somebody’s race. But in Baltimore at the shipyards where I worked, folks flung words round right freely about Jews and Negroes, too. But I would fling the dozens right back at them—and back up the dozens with my fists. You see this scar over my left eye? Well, the white man what give it to me got a worse scar over his right lip. I was the baddest Negro God’s got when I were young.

“Anyhow, when I first got to Baltimore, before I worked in either the foundry or the shipyards, I worked in a Jewish dress store where colored people could not try on a dress. You know most downtown stores in Baltimore is like that. A colored woman has to buy hats, dresses, and shoes by sight, without trying them on, if she buys them at all, less’n she shops in the colored neighborhood. Baltimore is worse than way down South in some things.