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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

“Carlyle is more near about his same age. But Carlyle’s done had experience with which he walks the floor each and every night.”

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“Do you expect Carlyle’s sex vocabulary to be any cleaner than yours?”

“Dirtier,” said Simple. “But F. D. do not respect Carlyle.”

On the Warpath

On the Warpath

“HAVE you met F. D.’s girl yet?”

“I did,” said Simple. “My landlady did also. She passed comment on her, ‘Cute as a bug in a rug! Your cousin has better taste than you have, Mr. Semple, being seen in public with streak-haired characters like Zarita.’

“I reminded my landlady that I also knows Joyce.

“‘Which helps a little bit,’ she said. ‘But I give that young boy, F. D., credit. He did not take up with no trash when he come to New York. Gloria is a real sweet kid. Brooklyn girls is raised. They don’t just grow, like they do here in New York. If I was to rear a family,’ she continues, ‘I would move to Brooklyn—which is a quiet suburb—and leave all you loud-mouthed roomers behind here in Harlem to make out the best way you can. Harlem is no place for a child.’

“Not wishing to carry on the conversation, I did not reply. I were not feeling talkative. Do you know what Joyce wrote me?”

“No.”

“Just one word scrawled across the middle of the card like she were in a hurry—Greetings! No address, no nothing, but the picture of a beach and some white folks in swimming.”

“You could tell from the postmark where it was, couldn’t you?”

“It were so pale all I could make out was AT—and the rest was hardly there. But it must be Atlantic City, which is where I know Joyce has been before and likes.”

“The Paradise, the Harlem, there are some fine night clubs there. Bars, music, dancing.”

“I better not go down there and find Joyce setting up in no night club.”

“What have you got against night clubs?”

“Nothing. It’s what I got against guys who take girls to night clubs. I would not take no woman to a cabaret and spend all that loot on her that I did not intend to take further. A man is always thinking ahead of a woman.”

“You have a suspicious mind,” I said. “But I am sure Joyce would know how to resist any too intimate encroachments, even if she did accept some handsome stranger’s bid for a date.”