So I gave him my comic book and went on to work. On the way I kept thinking about what a difference a foreign language makes. Just speak something else and you don’t have to be colored in this here U.S.A.—at least, not as colored as me, born and raised here, and 102 per cent American. The Puerto Ricans come up here from the islands and start living all over New York, Chicago, anywhere, where an ordinary American-speaking Negro can’t get a foothold, much less a room or an apartment—and the last place a Puerto Rican wants to live is Harlem, because that is colored. So they live uptown, downtown, all around town, the Bronx, Brooklyn, anywhere but with me, unless they can’t help it. And do I blame them? I do not! Nobody loves Jim Crow but an idiot, and I am Jim Crowed.

Español! Now that is a language which, if you speak it, will take some of the black off of you if you are colored. Just say, Sí, and folks will think you are a foreigner, instead of only a plain old ordinary colored American Negro. Don’t you remember a few years ago reading about that Negro who put on a turban and went all over the South speaking pig Latin and staying at the best hotels? They thought he was an A-rab, and he wasn’t nothing but a Negro. Why does a language, be it pig Latin or Spanish, make all that much difference?

I have been in this country speaking English all my life, daddy-o, yet and still if I walk in some of them rich restaurants downtown, they look at me like I was a varmint. But let somebody darker than me come in there speaking Spanish or French or Afangulo and the headwaiter will bow plumb down to the ground. I wonder why my mama did not bear me in Cuba instead of in Virginia? Had she did so, I would walk right up to the White Sulphur Springs Hotel now and engage me a room, dark though I be, and there would not be a white man in Dixie say a word. But just let me enter and say in English, “I would like a reservation.”

The desk clerk would say to me, “Negro, are you crazy?”

I would say, “No, I am not crazy. I am just American.”

He would say, “American though you be, you will never sleep in here. This hotel is for white folks.”

Then I would say, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, drawing the color line in Virginia where Thomas Jefferson was born, in this day and age of such great democracy.”

Whereupon he would call the manager who would say, “You better get out of here before I have you arrested for disturbing the peace.”