“‘That,’ says Minnie, ‘is a very old corny motto. You ain’t hep to the jive. The new motto now is, “Beg, borrow, and ball till you get it all—a bird in the hand ain’t nothing but a man.”’

“‘I ain’t coming on that,’ I said. ‘You sound like a woman I used to know named Zarita in my far-distant past. But, Minnie, I’m a married man now. I need my money for my home.’

“‘For lack of five simoleons you would let me maybe go to jail, your own blood-cousin, here all alone by herself in Harlem where I don’t know nobody. The reason I were in that joint that got raided was, I was trying to get acquainted. I met a right nice colored man in there who bought me a drink and seemed really interested in me until we all got hauled down to the Precinct. Then I asked that man if he would help me to get out. He said, “Baby, I got to get myself out, I can’t be bothered with you.” Peoples is hardhearted in New York City. You are hardhearted, too, Jesse B. Semple.’

“‘Hard as that rock in the St. Louis Blues that were cast into the sea! Minnie, I regrets this is what big-town life does to peoples. Girl, you had ought to stayed down yonder where you was in Virginia.’

“‘I’ll say no more,’ said Minnie. ‘Have you got some beer in the icebox?’

“‘Not with me around the house,’ I says. About that time, Joyce come back out of the kitchenette where she was peeling potatoes and says, ‘Miss Minnie, could I offer you a nice fresh glass of Kool-Aid?’

“So you know what Minnie says? She says, ‘Thank you, I never drinks a drop of no kind of ade, neither nothing else clear colored, such as water. I thank you just the same, Cousin-in-law, married as you is to my favorite cousin, Jesse B., I thank you just the same. And good night.’

“The very word Kool-Aid run Minnie out of the house. When she left Joyce laughed and said, ‘I knowed that would get rid of her—Kool-Aid! I would never let Minnie drink up that nice cold can of beer I just bought for you on my ways home from work out of our budget.’

“‘Joyce, I don’t know which I love the most,’ I said, ‘you on your budget!’”

Vicious Circle

Vicious Circle

“HOUSING, so I hear, is a vicious circle,” declared Simple. “If the first colored family did not move into a white neighborhood, the second one couldn’t. But as soon as one Negro moves in, here comes another one. After a while, so they tell me, we’re right back where we started from—in a slum.”

“What do you mean, slum? All colored neighborhoods are not slums.”

“I thought that’s what slums meant—colored,” said Simple.

“You did not.”