“He would be a Mau Mau,” said Simple. “Was he in Montgomery, he would turn Rev. King’s love feast upside down—and the buses, too. ‘Love thy neighbor as thy self,’ would not mean a thing to him. He do not love colored folks, let alone white. All that man loves is to fight. But the womens like him. See them girls all around him now down there at the end of the bar? When my Cousin Minnie was in this bar last, she asked me who he was and could I introduce her to him. I told her, not me! She would have to meet that man at her own risk, I said, and if she got hurt in the process, don’t come running to me for help because I would not want to be mixed up in the rumble. But I told her last week:

“There is many a slop

’Twixt the lip and the chop,

“You are liable to get gravy on your chin before you get the pork chop in.”

“What in the world do you mean by that?” I asked.

“Cousin Minnie,” said Simple, “is still slipping and slopping around in them Lenox Avenue bars looking for a chump with a pot of gold. I told Minnie when she first come here that the rainbow with the pot of gold at its end arches right on over New York City. It must terminate somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, because it sure do not end in Harlem.

“Minnie said, ‘Oh, as many rich old Negroes as there are around here, particularly West Indians, I am bound to find me a man with beaucoup loot and a Cadillac to boot. I never was a woman to play myself cheap.’

“Minnie has now been in Harlem a right smart while, and she is still trying to borrow five or ten dollars from me ever so often. But not if my wife knows it. Relatives or no relatives, Joyce does her best to balance me and the budget, and if I lent Minnie money every time she asks for it, nobody’s budget would work out right.”

“I gather your Cousin Minnie did not find her pot of gold as yet in New York,” I said.