“Whereupon Minnie hollered, ‘Why, you old rat, you! You got one foot in the grave and the other one on the brink. I don’t want you, nohow. I will put you down, and now—soon as you pay for this steak.’ They was setting in Frank’s when the blowup came and everybody in society heard what Minnie said. You read about it in Jet last week, didn’t you? Only Jet did not mention no names. It just said an elderly Harlem real-estate man were embarrassed by a loud-mouthed, mad, brownskin woman. That were my Cousin Minnie. Jet did not repeat what Minnie said. She said, ‘You are just a rat, that’s all, an old rat!’

“But that man were not fazed. He just told Minnie real quiet-like, whilst he chewed on his diet, ‘You are kinder old yourself—and an old ship can always leave a sinking rat.’”

Name in Print

Name in Print

“JUST look at the front pages of the newspapers,” said Simple, spreading his nightly copy of the Daily News out on the bar. “There is never hardly any colored names anywhere. Most headlines is all about white folks.”

“That is not true today,” I said. “Many headlines are about Negroes, Chinese, Indians, and other colored folks like ourselves.”

“Most on the inside pages,” said Simple, blowing foam from his beer. “But I am talking about front-page news. The only time colored folks is front-page news is when there’s been a race riot or a lynching or a boycott and a whole lot of us have been butchered up or arrested. Then they announce it.”

“You,” I said, “have a race phobia. You see prejudice where there is none, and Jim Crow where it doesn’t exist. How can you be constructive front-page news if you don’t make front-page news?”

“How can I make front-page news in a white paper if I am not white?” asked Simple. “Or else I have to be Ralph Bunche or Eartha Kitt. That is why I am glad we have got colored papers like the Afro, Defender, Courier, and Sepia, so I can be news, too.”

“I presume that when you say ‘I’ you mean the racial I—Negroes. You are not talking about yourself.”