“You have eyes but you see not,” said Simple. “These feet have stood on every rock from the Rock of Ages to 135th and Lenox. These feet have supported everything from a cotton bale to a hongry woman. These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored. These feet have stood at altars, crap tables, free lunches, bars, graves, kitchen doors, betting windows, hospital clinics, WPA desks, social security railings, and in all kinds of lines from soup lines to the draft. If I just had four feet, I could have stood in more places longer. As it is, I done wore out seven hundred pairs of shoes, eighty-nine tennis shoes, twelve summer sandals, also six loafers. The socks that these feet have bought could build a knitting mill. The corns I’ve cut away would dull a German razor. The bunions I forgot would make you ache from now till Judgment Day. If anybody was to write the history of my life, they should start with my feet.”

“Your feet are not all that extraordinary,” I said. “Besides, everything you are saying is general. Tell me specifically some one thing your feet have done that makes them different from any other feet in the world, just one.”

“Do you see that window in that white man’s store across the street?” asked Simple. “Well, this right foot of mine broke out that window in the Harlem riots right smack in the middle. Didn’t no other foot in the world break that window but mine. And this left foot carried me off running as soon as my right foot came down. Nobody else’s feet saved me from the cops that night but these two feet right here. Don’t tell me these feet ain’t had a life of their own.”

“For shame,” I said, “going around kicking out windows. Why?”

“Why?” said Simple. “You have to ask my great-great-grandpa why. He must of been simple—else why did he let them capture him in Africa and sell him for a slave to breed my great-grandpa in slavery to breed my grandpa in slavery to breed my pa to breed me to look at that window and say, ‘It ain’t mine! Bam-mmm-mm-m!’ and kick it out?”

“This bar glass is not yours either,” I said. “Why don’t you smash it?”

“It’s got my beer in it,” said Simple.

Just then Zarita came in wearing her Thursday-night rabbit-skin coat. She didn’t stop at the bar, being dressed up, but went straight back to a booth. Simple’s hand went up, his beer went down, and the glass back to its wet spot on the bar.

“Excuse me a minute,” he said, sliding off the stool.