“Nothing in a bottle will help my soul,” said Simple, “but I will take a drink.”

“Maybe it will help your mind,” I said. “Beer?”

“Yes.”

“Glass or bottle?”

“A bottle because it contains two glasses,” said Simple, spreading his paper out on the bar. “Look here at these headlines, man, where Congress is busy passing laws. While they’re making all these laws, it looks like to me they ought to make one setting up a few Game Preserves for Negroes.”

“What ever gave you that fantastic idea?” I asked.

“A movie short I saw the other night,” said Simple, “about how the government is protecting wild life, preserving fish and game, and setting aside big tracts of land where nobody can fish, shoot, hunt, nor harm a single living creature with furs, fins, or feathers. But it did not show a thing about Negroes.”

“I thought you said the picture was about ‘wild life.’ Negroes are not wild.”

“No,” said Simple, “but we need protection. This film showed how they put aside a thousand acres out West where the buffaloes roam and nobody can shoot a single one of them. If they do, they get in jail. It also showed some big National Park with government airplanes dropping food down to the deers when they got snowed under and had nothing to eat. The government protects and takes care of buffaloes and deers—which is more than the government does for me or my kinfolks down South. Last month they lynched a man in Georgia and just today I see where the Klan has whipped a Negro within a inch of his life in Alabama. And right up North here in New York a actor is suing a apartment house that won’t even let a Negro go up on the elevator to see his producer. That is what I mean by Game Preserves for Negroes—Congress ought to set aside some place where we can go and nobody can jump on us and beat us, neither lynch us nor Jim Crow us every day. Colored folks rate as much protection as a buffalo, or a deer.”

“You have a point there,” I said.

“This here movie showed great big beautiful lakes with signs up all around:

NO FISHING—STATE GAME PRESERVE

But it did not show a single place with a sign up:

NO LYNCHING

It also showed flocks of wild ducks settling down in a nice green meadow behind a government sign that said:

NO HUNTING

It were nice and peaceful for them fish and ducks. There ought to be some place where it is nice and peaceful for me, too, even if I am not a fish or a duck.