“You had better take your own advice,” I said, “or you might get your head cut off. A woman with a shape like that is bound to have a boy friend.”

“One more boy friend would do her no harm,” said Simple, “so it might as well be me. But you don’t see me moving out of my tracks, do you? I have learned one thing just by observation: Midsummer madness brings winter sadness, so curb your badness. If you can’t be good, be careful. In this hot weather with womens going around not only with bare back, but some of them with mighty near everything else bare, a man has got to watch his self. Look at them right here on the Avenue—play suits, sun suits, swim suits, practically no suits. I swear, if I didn’t care for Joyce, I’d be turning my head every which-a-way, and looking every which-a-where. As it is, I done eye-balled a plenty. This is the hottest summer I ever seen—but the womens look cool. That is why a man has to be careful.”

“Cool, too, you mean—controlled!”

“Also careful,” said Simple. “I remember last summer seeing them boys around my stoop, also the mens on the corner jiving with them girls in the windows and the young mens in the candy store buying ice cream for jail bait and beating bongos under her be-bop windows. And along about the middle of the winter, or maybe it was spring, I heard a baby crying in the room underneath me, and another one gurgling in the third floor front. And this summer on the sidewalk I see more new baby carriages, and rattles being raised, and milk bottles being sucked. It is beautiful the way nature keeps right on producing Negroes. But the Welfare has done garnished some of these men’s wages. And the lady from the Domestic Relations Court has been upstairs in the front room investigating twice as to where Carlyle has gone. When he do come home he will meet up with a summons.”

“I take it Carlyle is a young man who does not yet realize the responsibilities of parenthood.”

“Carlyle is old enough to know a baby has to eat. And I do not give him credit for cutting out and leaving that girl with that child—except that they had a fight, and Carlyle left her a note which was writ: ‘Him who fights and runs away, lives to fight some other day.’ The girl said Carlyle learned that in high school when he ought to have been learning how to get a good job that pays more than thirty-two dollars a week. When their baby was born, it was the coldest day in March. And my big old fat landlady, what always said she did not want no children in the house, were mad when the Visiting Health Nurse came downstairs and told her to send some heat up.