Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/202

 There was Dick. That was one solution, an easy, pleasant solution for people of Dick's complexion, and what Dick had done hundreds had done before him and thousands would do after him. Byron reflected that during the period he had spent in New York he had encountered more and more coloured people who were nearly white. Would the race eventually lose its identity? Was it destined to dissolve in this white blood?

He considered another alternative. When a coloured family moved into an apartment, all the white families fled. When two coloured families moved into a block, the block was deserted by the white occupants. So Harlem, in its African aspects, had been created. So Harlem was slowly growing, east and west, north and south, growing, slowly growing. Might it not eventually happen, as more Negroes, coming from the South, coming from the West, to take advantage of the opportunities promised by this new metropolis, encroached farther and farther on white territory, that Manhattan, which already had been Indian, Dutch, English, and finally the melting-pot for every nation, become a Negro island? Byron chuckled aloud as the vision came to him of the last white inhabitant pushing off in a row boat from the Battery while the black flag flew over the Aquarium and from the roof of every skyscraper. Or would property values in Harlem increase so substantially that it would be practical to sell the land and migrate again? Or would it ever