Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/238

 "live in." Washing dishes in the day-time, she returns at night to her home in Harlem where she smacks her daddy in the jaw or else dances and makes love. On the whole I should say she has the best time of any domestic servant in the world. Know anything about the fast set?

Not very much.

Too bad you don't know more. The Negro fast set does everything the Long Island fast set does, plays bridge, keeps the bootlegger busy, drives around in Rolls-Royces, and commits adultery, but it is vastly more amusing than the Long Island set for the simple reason that it is amused.

After all, the main thing is to use your eyes and your brain. Why, Roy McKain visited Harlem just once and then brought me in a capital yarn about a Negro pimp. I don't suppose he even saw the fellow. Probably just made him up, imagined him, but his imagination was based on a background of observation. The milieu is correct. The story is credible. It jumps ahead; it lives. I'm featuring it in the June number.

Durwood yawned. Well, I don't suppose I've got anything more to say to you. I don't want to flatter you, because I honestly believe you ought to have your throat cut for turning in such an atrocity as this story, but it's an actual fact that I haven't wasted so much time giving an author advice in the last three years. I usually take 'em or leave 'em. There's no good arguing with authors. A sour