Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/247

 You're rich, Byron remarked, with a tinge of bitterness. It's easy for you.

I haven't always been rich, Byron, but I've always found what I wanted—even money.

You're luckier than most—than most Negroes anyway.

Negroes aren't any worse off than anybody else. They're better off, if anything. They have the same privileges that white women had before the bloody fools got the ballot. They're considered irresponsible like children and treated with a special fondness. Why, in Harlem one is allowed to do thousands of things that one would get arrested for downtown. Take the game of Numbers; everybody plays Numbers, and yet it is just a lottery and consequently against the law. . . . Of course, she continued, after a slight pause, I've never bothered very much about the fact that I'm coloured. It doesn't make any difference to me and I've never thought very much about it. I do just what I want to.

But how can you? What about discrimination? Segregation?

They just don't exist for me. I wouldn't tolerate such a thing. I live in New York exactly as I live in Paris. I do just what I want to and go where I please—to any theatre or hotel—and get what I'm after. You see, most Negroes are so touchy and nervous that they obey the unwritten im Crow laws—you must remember that any form