Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/57

 ily had managed to send Howard to Harvard, and afterwards to Columbia Law School. He had just begun to practise his profession; as yet he was quite destitute of clients. Handsome and tall, dark brown in colour, he had personal reasons for being seriously interested in the perplexing phases of the Negro problem.

One night he came in after dinner—Olive, expecting him, had prepared a large pot of coffee—with Richard Fort Sill, a young man who was so white that, like Olive, below the line he was never taken for a Negro.

They became expansive over the coffee and cigarettes.

Of course, Howard was saying, it isn't so bad for us as it was for those who came before. We at least have Harlem.

Sill began to snicker. The Mecca of the New Negro! The City of Refuge! he cried derisively.

I don't know that we even have Harlem, Olive argued, so many white people come up here now to the cabarets. Why, in one or two places they've actually tried to do a little jim crowing!

Think of it! Howard replied. It isn't, he went on, that we want to mingle with the whites—I mean that we don't want to much more than we are already compelled to—but it is a bore to have them all over our places while we are excluded from their theatres and restaurants merely on account of our colour, theatres and restaurants which admit Chi-