Page:Nigger Heaven (1926).pdf/58

 nese and Hindus—if I wore a turban or a burnous I could go anywhere—and prostitutes of any nationality. Why, a white prostitute can go places where a coloured preacher would be refused admittance.

True enough, Counsellor, Sill drawled. There's no social line drawn in jail anyway. Probably Marcus Garvey is treated just as well as his fellow convicts. . . . He was lounging in a chair with his hand hanging so far over one arm that his cigarette almost singed the rug. . . . It all comes down, he went on, to that question the ofays are always asking each other: would you like your sister to marry a Negro? You must realize, my dear coloured brethren, that social equality means a mingling of the sexes of the two races. Sill's tone was tinged with a bitter irony.

Well, Howard laughed, the buckras should have thought of that earlier, before you were born, Dick. How did you get as white as you are?

The Southern explanation is that Sherman marched to the sea.

They all laughed.

He must have had a considerable and very vital army, was Olive's comment. You know as well as I do that practically every other ofay in the South has a coloured half-brother and you know how many successful intermarriages there have been, especially in the West Indies. It strikes me as particularly amusing what they have to say, these ofays, about the geniuses of our race. Oh yes, they admit that