Black No More quotes

Max was tall, dapper and smooth coffee-brown. His negroid features had a slightly satanic cast and there was an insolent nonchalance about his carriage. He wore his hat rakishly and faultless evening clothes underneath his raccoon coat.

He was young, he wasn’t broke, but he was damnably blue.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1933, but there was no spirit of gaiety and gladness in his heart. How could he share the hilarity of the crowd when he had no girl?

How could he share the hilarity of the crowd when he had no girl? He and Minnie, his high “yallah” flapper, had quarreled that day and everything was over between them.

“Women are mighty funny,” he mused to himself, “especially yallah women. You could give them the moon and they wouldn’t appreciate it.”

That was probably the trouble; he’d given Minnie too much. It didn’t pay to spend too much on them. As soon as he’d bought her a new outfit and paid the rent on a three-room apartment, she’d grown uppity.

The two had in common a weakness rather prevalent among Aframerican bucks: they preferred yellow women.

Both swore there were three things essential to the happiness of a colored gentleman: yellow money, yellow women and yellow taxis.

They had little difficulty in getting the first and none at all in getting the third but the yellow women they found flighty and fickle. It was so hard to hold them.

She looked up at him haughtily with cool green eyes, somewhat astonished at his insolence and yet perhaps secretly intrigued, but her reply lacked nothing in definiteness.

“No,” she said icily, “I never dance with niggers!”

Then turning to her friend, she remarked: “Can you beat the nerve of these darkies?” She made a little disdainful grimace with her mouth, shrugged daintily and dismissed the unpleasant incident.

Only a few years ago he’d been just a hungry medical student around Harlem. Max put down the paper and stared vacantly out of the window. Gee, Crookman would be a millionaire in no time. He’d even be a multimillionaire.

It looked as though science was to succeed where the Civil War had failed.

But how could it be possible? He looked at his hands and felt at the back of his head where the straightening lotion had failed to conquer some of the knots.

There was a low hum and throb of machinery and an acrid odor filled the air. Uniformed nurses and attendants hurried back and forth at their tasks.

Everything was quiet, swift, efficient, sinister.

He felt so thankful that he had survived the ordeal of that horrible machine so akin to the electric chair. A shudder passed over him at the memory of the hours he had passed in its grip, fed at intervals with revolting concoctions.

There would be no more expenditures for skin whiteners; no more discrimination; no more obstacles in his path. He was free!

The world was his oyster and he had the open sesame of a pork-colored skin!

The reflection in the mirror gave him new life and strength. He now stood erect, without support and grinned at the two tall, black attendants. “Well, Boys,” he crowed, “I’m all set now. That machine of Doc’s worked like a charm.

Now everybody would know who he was. He had undergone the tortures of Doc Crookman’s devilish machine in order to escape the conspicuousness of a dark skin and now he was being made conspicuous because he had once had a dark skin!

Could one never escape the plagued race problem?

“Don’t worry about that,” comforted Miss Smith. “Nobody’ll recognize you. There are thousands of white people, yes millions, that look like you do.” She took his arm and snuggled up closer. She wanted to make him feel at home.

Through his efforts and the activities of Black-No-More, Incorporated, it would be possible to do what agitation, education and legislation had failed to do. He was naively surprised that there should be opposition to his work.

Like most men with a vision, a plan, a program or a remedy, he fondly imagined people to be intelligent enough to accept a good thing when it was offered to them, which was conclusive evidence that he knew little about the human race.

Dr. Crookman prided himself above all on being a great lover of his race. He had studied its history, read of its struggles and kept up with its achievements. He subscribed to six or seven Negro weekly newspapers and two of the magazines.

He was so interested in the continued progress of the American Negroes that he wanted to remove all obstacles in their path by depriving them of their racial characteristics. His home and office were filled with African masks and paintings of Negroes by Negroes.

He was what was known in Negro society as a Race Man. He was wedded to everything black except the black woman⁠—his wife was a white girl with remote Negro ancestry, of the type that Negroes were wont to describe as being “able to pass for white.”

While abroad he had spent his spare time ransacking the libraries for facts about the achievements of Negroes and having liaisons with comely and available fraus and frauleins.

“Nice lookin’!” echoed Johnson, with mock amazement. “Why, nigguh, that ooman would make uh rabbit hug uh houn’. Doc sez she’s cullud, an’ she sez so, but she looks mighty white tuh me.”

“Everything that looks white ain’t white in this man’s country,” Foster replied.

Meantime there was feverish activity in Harlem’s financial institutions. At the Douglass Bank the tellers were busier than bootleggers on Christmas Eve. Moreover, they were short-handed because of the mysterious absence of Bunny Brown.

He was not finding life as a white man the rosy existence he had anticipated. He was forced to conclude that it was pretty dull and that he was bored.

As a boy he had been taught to look up to white folks as just a little less than gods; now he found them little different from the Negroes, except that they were uniformly less courteous and less interesting.

Often when the desire for the happy-go-lucky, jovial good-fellowship of the Negroes came upon him strongly, he would go down to Auburn Avenue and stroll around the vicinity, looking at the dark folk and listening to their conversation and banter.

Mrs. Givens spoke in a grieved tone and heaved her narrow chest in a deep sigh. She didn’t like all this newfangled foolishness of these young folks. They were getting away from God, that’s what they were, and she didn’t like it.

Mrs. Givens was a Christian. There was no doubt about it because she freely admitted it to everybody, with or without provocation.

Of course she often took the name of the Creator in vain when she got to quarreling with Henry; she had the reputation among her friends of not always stating the exact truth; she hated Negroes;

her spouse had made bitter and profane comment concerning her virginity on their wedding night; and as head of the ladies’ auxiliary of the defunct Klan she had copied her husband’s financial methods; but that she was a devout Christian no one doubted.

She believed the Bible from cover to cover, except what it said about people with money, and she read it every evening aloud, greatly to the annoyance of the Imperial Grand Wizard and his modern and comely daughter.

Mrs. Givens had probably once been beautiful but the wear and tear of a long life as the better half of an itinerant evangelist was apparent.

Now she was back home, thoroughly ashamed of her grotesque parents, and, like the other girls of her set, anxious to get a husband who at the same time was handsome, intelligent, educated, refined and rolling in wealth.

As she was ignorant of the fact that no such man existed, she looked confidently forward into the future.

“I don’t care to go down there among all those gross people,” she informed her father at the dinner table when he broached the subject of the meeting. “They’re so crude and elemental, don’t you know,” she explained, arching her narrow eyebrows.

At sixteen when her instructors had about despaired of her, they were overjoyed by the decision of her father to send the girl to a “finishing school” in the North.

The “finishing school” about finished what intelligence Helen possessed

;

You make me sick with all your modern ideas. You’d do a lot better if you’d try to be more like your Ma.”

Both Mrs. Givens and Helen looked quickly at him to see if he was smiling. He wasn’t.

“Why don’tcha go, Helen?” pleaded Mrs. Givens. “Yo fathah sez this heah man f’m N’Yawk is uh—uh scientist or somethin’ an’ knows a whole lot about things. Yuh might l’arn somethin’. Ah’d go mys’f if ’twasn’t fo mah rheumatism.”

… the similarity of this meeting to the religious orgies of the more ignorant Negroes and amazed that earlier in the evening he should have felt any qualms about lecturing to these folks on anthropology, a subject with which neither he nor his hearers were acquainted.

He quickly saw that these people would believe anything that was shouted at them loudly and convincingly enough.

He knew what would fetch their applause and bring in their memberships and he intended to repeat it over and over.

… spent a half-hour introducing the speaker of the evening, dwelt upon his supposed scholastic attainments, but took pains to inform them that, despite Matthew’s vast knowledge, he still believed in the Word of God, the sanctity of womanhood and the purity of the white race.

For an hour Matthew told them at the top of his voice what they believed

: i.e., that a white skin was a sure indication of the possession of superior intellectual and moral qualities; that all Negroes were inferior to them;

Following him came Colonel Mortimer Roberts, principal of the Dusky River Agricultural Institute, Supreme General of the Knights and Daughters of Kingdom Come and president of the Uncle Tom Memorial Association.

Colonel Roberts was the acknowledged leader of the conservative Negroes (most of whom had nothing to conserve) who felt at all times that the white folks were in the lead and that Negroes should be careful to guide themselves accordingly.

He was a great mountain of blackness with a head shaped like an upturned bucket, pierced by two pig-like eyes and a cavernous mouth equipped with large tombstone teeth which he almost continually displayed.

He was a great mountain of blackness with a head shaped like an upturned bucket, pierced by two pig-like eyes and a cavernous mouth equipped with large tombstone teeth which he almost continually displayed.

His speech was a cross between the woofing of a bloodhound and the explosion of an inner tube.

It conveyed to most white people an impression of rugged simplicity and sincerity, which was very fortunate since Colonel Roberts maintained his school through their contributions.

His feeling in the matter could easily be appreciated.

He was engaged in a most vital and necessary work: i.e., collecting bales of data to prove satisfactorily to all that more money was needed to collect more data.

Most of the data were highly informative, revealing the amazing fact that poor people went to jail oftener than rich ones; that most of the people were not getting enough money for their work;

that most of the people were not getting enough money for their work; that strangely enough there was some connection between poverty, disease and crime. By establishing these facts with mathematical certitude and illustrating them with elaborate graphs, Dr. Bonds garnered many fat checks.

For his people, he said, he wanted work, not charity; but for himself he was always glad to get the charity with as little work as possible.

For many years he had succeeded in doing so without any ascertainable benefit accruing to the Negro group.

“But Doctor Beard,” objected Rev. Gronne, “isn’t this a rather unusual procedure?”

“Rev. Gronne,” the great man replied, “it’s not near as unusual as Black-No-More. I have probably ruffled your dignity but that’s nothing to what Dr. Crookman will do.”

“I guess you’re right, Beard,” the college president agreed.

Mr. Licorice, who was known by his followers as Provisional President of Africa, Admiral of the African Navy, Field Marshal of the African Army and Knight Commander of the Nile, had a genius for being stuck with junk by crafty salesmen.

White men only needed to tell him that he was shrewder than white men and he would immediately reach for a check book.

But there was little reaching for check books in his office nowadays. He had been as hard hit as the other Negroes.

Why, they began to argue, one couldn’t tell who was who! Herein lay the fundamental cause of all their ills. Times were hard, they reasoned, because there were so many white Negroes in their midst taking their jobs and undermining their American standard of living.

None of them had ever attained an American standard of living to be sure, but that fact never occurred to any of them.

So they flocked to the meetings of the Knights of Nordica and night after night sat spellbound while Rev.

Here you are fighting this Black-No-More, and so is Beard, Whooper, Gronne, Spelling and the rest of the Negro leaders, yet you have Licorice on the payroll to fight the same people that are fighting your enemy.

This thing is more complicated than a flapper’s past.

”

“Never mind, look it up at your leisure. Now you can savvy the fact that the sooner these spades are whitened the sooner this graft will fall through, can’t you?”

“Well, the longer we can make the process, the longer we continue to drag down the jack. Is that clear?”

“You’re getting brighter by the minute, old man,” jeered Matthew.

“You’re getting brighter by the minute, old man,” jeered Matthew.

“Coming from you, that’s no compliment.”

“As I was saying, the longer it takes, the longer we last. It’s my business to see that it lasts a long time but neither do I want it to stop because that also would be disastrous.”

It also suddenly began to dawn upon some men that the pretty young thing they had met at the seashore and wanted to rush to the altar might possibly be a whitened Negress; and young women were almost as suspicious.

Rapid-fire courtships and gin marriages declined. Matrimony at last began to be approached with caution.

Nothing like this situation had been known since the administration of Grover Cleveland.

People were always asking each other embarrassing questions about birth and blood. Fights became more frequent. Large numbers of the workers, being of Southern birth, were unable to disprove charges of possessing Negro ancestry, and so were forced to leave the vicinity.

The mill hands kept so busy talking about Negro blood that no one thought of discussing wages and hours of labor.

In August, Messrs. Blickdoff and Hortzenboff, being in Atlanta on business, stopped by Matthew’s office.

Rev. Givens, fortified with a slug of corn, advanced nervously to the microphone, fingering his prepared address.

He cleared his throat and talked for upwards of an hour during which time he successfully avoided saying anything that was true, the result being that thousands of telegrams and long distance telephone calls of congratulation came in to the studio.

In his long address he discussed the foundations of the Republic, anthropology, psychology, miscegenation, cooperation with Christ, getting right with God, curbing Bolshevism, the bane of birth control, the menace of the Modernists, science versus religion, and many other subjects of which he was totally …

Two months later, when practically everyone had forgotten that there had ever been such an investigation, the complete report of the commission, comprising 1,789 pages in fine print came off the press. Copies were sent broadcast to prominent citizens and organizations.

Exactly nine people in the United States read it

:

“Don’t insult me, you tripe. Listen now: This crowd thinks they’re too highbrow to come in with the Knights of Nordica. They say our bunch are morons.”

“That about makes it unanimous,” commented Bunny, biting off the end of a cigar.

“Well, what I’m trying to do now is to bring these two organizations together. We’ve got numbers but not enough money to win an election; they have the jack.

This man, Dr. Samuel Buggerie, was highly respected among members of his profession and well known by the reading public. He was the author of several books and wrote frequently for the heavier periodicals.

His well-known work, The Fluctuation of the Sizes of Left Feet Among the Assyrians During the Ninth Century Before Christ had been favorably commented upon by several reviewers, one of whom had actually read it.

An even more learned work of his was entitled Putting Wasted Energy to Work, in which he called attention, by elaborate charts and graphs, to the possibilities of harnessing the power generated by the leaves of trees rubbing together on windy days.

An even more learned work of his was entitled Putting Wasted Energy to Work, in which he called attention, by elaborate charts and graphs, to the possibilities of harnessing the power generated by the leaves of trees rubbing together on windy days.

In several brilliant monographs he had proved that rich people have smaller families than the poor; that imprisonment does not stop crime; that laborers usually migrate in the wake of high wages.

His most recent article in a very intellectual magazine read largely by those who loafed for a living, he had proved statistically that unemployment and poverty are principally a state of mind.

… had married a Jewess, a seventh was an intellectual, an eighth had spent too long at Hot Springs trying to cure the syphilis, a ninth was rumored to be part Mexican and a tenth had at one time in his early youth been a Socialist.

At five o’clock they were desperate, drunk and disgusted.

The stuffy room was a litter of discarded collars, cigarette and cigar butts, match stems, heaped ash trays and empty bottles. Matthew drank little and kept insisting on the selection of Rev. Givens.

President Goosie averred again and again, “I intend to make my second term as honest and efficient as my first.”

Though a dire threat, this statement was supposed to be a fine promise.

Meanwhile, Dr. Samuel Buggerie and his operatives were making great headway examining birth and marriage records throughout the United States. Around the middle of September the Board of Directors held a conference at which the learned man presented a partial report.

As the campaign grew more bitter, denunciations of Dr. Crookman and his activities grew more violent. A move was started to close all of his hospitals. Some wanted them to be closed for all time; others advised their closing for the duration of the campaign.

The majority of thinking people (which wasn’t so many) strenuously objected to the proposal.

“No good purpose will be served by closing these hospitals,” declared the New York Morning Earth. “On the contrary such a step might have tragic results.

The air was electric with expectancy. People stood around in knots. Small boys scattered leaflets on ten million doorsteps.

Police were on the alert to suppress disorder, except what they created.

Arthur Snobbcraft, jovial and confident that he would soon assume a position befitting a member of one of the First Families of Virginia, was holding a brilliant pre-election party in his palatial residence.

Wouldn’t it be better to settle the matter once and for all? Or should he let the doctor murder the boy and then hope for a better situation the next time?

An angel of frankness beckoned him to be done with this life of pretense; to take his wife and son and flee far away from everything, but a devil of ambition whispered seductively about wealth, power and prestige.

In almost as many seconds the pageant of the past three years passed in review on the screen of his tortured memory:

But Givens was greatly depressed, much more so than the others. He had really believed all that he had preached about white supremacy, race purity and the menace of the alien, the Catholic, the Modernist and the Jew.

He had always been sincere in his prejudices.

When they arrived at the Valbuena Air Field outside Mexico City, a messenger brought Bunny a telegram.

Other things of which the community might have boasted were its inordinately high illiteracy rate and its lynching record—but these things were seldom mentioned, although no one was ashamed of them.

Certain things are taken for granted everywhere.

Long before the United States had rid themselves of their Negroes through the good but unsolicited offices of Dr.

But the people, eager for something new, found all of the old churches too tame. They wanted a faith with more punch to it; a faith that would fittingly accompany the fierce corn liquor which all consumed, albeit they were all confirmed Prohibitionists.

Whenever and wherever there is a social need, some agency arises to supply it.

The needs of Happy Hill were no exception. One day, several weeks previously, there had come to the community one Rev.

His flock was soon on the nervous edge of expectancy but the Lord failed, for some reason, to answer the prayer of his right-hand man.

Rev. McPhule began to wonder what he had done to offend the Almighty.

He prayed long and fervently in the quiet of his bedchamber, except when he didn’t have company, but no sign appeared. Possibly, thought the evangelist, some big demonstration might attract the attention of Jesus; something bigger than the revivals he had been staging.

The two men were marched protesting to Happy Hill. The enthused villagers pinched them, pulled them, playfully punched and kicked them during their triumphant march. No one paid the slightest attention to their pleas.

Too long had Happy Hill waited for a Negro to lynch.

Could the good people hesitate now that the Lord had answered their prayers?