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the storekeeper took the money and put it into the cash drawer, he told the Negro to be sure to hurry back as soon as he had enough money to buy something else. Waiting until the Negro had left the store, he said that colored money was just as good as a white man’s money and that he was always glad to get as much of it as he could.
    I don’t know why it is that there’s so much talk against us down here in the South, he said. It’s bound to be either ignorance or meanness, though. You read in the newspapers all the time these days about somebody up North saying we discriminate against colored people. You saw me take that colored money just now. I sell to the colored just like I do to anybody else. I couldn’t stay in business to the end of the month if I didn’t sell to them. I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t. Half my trade is with the colored.
    I don’t know what in hell’s wrong with them up North. Trouble-making people up there are always saying we make the colored live where we want them to live and won’t let them live where they want to. That’s not the way it is. Colored people are used to living among themselves and that’s the way the good ones want it to be. We don’t have a single law keeping them from moving to a house in our part of town. There’s no law saying they have to stay down on the southside, neither. When you have a good custom like we do, the government has no business making laws, neither.
    It just wouldn’t happen that some colored people had enough money to pay high rent or buy a house in our part of town. The colored people are just too poor to do that. They have a hard time paying a few dollars a month rent to live in their part of town as it is. I own a few houses down on the southside and I know how hard it is every month getting them to pay me what they owe. They’re always complaining that they want city water piped inside the house and a flushtoilet instead of an outside privy or that the roof leaks when it rains or that the front porch is about to fall through, but that’s only their way of trying to put off paying the rent when it’s due and I don’t pay no attention to that kind of complaining.
    There’s no need to worry about a colored doctor or school teacher or somebody like that getting rich enough to rent or buy a house in the white part of town. That’s nothing at all to worry about and I can tell you why. All the property in our part of town belongs to white people and you won’t see white people renting or selling to the colored. Nobody of us would do a thing like that. I know that for sure.
    Here’s how I happen to know it. Some of us got together one night not long ago with the real estate people in town and talked it over. All the real estate people said on their word of honor they’d never touch a deal like that, no matter how much money it cost them in commissions.
    When we had this meeting, somebody asked what would happen if an estate came up for settlement and under the terms of the will the law required that a certain piece of property in our part of town had to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. That’s a serious thing, because if there is such a provision in a will, it’s enforceable by law. But that didn’t bother us for long. Some of the lawyers at the meeting told us how to get around it.
    What they said was for us to take care of anything like that in a quiet, orderly, business-like way and there wouldn’t be no trouble at all. I’ll tell you how the lawyers said for us to go about it.
    If one of the colored out-bid everybody else and got legal ownership of a house in our part of town, some of us would have a serious talk with him and convince him he’d better listen to what we said and sell it back to us in a hurry.
    That might take time and a lot of serious talking, because he might have the backing of some trouble-makers somewhere, but we’d pressure him enough till he ended up selling to us. We’d remind him how good we’ve