J. Poindexter, ColoredCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
J. Poindexter, Colored
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
African Americans -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
It's curious how news does travel 'round in a place that's the right
size for everybody in it to know everybody else's business. Before night
it has done leaked out somehow that I is seriously considering accepting
going to New York with young Mr. Dallas Pulliam; and by next morning, lo
and behold, if it ain't all over town! Wherever I goes, pretty near
everybody I meets, whites and blacks alike, asks me how about it and
allows I'm powerful lucky to get such a chance. Mostly, in times gone
by, when my race goes North they heads for Chicago, Illinois, or maybe
Detroit, Michigan, or Indianapolis, Indiana. No sooner do they get
there than they begins writing back saying that up North is the only
fitten place for colored folks to be at; wages high, times easy, and
white folks calling you "Mister" and everything pleasant like that. They
writes that there is not no Jim Crow cars nor separate seats for colored
at the moving-pictures nor nothing like that. But I has taken notice
that after awhile most of 'em quits writing back and starts coming back.
Some stays but more returns--and is verging on shouting-happy when they
crosses the Ohio River coming in. From what I hears some of 'em say
after they gets home and has got a full meal of vittles inside of them,
and so is got more time to talk, I has made up my mind that so far as my
own color is concerned, the main difference from the South is this: Up
North they calls you "Mister" but they don't feed you!
Still, New York City ain't Chicago, Illinois, nor yet it ain't Detroit,
Michigan; and besides, working for Mr. Dallas Pulliam, I won't have to
be worrying about when does I eat next. Still, even so, I says to
myself that it won't be no harm to inquire round now that the word is
done leaked out anyhow, and learn something more than what little I
knows about New York City. But it seems like, outside of some few white
folks, there is not nobody I knows who's ever been there, excusing a few
head of draft-boys which went there enduring of the early part of the
war; and they wouldn't scarcely count neither on account of them just
passing through and not staying over only just a short time whilst
waiting for the boat to start. Howsomever, they tells me, one and all,
that from what they did see of it they is willing to recommend it very
highly.
One or two of the white gentlemen which I is well acquainted with, they
tells me the same, too. Mr. Jere Fairleigh he takes me into his law
office when I meets him on the street and speaks to him about it; and he
gets a book all about New York down off of one of his shelves and he
reads to me where the book says that in New York there is more of these
here Germans than there is in any German city except one, and more
Russians than there is in any Russia city except none, and more Italians
than there is in any Italy city except one, and more Hungarians than
there is in any Hungry city at all, and so on and so forth. I says to
him, I says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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