He knew Crab Nature, and was not at all worried about his Crabs. For as soon as any one Crab began to climb up on the side of the barrel to work his way toward the top the other Crabs would reach up, grab him by the legs, and down he would come, kerplunk! “If we can’t get up,” they would say—“if we can’t get up, you shan’t get up, either. We’ll pull you down. Besides, you should wait until the barrel bursts. There are Kind Friends on the Outside who will burst, the barrel if we only wait, and then, when the Great Day dawns, we will all be Emancipated and there’ll be no need for Climbing. Come down, you fool!” (Because this was in the Beginning of Things, Best Beloved.) So the Greedy Person could always get as many Crabs as he needed for the Home Market, because they all depended on him for their food. And all the creatures stood around and laughed. For this was very funny in the Beginning of Things. And all the creatures said that the Reason for this kink in Crab Nature was that when the Creator was giving out heads he didn’t have enough to go around, so the poor Crabs didn’t get any. And the Greedy Person thanked his lucky stars that Crabs had been made in that Peculiar way, since it made it unnecessary to put a cover on his barrel or to waste his precious time a-watching of them. (Now, all this happened long ago, Best Beloved, in the very Beginning of Things.) --- The above is the first of our Just-So Stories—with no apologies to Rudyard Kipling or any one else. We print it here because, just at this time the Crabs are at work in Harlem, and there is a tremendous clashing of claws as the Pull ’Em Down program goes forward. It’s a great game, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to get them or us anywhere. The new day that has dawned for the Negroes of Harlem is a day of business accomplishment. People are going into business, saving their money and collectively putting it into enterprises which will mean roofs over their heads and an economic future for themselves and their little ones. But the Subsidized Sixth are sure that this is all wrong and that we have no right to move an inch until the Socialist millennium dawns, when we will all get “out of the barrel” together. It does not seem to have occurred to them that making an imperfect heaven now does not unfit any one for enjoying the perfect paradise which they promise us—if it ever comes. Truly it is said of them that “the power over a man’s subsistence is the power over his will”—and over his “scientific radicalism,” too. But we remember having translated this long ago into the less showy English of “Show me whose bread you eat, and I’ll tell you whose songs you’ll sing.” Surely this applies to radicals overnight as well as to ordinary folk. And if not, why not?