The Return of Simple by Langston Hughes

Author:Langston Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-05-06T04:00:00+00:00

Intermarriage

“I BEEN reading in the papers about Sammy Davis turning himself into a Jew,” said Simple, “but in his pictures, he still looks colored to me.”

“Because a man changes his religion does not mean he changes his complexion, too,” I said. “Sammy Davis is colored.”

“But his race is now Jewish,” said Simple.

“No,” I said, “his religion is Jewish.”

“I thought Jews were a race of people,” said Simple.

“Judaism is a religion,” I said, “and anybody can become a Jew in the religious sense by adopting the Hebrew faith—which is what Sammy Davis did.”

“I think he made a mistake,” said Simple.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because in a little while Jews are going to start trying to be colored,” said Simple, “and Sammy Davis will just have to turn around and come back where he started from in order to be saved, because if the Jews are wise, they will not try to stick with the rest of the white folks from here on out. Instead they will come with us.”

“What do you mean, ‘come with us’?” I asked.

“I mean run with us—if they don’t want to run FROM us like the white folks are doing in the Congo when they hear them Congo drums. There ain’t but two ways to go tomorrow—ALONG WITH us or AWAY FROM us. Right now, most white folks is trying to run away from us, everywhere in the world—even when we are not chasing them. But we here in the U.S.A. is not chasing nobody when we buy a house next door to some white family. Yet and still, them white folks run like mad, be they Jewish or otherwise. Do you reckon if me and Joyce was to buy a house next door to Sammy Davis, he would run, too?”

“Sammy is probably a liberal Jew,” I said.

“I am not talking about stingy,” said Simple.

“I am not talking about being liberal with money, either,” I explained. “I mean liberal in a racial and religious sense, accepting everyone equally.”

“My wife is upset about Sammy marrying white,” said Simple. “In fact, Joyce is mad.”

“Your wife is like a great many other colored women. Their tolerance doesn’t encompass interracial marriage,” I said. “On that they take a rather narrow-minded view, especially when the male involved is a celebrity.”

“And more so when that Negro is up in the money,” said Simple. “Joyce says, ‘Just let a Negro get a little money, he ups and marries a white woman—and his new wife is the one that wears furs and diamonds. Usually his first wife, colored, is left out in the cold when the money starts coming in,’ says Joyce.

“The more Joyce talks, the madder she gets on that subject. Then she switches to colored women and white men. ‘Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, Katherine Dunham, Diahann Carroll, Dorothy Dandridge, Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt—every last famous woman we got in show business almost—except Ethel Waters, who is rather old for wedding veils—has up and married white. So who shares all these rich colored women’s money?’

“I said, ‘Joyce, you are making me mad because I am not white—then I could marry me a well-off star.

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