"Because," he says, "he wants to be as much like a white man as he possibly can. He strives to burst his birth's invidious bar, Danny. They talk about progress and education for the Afro-American brother, and uplift and advancement and industrial education and manual training and all that sort of thing. Especially we Northerners.
But what the Afro-American brother thinks about and dreams about and longs for and prays to be--when he thinks at all--is to be white.
Education, to his mind, is learning to talk like a white man. Progress means aping the white man.
Religion is dying and going to heaven and being a WHITE angel--listen to his prayers and sermons and you'll find that out. He'll do anything he can, or give anything he can get his Ethiopian grub-hooks on, for something that he thinks is going to make him more like a white man. Poor devil!
Therefore the millions of Doctor Jackson Anti-Curl.
"All this Doctor Jackson Anti-Curl has dis-covered and thought out and acted upon. If he had gone just one step farther the Afro-American brother would have hailed him as a greater man than Abraham Lincoln, or either of the Washing-tons, George or Booker. It remains for me, Danny--for US--to carry the torch ahead--to take up the work where the imagination of Doctor Jackson Anti-Curl has laid it down.""How?" asts I.
"WE'LL PUT UP AND SELL A PREPARATION TO TURN THENEGROES WHITE!"
THAT was his great idea. He was more excited over it than I ever seen him before about anything.
It sounded like so easy a way to get rich it made me wonder why no one had ever done it before, if it could really be worked. I didn't believe much it could be worked.
But Doctor Kirby, he says he has begun his experiments already, with arsenic. Arsenic, he says, will bleach anything. Only he is kind of afraid of arsenic, too. If he could only get hold of something that didn't cost much, and that would whiten them up fur a little while, he says, it wouldn't make no difference if they did get black agin.
This here Anti-Curl stuff works like that--it takes the kinks out fur a little while, and they come back agin. But that don't seem to hurt the sale none. It only calls fur MORE of Doctor Jackson's medicine.
The doctor takes me around to the place he boards at, and shows me a nigger waiter he has been ex-perimenting on. He had paid the nigger's fine in a police court fur slashing another nigger some with a knife, and kept him from going into the chain-gang. So the nigger agreed he could use his hide to try different kinds of medicines on. He was a velvety-looking, chocolate-coloured kind of nigger to start with, and the best Doctor Kirby had been able to do so fur was to make a few little liver-coloured spots come onto him. But it was making the nigger sick, and the doctor was afraid to go too fur with it, fur Sam might die and we would be at the expense of another nigger. Peroxide of hidergin hadn't even phased him. Nor a lot of other things we tried onto him.
You never seen a nigger with his colour running into him so deep as Sam's did. Sam, he was always apologizing about it, too. You could see it made him feel real bad to think his colour was so stubborn.
He felt like it wasn't being polite to the doctor and me, Sam did, fur his skin to act that-a-way. He was a willing nigger, Sam was. The doctor, he says he will find out the right stuff if he has to start at the letter A and work Sam through every drug in the hull blame alphabet down to Z.
Which he finally struck it. I don't exactly know what she had in her, but she was a mixture of some kind. The only trouble with her was she didn't work equal and even--left Sam's face looking peeled and spotty in places. But still, in them spots, Sam was six shades lighter. The doctor says that is jest what he wants, that there passing-on-to-the-next-cage-we-have-the-spotted-girocutus-look, as he calls it. The chocolate brown and the lighter spots side by side, he says, made a regular Before and After out of Sam's face, and was the best advertisement you could have.
Then we goes and has a talk with Doctor Jackson himself. Doctor Kirby has the idea mebby he will put some money into it. Doctor Jackson was setting on his front veranda with his chair tilted back, and his feet, with red carpet slippers on 'em, was on the railing, and he was smoking one of these long black cigars that comes each one in a little glass tube all by itself. He looks Sam over very thoughtful, and he says:
"Yes, it will do the work well enough. I can see that. But will it sell?"Doctor Kirby makes him quite a speech. I never hearn him make a better one. Doctor Jackson he listens very calm, with his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and moving his eyebrows up and down like he enjoyed it. But he don't get excited none.
Finally Doctor Kirby says he will undertake to show that it will sell--me and him will take a trip down into the black country ourselves and show what can be done with it, and take Sam along fur an object lesson.
Well, they was a lot of rag-chewing. Doctor Jackson don't warm up none, and he asts a million questions. Like how much it costs a bottle to make it, and what was our idea how much it orter sell fur. He says finally if we can sell a certain number of bottles in so long a time he will put some money into it. Only, he says, they will be a stock company, and he will have to have fifty-one per cent. of the stock, or he won't put no money into it. He says if things go well he will let Doctor Kirby be manager of that company, and let him have some stock in it too, and he will be president and treasurer of it himself.
Doctor Kirby, he didn't like that, and said so.
Said HE was going to organize that stock company, and control it himself. But Doctor Jackson said he never put money into nothing he couldn't run.
So it was settled we would give the stuff a try-out and report to him. Before we went away from there it looked to me like Doctor Kirby and me was going to work fur this here Doctor Jackson, instead of making all them there millions fur ourselves.
Which I didn't take much to that Anti-Curl man myself; he was so cold-blooded like.
