"Why is it that the Afro-American brother buys Anti-Curl?" he asts.
"Why?" I asts.
"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 grubhooks 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 discovered 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 Washingtons, 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 THE NEGROES 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 experimenting 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.