I ain't blaming him for not being pleased, neither. To start with, the waiter is blacked up too much. He don't look like he's genuine colored; he looks more like he's been shining up a cook stove and got most of the polish rubbed off onto his face and hands. He don't act like he's genuine colored, neither. I judges he must have studied the business of acting like colored folks from watching nigger minstrel shows. He keeps rolling his eyes up in his head and smacking his lips, the same as an end-man does, which is all right, I reckon, when you is an end-man but which does not fill the bill when you is letting on to be a sure-enough black person; because for years past I ain't never seen scarsely no minstrel man which really deported himself as though he had colored feelings inside of him.
Still, I must say for him that he's doing his level best to oblige. But what with him trying to remember to keep the eyes rolling and the lips smacking, and the director yelling at him through that megaphome to do the next step this-a-way or that-a-way, he's presently so muddled up in his mind that it seems like he can't get nothing at all accomplished. It makes me feel actually sorry for him; but I ain't sorry for the director. One of 'em is ignorant and willing to admit it; the other one is ignorant but is trying to cover it up by behaving bossified and making loud sounds and laying the blame on somebody else. Leastwise, that's how I figures it out. I says to myself, I says:
"It's all wrong frum who laid the rail. Yas suh, I'll tell the waitin' world they don't neither one of 'em onderstan' the leas' particle 'bout nigger actions an' nigger depotemint."
I must've said it out loud without thinking, because right alongside me somebody speaks up and says:
"What do you know about this business?"
I turns my head and looks, and it's that there quiet little man with the big glasses on, name of Mr. Simons.
I says to him, I says:
"I don't know nothin' 'bout this yere bus'ness, but I does know somethin' 'bout bein' cullid, seein' ez I is one myse'f."
He sort of squints up his eyes like he's got an idea. He says:
"Could you take the director's place there and show that man how to get through with his scene?"