THE POLITICS INVOLVED IN WEARING COLORS are as racial as they are regional. Being paisan doesn't help diplomacy much when the guy who rides his hog up beside yours asks to your face whether you'll turn and side with the blacks once they have their uprising.
There seems to be mix-up among some of the all-Americans--the ones so far-West and inbred they don't remember their own ancestors came from somewhere else--that Italians have black blood. Most of them didn't get past the third grade so I know there's some educating to do. When they call me eggplant it's because there's something wrong in their heads.
I'm as white as any one of them. But even some sissy whites take up the black-power call now. Treason because they got it in their heads we'll fall to their uprising, so they kiss ass now for the chance to live in fear instead of get killed. Well I'll be the first, in the unlikely event of a negro victory, to take one of those White Pathers down with me. I'd kill one of them before I'd kill a black girl.