“There’s your ‘grand white folks’ Janna. My Heavens, where do you suppose she finds her clothes? She hasn’t a bit of color in her face and there she’s wearing a stone gray suit and a gray hat with a brown, a brown scarf around it. Her hair is as straight as a poker and she wears it bobbed.” Sylvia shuddered.
“Oh well, she’s a good sort,” Joanna remonstrated, smiling, “and she doesn’t say ‘you people.’ ”
Strange how realization falls short of anticipation. Joanna was about to scale the path which led to her highest ambition, but she had no sense of premonition. Instead, she looked at Vera Sharples sitting insignificantly and drably in an armchair, her graying bobbed hair straggling a bit over her mannish tweed coat, her feet encased in solid tan boots. Only her eyes, looking straightforwardly and appraisingly from under the unbecoming hat, kept her from being dubbed a “freak.”
Joanna, who had not seen her for some years, thought amusedly as she came with swift rhythmic steps down the long room: “It would be fun to turn Sylvia loose on her and make her dress worthy of her eyes.”
The two were standing looking at each other now, Miss Vera still appraisingly. Then the older woman held out her hand. Joanna had neglected to do this, having, like most colored people of her class, carefully schooled herself in the matter of repression where white people were concerned. However, she took the extended hand and gave it a hearty pressure.
“Yes,” said Miss Sharples as though checking up the colored girl’s points by a pattern which she carried in her head, “yes, you are the one. I was sure I hadn’t confused you with anyone else. I haven’t seen you for several years, you know, not since that Christmas when you danced for the Day Nursery with Helena Arnold. Do you remember?”
Joanna, slightly nonplussed, nodded yes. As though she could forget that Christmas when she had become engaged to Peter!
Miss Sharples, still pursuing some train of thought known only to herself, meandered on. “I said, ‘I know there must be somebody who could do it,’ and then I thought of but I didn’t know your name. So I called up Helena and she told me. Do you still dance as divinely as you did that night, my dear?”
“Better,” Joanna told her confidently, “although it doesn’t get me anywhere. Would you mind telling me what all this is about?”
Her visitor settled herself comfortably in a chair, crossed one leg over the other, and took out a cigarette. “Mind if I smoke?” Joanna watched her wide-eyed, picturing her father’s surprise if he should happen to look in on them.
“It’s a long story. You may or may not know that I am one of the directors of the District Line Theater. Lately we’ve been putting on a production called ‘The Dance of the Nations’—dances of the nations it really should be called. Well, we have one woman to represent France, another England, etc.; we aren’t featuring Germany or any of her allies. When it came to America we had to have two or three dances represented, one for the white element, one for the black and one for the red. Of course that made the woman representing America practically a star. Well, she’s all right as a white American, or as a red one, but when it comes to the colored American, she simply lays down on her job.” Miss Sharples’ eloquence drowned her sense of grammar.
“You know,” she went on vigorously, “art to my eye is art, and there’s no sense in letting a foolish prejudice interfere with it. This girl won’t darken her face and hasn’t a notion, so far as dancing like colored people is concerned, beyond the cakewalk. Well, I told my Board I didn’t believe that was either adequate or accurate. I’d seen Helena Arnold dance, you know, and I’d seen you, and I figured that your way was the right way,” she concluded sensibly, “because you were colored. Miss Ashby’s contract expires this week and I persuaded the Board to let me try to find someone else. What do you think about it?” She paused, still regarding Joanna shrewdly.
“You mean,” said Joel Marshall’s daughter, “that you are offering me a chance to dance at the District Line Theater?” She thought: “I know this isn’t real.”
“Well, yes, if you suit. It would be an experiment. To be frank, my dear, some of the directors are doubtful about the success of a colored girl on the stage, but if you dance as well as you did five or six years ago, I should say there would be no difficulty. Suppose you come with me now, there’s a rehearsal at the theater this afternoon. Are you free?”
Was she free? She dashed off to get her wraps and stumbled into Sylvia on the second floor. “Isn’t she long-winded? What’d she come to see you about?”
Joanna took her by both shoulders and shook her. “About my dancing at the District Line Theater in the ‘Dance of the Nations.’ Oh, Sylvia, if I’m dreaming, don’t let me wake up.”
Down in Greenwich Village on the south side of Washington Square, Joanna found Miss Susan’s “Board.” They were occupying, scattered around, a large dilapidated room of magnificent proportions and they were talking of art, of dancing with an enthusiasm and accuracy, an amazing precision such as Joanna had never heard equaled.
“Valvinov is good, more than good, excellent in her conception of the dance and the way she carries it out, but her ankles are too clumsy, it makes me sick to look at her legs.” A short, stocky young man seated at the piano delivered this dictum. He was very pale, with thick black hair which he wore plastered back from a low square forehead. His hair was long, Joanna noticed, and ran in unbroken strands from his forehead to the top of his coat collar. He spoke absolutely unaccented
