“Bowers’ cabaret was some place for the teasing-brown pick-me-up then, brother—and the snow. The stuff was cheap then. You sniff, boh?” Strawberry Lips asked Jake and Zeddy.
“I wouldn’t know befoh I sees it,” Jake laughed.
“I ain’t no habitual prisoner,” said Zeddy, “but I does any little thing for a change. Keep going and active with anything, says I.”
The phonograph was discharging its brassy jazz notes when they entered the apartment. Susy was jerking herself from one side to the other with a potato-skinned boy. Miss Curdy was half-hopping up and down with the only chocolate that was there. Five lads, ranging from brown to yellow in complexion, sat drinking with jaded sneering expressions on their faces. The one that had invited Zeddy was among them. He waved to him to come over with his friends.
“Sit down and try some gin,” he said. …
Zeddy dipped his hand in his pocket and sent two bones rolling on the table.
“Ise with you, chappie,” his yellow friend said. The others crowded around. The gramophone stopped and Susy, hugging a bottle, came jerking on her French heels over to the group. She filled the glasses and everybody guzzled gin.
Miss Curdy looked the newcomers over, paying particular attention to Jake. A sure-enough eye-filling chocolate, she thought. I would like to make a steady thing of him.
Over by the door two light-brown lads began arguing about an actress of the leading theater of the Black Belt.
“I tell you I knows Gertie Kendall. I know her more’n I know you.”
“Know her mah granny. You knows her just like I do, from the balcony of the Lafayette. Don’t hand me none o’ that fairy stuff, for I ain’t gwine to swallow it.”
“Youse an aching pain. I knows her, I tell you. I even danced with her at Madame Mulberry’s apartment. You thinks I only hangs out with low-down trash becassin Ise in a place like this, eh? I done met mos’n all our big niggers: Jack Johnson, James Reese Europe, Adah Walker, Buddy, who used to play that theah drum for them Castle Walkers, and Madame Walker.”
“Yaller, it ’pears to me that youse jest a nacherally-born storyteller. You really spec’s me to believe youse been associating with the mucty-mucks of the race? Gwan with you. You’ll be telling me next you done speaks with Charlie Chaplin and John D. Rockefeller—”
Miss Curdy had tuned her ears to the conversation and broke in: “Why, what is that to make so much fuss about? Sure he can dance with Gertie Kendall and know the dickty niggers. In my sporting days I knew Bert Williams and Walker and Adah Overton and Editor Tukslack and all that upstage race gang that wouldn’t touch Jack Johnson with a ten-foot pole. I lived in Washington and had Congressmen for my friends—foop! Why you can get in with the top-crust crowd at any swell ball in Harlem. All you need is clothes and the coin. I know them all, yet I don’t feel a bit haughty mixing here with Susy and you all.”
“I guess you don’t now,” somebody said.
Gin went round … and round … and round. … Desultory dancing. … Dice. … Blackjack. … Poker. … The room became a close, live, intense place. Tight-faced, the men seemed interested only in drinking and gaming, while Susy and Miss Curdy, guzzling hard, grew uglier. A jungle atmosphere pervaded the room, and, like shameless wild animals hungry for raw meat, the females savagely searched the eyes of the males. Susy’s eyes always came back to settle upon the lad that had invited Zeddy. He was her real object. And Miss Curdy was ginned up with high hopes of Jake.
Jake threw up the dice and Miss Curdy seized her chance to get him alone for a little while.
“The cards do get so tiresome,” she said. “I wonder how you men can go on and on all night long poking around with poker.”
“Better than worser things,” retorted Jake. Disgusted by the purple streaks, he averted his eyes from the face of the mulattress.
“I don’t know about that,” Miss Curdy bridled. “There’s many nice ways of spending a sociable evening between ladies and gentlemen.”
“Got to show me,” said Jake, simply because the popular phrase intrigued his tongue.
“And that I can.”
Irritated, Jake turned to move away.
“Where you going? Scared of a lady?”
Jake recoiled from the challenge, and shuffled away from the hideous mulattress. From experience in seaport towns in America, in France, in England, he had concluded that a woman could always go farther than a man in coarseness, depravity, and sheer cupidity. Men were ugly and brutal. But beside women they were merely vicious children. Ignorant about the aim and meaning and fulfillment of life; uncertain and indeterminate; weak. Rude children who loved excelling in spectacular acts to win the applause of women.
But women were so realistic and straight-going. They were the real controlling force of life. Jake remembered the bal-musette fights between colored and white soldiers in France. Blacks, browns, yellows, whites. … He remembered the interracial sex skirmishes in England. Men fought, hurt, wounded, killed each other. Women, like blazing torches, egged them on or denounced them. Victims of sex, the men seemed foolish, apelike blunderers in their pools of blood. Didn’t know what they were fighting for, except it was to gratify some vague feeling about women. …
Jake’s thoughts went roaming after his little lost brown of the Baltimore. The difference! She, in one night, had revealed a fine different world to him. Mystery again. A little stray girl. Finer than the finest!
Some of the fellows were going. In a vexed spirit, Susy had turned away from her unresponsive mulatto toward Zeddy. Relieved, the mulatto yawned, threw his hands backwards and said: “I guess mah broad is home from Broadway by now. Got to final on home to her. Harlem, lemme see you.”
Miss Curdy was sitting against the mantelpiece, charming Strawberry Lips. Marvellous lips. Salmon-pink and planky. She had hoisted herself upon his knees, her arm around his thick neck.
Jake went over to the mantelpiece
