Besides its spacious floor, ladies’ room, gentlemen’s room and coatroom, the new cabaret had a bar with stools, where men could get together away from their women for a quick drink and a little stag conversation. The bar was a paying innovation. The old-line cabarets were falling back before their formidable rival. …
The fashionable Belt was enjoying itself there on this night. The press, theatrical, and music world were represented. Madame Mulberry was there wearing peacock blue with patches of yellow. Madame Mulberry was a famous black beauty in the days when Fifty-third Street was the hub of fashionable Negro life. They called her then, Brown Glory. She was the wife of Dick Mulberry, a promoter of Negro shows. She had no talent for the stage herself, but she knew all the celebrated stage people of her race. She always gossiped reminiscently of Bert Williams, George Walker and Aida Overton Walker, Anita Patti Brown and Cole and Johnson.
With Madame Mulberry sat Maunie Whitewing with a dapper cocoa-brown youth by her side, who was very much pleased by his own person and the high circle to which it gained him admission. Maunie was married to a nationally-known Negro artist, who lived simply and quietly. But Maunie was notorious among the scandal sets of Brooklyn, New York, and Washington. She was always creating scandals wherever she went, gallivanting around with improper persons at improper places, such as this new cabaret. Maunie’s beauty was Egyptian in its exoticism and she dared to do things in the manner of ancient courtesans. Dignified colored matrons frowned upon her ways, but they had to invite her to their homes, nevertheless, when they asked her husband. But Maunie seldom went.
The sports editor of Colored Life was also there, with a prominent Negro pianist. It was rumored that Bert Williams might drop in after midnight. Madame Mulberry was certain he would.
James Reese Europe, the famous master of jazz, was among a group of white admirers. He had just returned from France, full of honors, with his celebrated band. New York had acclaimed him and America was ready to applaud. … That was his last appearance in a Harlem cabaret before his heart was shot out during a performance in Boston by a savage buck of his race. …
Prohibition was on the threshold of the country and drinking was becoming a luxury, but all the joy-pacers of the Belt who adore the novel and the fashionable and had a dollar to burn had come together in a body to fill the new cabaret.
The owner of the cabaret knew that Negro people, like his people, love the pageantry of life, the expensive, the fine, the striking, the showy, the trumpet, the blare—sumptuous settings and luxurious surroundings. And so he had assembled his guests under an enchanting-blue ceiling of brilliant chandeliers and a dome of artificial roses bowered among green leaves. Great mirrors reflected the variegated colors and poses. Shaded, multicolored sidelights glowed softly along the golden walls.
It was a scene of blazing color. Soft, barbaric, burning, savage, clashing, planless colors—all rioting together in wonderful harmony. There is no human sight so rich as an assembly of Negroes ranging from lacquer black through brown to cream, decked out in their ceremonial finery. Negroes are like trees. They wear all colors naturally. And Felice, rouged to a ravishing maroon, and wearing a close-fitting, chrome-orange frock and cork-brown slippers, just melted into the scene.
They were dancing as Felice entered and she led Jake right along into it:
“Tell me, pa-pa, Ise you’ ma-ma …”
Every cabaret and dancing-hall was playing it. It was the tune for the season. It had carried over from winter into spring and was still the favorite. Oh, ma-ma! Oh, pa-pa!
The dancing stopped. … A brief interval and a dwarfish, shiny black man wearing a red-brown suit, with kinks straightened and severely plastered down in the Afro-American manner, walked into the center of the floor and began singing. He had a massive mouth, which he opened wide, and a profoundly big and quite good voice came out of it.
“I’m so doggone fed up, I don’t know what to do.
Can’t find a pal that’s constant, can’t find a gal that’s true.
But I ain’t gwine to worry ’cause mah buddy was a ham;
Ain’t gwine to cut mah throat ’cause mah gal ain’t worf a damn.
Ise got the blues all ovah, the coal-black biting blues,
Like a prowling tom-cat that’s got the low-down mews.“I’m gwine to lay me in a good supply a gin,
Foh gunning is a crime, but drinking ain’t no sin.
I won’t do a crazy deed ’cause of a two-faced pal,
Ain’t gwineta break mah heart ovah a no-’count gal
Ise got the blues all ovah, the coal-black biting blues,
Like a prowling tom-cat that’s got the low-down mews.”
There was something of the melancholy charm of Tchaikovsky in the melody. The black singer made much of the triumphant note of strength that reigned over the sad motif. When he sang, “I ain’t gwine to cut mah throat,” “Ain’t gwine to break mah heart,” his face became grim and full of will as a bulldog’s.
He conquered his audience and at the finish he was greeted with warm applause and a shower of silver coins ringing on the tiled pavement. An enthusiastic white man waved a dollar note at the singer and, to show that Negroes could do just as good or better, Maunie Whitewing’s sleek escort imitated the gesture with a two-dollar note. That started off the singer again.
“Ain’t gwine to cut mah throat …
Ain’t gwine to break mah heart …”
“That zigaboo is a singing fool,” remarked Jake.
Billy Biasse entered resplendent in a new bottle-green suit, and joined Jake and Felice at
