“I guess youse right, sweetness. Come on, le’s get our stuff together.”
The two leather cases were set together against the wall. Felice sat upon the bed dangling her feet and humming “Tell me, pa-pa, Ise you’ ma-ma.” Jake, in white shirtsleeves, was arranging in the mirror a pink-yellow-and-blue necktie.
“All set! What you say, sweetness?”
“I say, honey, le’s go to the Baltimore and finish the night and ketch the first train in the morning.”
“Why, the Baltimore is padlocked!” said Jake.
“It was, daddy, but it’s open again and going strong. White folks can’t padlock niggers outa joy forever. Let’s go, daddy.”
She jumped down from the bed and jazzed around.
“Oh, I nearly made a present of these heah things to the landlady!” She swept from the bed a pink coverlet edged with lace, and pillow-slips of the same fantasy (they were her own make), with which she had replaced the flat, rooming-house-white ones, and carefully folded them to fit in the bag that Jake had ready open for her. He slid into his coat, made certain of his pocketbook, and picked up the two bags.
The Baltimore was packed with happy, grinning wrigglers. Many pleasure-seekers who had left the new cabaret, on account of the Jake-Zeddy incident, had gone there. It was brighter than before the raid. The ceiling and walls were kalsomined in white and lilac and the lights glared stronger from new chandeliers.
The same jolly, compact manager was there, grinning a welcome to strange white visitors, who were pleased and never guessed what cautious reserve lurked under that grin.
Tell me, pa-pa, Ise you’ ma-ma. …
Jake and Felice squeezed a way in among the jazzers. They were all drawn together in one united mass, wriggling around to the same primitive, voluptuous rhythm.
Tell me, pa-pa, Ise you’ ma-ma. …
Haunting rhythm, mingling of naive wistfulness and charming gayety, now sheering over into mad riotous joy, now, like a jungle mask, strange, unfamiliar, disturbing, now plunging headlong into the far, dim depths of profundity and rising out as suddenly with a simple, childish grin. And the white visitors laugh. They see the grin only. Here are none of the well-patterned, well-made emotions of the respectable world. A laugh might finish in a sob. A moan end in hilarity. That gorilla type wriggling there with his hands so strangely hugging his mate, may strangle her tonight. But he has no thought of that now. He loves the warm wriggle and is lost in it. Simple, raw emotions and real. They may frighten and repel refined souls, because they are too intensely real, just as a simple savage stands dismayed before nice emotions that he instantly perceives are false.
Tell me, pa-pa, Ise you’ ma-ma. …
Jake was the only guest left in the Baltimore. The last wriggle was played. The waiters were picking up things and settling accounts.
“Whar’s the little hussy?” irritated and perplexed, Jake wondered.
Felice was not in the cabaret nor outside on the pavement. Jake could not understand how she had vanished from his side.
“Maybe she was making a high sign when you was asleep,” a waiter laughed.
“Sleep hell!” retorted Jake. He was in no joking mood.
“We gwineta lock up now, big boy,” the manager said.
Jake picked up the bags and went out on the sidewalk again. “I kain’t believe she’d ditch me like that at the last moment,” he said aloud. “Anyhow, I’m bound foh Chicago. I done made up mah mind to go all becausing a her, and I ain’ta gwineta change it whether she throws me down or not. But sure she kain’ta run off and leaves her suitcase. What the hell is I gwine do with it?”
Felice came running up to him, panting, from Lenox Avenue.
“Where in hell you been all this while?” he growled.
“Oh, daddy, don’t get mad!”
“Whar you been I say?”
“I done been to look for mah good-luck necklace. I couldn’t go to Chicago without it.”
Jake grinned. “Whyn’t you tell me you was gwine? Weren’t you scared a Zeddy?”
“I was and I wasn’t. Ef I’d a told you, you woulda said it wasn’t worth troubling about. So I jest made up mah mind to slip off and git it. The door wasn’t locked and Zeddy wasn’t home. It was hanging same place where I left it and I slipped it on mah leg and left the keys on the table. You know I had the keys. Ah, daddy, ef I’d a had mah luck with me, we nevah woulda gotten into a fight at that cabaret.”
“You really think so, sweetness?”
They were walking to the subway station along Lenox Avenue.
“I ain’t thinking, honey. I knows it. I’ll nevah fohgit it again and it’ll always give us good luck.”
Endnotes
-
The fourth waiter on the railroad is nicknamed “mule” because he works under the orders of the pantryman. ↩
Colophon
Home to Harlem
was published in by
Claude McKay.
This ebook was produced for
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African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology
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Home to Harlem,
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