“That sounds dangerously like opportunism—er—it might even be called deceit,” Mimi laughed.
“Yes, I suppose it can,” Mrs. Rogers frankly admitted. “But life’s like that—you can go tilting at windmills and getting knocked over for your pains or you can adapt yourself to the things you find around you. After all, the important thing is to work out for one’s own guidance the philosophy in keeping with one’s ideas and ideals and then extract from life all the happiness one can without destroying what’s more important than everything else—one’s inner self. When that’s gone, then you can have every material thing there is—and you’ll know misery such as even you have never experienced or ever will know. …”
The new life she was ushered into through Aunt Sophie seemed by comparison with her experiences since she left Atlanta almost idyllic to Mimi. Through her aunt’s influence, she secured work sewing, the only thing she could do by which she could earn money. But for this she had a certain gift. She loved the feel of silks and satins and chiffons; the finer the fabric, the more she liked to handle it and make it into alluring garments. All day she worked and in the evenings she either stayed at home and made dresses and other garments for herself to replace the worn things she had brought to New York, or with her aunt she walked through the streets of Harlem or rode on the bus down Fifth Avenue. Occasionally this schedule was varied by a visit to the theatre, which Mimi loved. A new world was opening to her and in it she found greater happiness than she had believed she would ever know again. These unfolded before her eyes a gloriously fascinating scene and she sometimes felt as though a giant scroll were being unwound for her own amusement and interest. This joy was added to by the modest yet steady progress she was making towards reclaiming Jean. Each week she added to the little sum in the bank. At times she seemed to be making tragically little headway, at times she was delighted at the speed with which the dollars accumulated.
Most interesting to her was the transition she saw going on around her in Harlem. Gradually yet surely there was being builded a Negro city here in northern Manhattan. For hours she would sit silent, listening with a strange eagerness to the stories her aunt told her of her own people in New York. She insisted that Mrs. Rogers take her to the sections where Negroes had lived in years past; they wandered through Broome and Spring Streets, where Negroes had lived before the Civil War, through Sullivan and Bleecker Streets and Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village, now settled thickly with Italians, among them little groups of coloured people who had never lived anywhere else.
But neither of these settlements nor the former habitats in the Twenties and Thirties interested her nearly so much as the section which Negroes had but lately quitted for Harlem. She made her aunt tell her of the Maceo and Marshall’s and other rendezvous of Negro and white musicians and writers and bohemians. She asked many questions about Williams and Walker, about Aida Overton, Jim Europe, Buddy Gilmore who served as model for trap drummers in all the orchestras, Ernest Hogan, Cole and Johnson, and many others of the stars of the stage. Mrs. Rogers had lived near the Marshall and had known everybody who was worth knowing. She told Mimi of the brilliant Sunday nights when they used to dine to the music of a Negro orchestra at Marshall’s, when one was always sure of finding interesting companions and acquaintances. She told of this orchestra, the members of which played and sang and danced and established the vogue out of which sprang the modern cabaret. Mimi wished fervidly she had been a part of this brilliant scene, might have known in the flesh these of whom she had heard so often even in New Orleans.
She was new enough to this growth to enable her to see how it formed itself and gradually spread over a greater territory. It seemed that every month saw the opening up to coloured tenants and buyers of new blocks. A group of white property-owners became alarmed and formed a holding company to buy all property occupied by Negro tenants and eject them. This step was promptly met by a countermove on the part of an intelligent coloured real-estate dealer who formed a Negro realty company to purchase for coloured tenants apartment houses of the best class. Then came panic among the whites, who deserted houses long before there was any invasion of their neighbourhoods by coloured tenants. Prices dropped and Negroes reaped the benefit by buying at these figures. The district spread with increasing rapidity and the new city was definitely in the making. …
Mimi kept track of these changes through the interesting circle of friends which frequented her Aunt Sophie’s house. There were types she had not known before—business men who had a broad vision of the city that was to be, men who were eager, of course, to make money but who made personal gain secondary to the deep love of race and pride in the advances of that race toward a more secure foothold than was theirs in most parts of the country. There were the wives of these men, some of them of small minds fixed on nothing but dress and gossip and petty, unimportant social affairs, but others of them intelligent and valuable aids to their husbands. Some of the women were in business for themselves like Mrs. Rogers and they were no less shrewd and farseeing than the men, in a number of cases more so. It was through these and their conversations, to which was added
