It came to her suddenly why the impulse to go to Harlem had sprung to her mind. It was the statement Wu Hseh-Chuan had made—“… only your Negroes have successfully resisted mechanization …” was the way he put it. Now that she was once again headed towards Harlem, she felt the old attraction which had come over her that first night in New York when her Aunt Sophie and she had come up in the subway and debarked at Lenox Avenue and 135th Street. Bert Bellamy was singing the latest “Mammy” song in what he fondly imagined to be Negro dialect but Mimi paid no attention to him—she felt an eager interest that contrasted vigorously with her gloom of the morning. …
Bert was apparently no stranger when they turned from Seventh Avenue into a side street and alighted before a door guarded by a huge uniformed Negro. Down a narrow stair they went to a barred door which opened when the doorkeeper above pressed a buzzer. Mimi was startled when a roar of sound plunged from the opened door, sound which had been wholly inaudible when the door was shut. Inside, bright lights shone on the rectangle of dance floor but left the tables along the sides in soft shadow. Crowded high upon a narrow platform sat the orchestra, clad in dinner jackets and playing as though they were paying for the privilege of playing. Scurrying waiters hurried and slid and expertly wove their way in and out of the crowd of dancers and diners. A dinner jacketed, sleek-haired head waiter guided Mimi and Bert to a table where they sat watching the dancers. Mimi eagerly took it all in. She noticed that at the tables the parties were either all white or all Negro, there being seldom any mixing of the two groups.
At the table next to theirs sat a noisy group of younger people. With frequent regularity there appeared from underneath the table a large bottle from which glasses were surreptitiously filled. As the evening wore on, the boisterousness of the party increased. Suddenly one of the girls, pretty in a rather coarse way, slumped forward on the table. Two of the men hurriedly carried her out.
“She’s checked out,” Bert coolly commented. “Too much bad liquor.” The orchestra played on. “Funny about these coons,” Bert went on. “They don’t ever seem to pass out like white folks.”
Mimi flushed at the word but Bert was watching the dancers and did not see it. Mimi suddenly hated him for using the detested word. She checked the remark which sprang to her lips—that the swinish guzzling was being done only at the tables at which white people sat. She was amazed at the sudden rekindling of the race-consciousness which had lain dormant for nearly ten years. I’m silly, she chided herself, for after all what difference does it make what a man is called? But immediately there came the answer that it apparently made a great deal of difference, whether one wanted it to or not. She watched the dancers. The floor was crowded mostly with white couples executing all sorts of fancy steps, swaying and bumping the others in their gyrations. Here and there a coloured couple moved with unconscious grace, a rhythmic sweep to their bodies that made the others seem awkward and graceless. She commented on the fact to Bert, whose answer was: “Yeah, all the showgirls down town come up here and get stuff for Broadway.” And as she watched them Mimi began to see for the first time what Wu Hseh-Chuan had meant—it had taken an Oriental from halfway around the world to make her see things she had seen all her life and yet had never seen.
The floor was too crowded. Bert wanted her to dance but one attempt made her content to sit and watch. The music had a strange effect upon her. Analysed, it was all wrong when judged by conventional musical standards. Taken as a whole, it formed a weird and oddly exciting cacophony of chords and exotic rhythms. A muted cornet sent forth hair disturbing peals like an eerie sound heard in a graveyard after midnight. The saxophone grunted and slid up and down a facile scale of gurgling harmonies. Drums and the piano pounded a steady beat that had in them all the power and mystery and inflaming beauty of the tomtom. Suddenly it became clear. Mimi knew that for her this wild music held its greatest charm in its freedom from rules, its complete disregard of set forms. It refused to be tied down, its creators wove harmonies out of thin air and transferred to their notes the ecstasy of a wild, unharnessed, free thing. She thought of nymphs gambolling in a virgin forest, on ground unsoiled by human foot. Dryads and hamadryads, wood and water nymphs every conceived creature of freedom came to her mind as she sat and listened and felt the ecstasy the music made her feel. …
The next night she slipped from the house after an early dinner and with the spirit of high adventure hurried through the melting snow towards the West Side subway station. She came to the surface again in Harlem and there she wandered through the streets. She wondered why in the days when restlessness had gripped her after a hard day at Francine’s she had never come to Harlem as she had walked through the streets where French and Italian and Gipsy and Jewish people lived—wondered even as she knew why she had not come to Negro Harlem.
It was a new Harlem she now saw, or rather, though she did not realize it, it was a new Mimi through whose eyes she saw it. Gone were the morose, the worried, the unhappy, the untranquil faces she had been seeing down town for years. Here there was light and spontaneous laughter,
