“I hit him three or four times and he only hit me once,” he boasted loudly.
“Go on, Mushmouth, that’s all David hit Goliath,” his tormentor cheerfully answered. A third man who had seen the fight completed the boastful one’s rout when he described pungently the expression on the face of the defeated one: “He made a face like a nigger tasting his first olive!” …
As Mimi sat in the roaring subway on her way home, she felt within her a renewing of her old eagerness towards life. Here was something real that the unknowing and unseeing had called “native humour” and “Negro comedy.” But, somewhat vaguely, she felt the thing went deeper than that. She speculated as to the lasting value of machines and all that they brought—whether a radio over which came “Yes, We Have No Bananas” added measurably to the sum total of happiness. She was wondering yet when sleep overcame her. …
In the days that followed there came to her out of the tangled maze of her thoughts a clearer conception of the causes underlying her discontent. She loved the comforts of her home, from the shiny brass knocker on the snowy white front door to the full-length mirrors in which she loved to gaze at her rounded form after her morning bath in the big blue-and-white porcelain tub. But she wondered if the sombre, cynical companions she met in her home and in other places were worth the price she was paying for these luxuries. People who were playing at enjoying life but whose unhappiness shone through all they did or said. She wondered. …
XXIV
Carnegie Hall was surrounded by streams of people, white and black, that were swallowed up in the vast building. Their car finally edged its way towards the curb close enough for them to alight. Inside, Mimi noted that every seat seemed to be taken as she followed Jimmie down the aisle in the wake of the grey-clad usher. The tiers of seats on the platform too were rapidly filling. The rumble of voices hushed. Out of a door on one side of the platform came a short dark figure followed by a taller one whose skin was brown. A salvo of applause welled up and swept over the bowing figure as he faced the shifting panorama of upturned faces.
Silence. The pianist leaned low over his instrument, and long brown fingers lightly touched ivory keys, prodding them gently in light, gentle touches. A chord. The immobile figure of the singer galvanized into tense attentiveness. Back went the head on which crisply curled hair hung close. Eyes shut, gleaming teeth were revealed as a thin pure note poured from parted lips. The harsh guttural tones of the German were transmuted into a finespun sound as pure and delicate as a silken thread. Out it poured.
If thou art near me, I will go with joy to death and rest;
Ah, how happy were my end, with the pressure of thy fair hands and the glance of thy true eyes.
Through songs by Bach and Schubert, by Brahms and Franck, by Quilter and Jensen, the singer made his way. And then he sang the songs of his own people. Not a sound disturbed the spell he had woven, the auditors dared hardly breathe. “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See,” he sang, a strange, wistful sadness pervading the music.
As from a fountain of bronze, tiny jets of gold and silver sound were flung in a pellucid stream high above the heads of the silent throng. It broke against the ceiling, the iridescent bubbles bursting in radiant glory, dissolving into myriad little drops of sound, each perfect and complete in itself. Down they were wafted in gentle benediction upon the heads of the listeners. Soothing, comforting, they brought peace and rest and happiness. Before them fled all worries, all cares, all lines of sex and class and race melting the heterogeneous throng into a perfect unity.
Upon Mimi the music served as magic metal keys which opened before her eyes mystic rooms, some of them long closed, some of them never opened for her before, all of them musty through long dark days and longer nights of disuse.
“Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Nobody knows but Jesus …”
Ghostly figures moved shadowily across the rooms—figures with eyes sad with the tragedies of a thousand years, eyes bright with the faith which is born of strength in trial. Figures which by some strange legerdemain began as she watched them to lose their unearthly diaphanousness and, like Galatea, to become flesh and blood. The transformation did not startle nor alarm her—instead, held fast in the spell woven by the black singer, the recreation of life in the figures before her seemed the most natural thing in the world.
A vast impenetrable tangle of huge trees appeared, their pithy bulk rising in ebon beauty to prodigious heights. As she gazed, half afraid of the wild stillness, the trees became less and less blackly solid, shading off into ever lighter greys. Then the trees were white, then there were none at all. In their stead an immense circular clearing in which moved at first slowly, then with increasing speed, a ring of graceful, rounded, lithe women and stalwart, magnificently muscled men, all with skins of midnight blackness. To music of barbaric sweetness and rhythm they danced with sinuous grace and abandon. Soft little gurgling cries punctuated the music, cries which came more sharply, like little darting arrows, as the ecstatic surrender of the figures to the dance increased.
A loud cry of alarm and of warning came from afar. The dance stopped,
