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