World or Times , though, more than any other purveyor of the news, they bought issues of “the paper for people who think.” Sleek and well fed, powdered and rouged and lipsticked with expert hand, they were swallowed up by the yawning and insatiable pits and were whirled to downtown jobs by the rushing, roaring subways.
Later in the day swarms of children poured forth from the same apartments, in winter bound schoolward, in summer to the nearest park or the street, chaperoned by quarrelsome mothers or older sisters. Yet later came elaborately coiffured and gowned young women, invariably pretty, who toiled not nor spun. Evening came and the Gargantuan beehives reversed the process and swallowed again the hordes they had spewed forth in the morning hours. Phonographs blared raucously, voices were raised in babels of song or quarrelling or loud laughter. Midnight, and the din died down. Sleep, engulfing and obliterating as a candle-snuffer, brought peace, broken only when a late and noisy party was quieted momentarily by sleepy, irritated voices shouting: “Hey, cut out the noise down there!”
It was in one of these huge rabbit warrens that Mimi found shelter. The house she lived in looked down upon most of the others in the block—it boasted in the entrance hallway rows of dusty but imposing palms, set in tubs painted a bilious green, and between these tropic relics stood uncomfortable-looking chairs of imitation needlepoint. No one seemed aware of the purpose of these chairs, which always reminded Mimi of the photographs she had seen of the electric chair at Sing Sing, for not even the oldest inhabitant of the house, who had been living there now for a year and a half, had ever seen anyone sitting in them. But they added class, tone, éclat. And they likewise added a few dollars to the rent of each apartment in the house so adorned.
She had not wanted to leave Harlem. Mrs. Rogers had argued, pleaded, almost wept. At times Mimi had been on the point of