Bert hailed a taxi and they were on their way. Mimi wondered just why she had suggested Harlem. It had been nearly ten years since she had been north of 125th Street—she wondered if she would meet any of the people she had known there years before. The vogue of Negro shows on Broadway, Shuffle Along , Runnin’ Wild and others, the popularity of Miller and Lyles and of Florence Mills, had not touched her directly. She suddenly realized that she had stayed away from them for fear she would meet some of her former friends or acquaintances and thereby suffer possibly embarrassing situations in explaining to Jimmie why she knew these people. She laughed at herself for a silly little goose as she leaned comfortably back in the warm cab—she had long since been forgotten in the ever-changing life of Harlem. She herself didn’t even know who had taken over her Aunt Sophie’s business when Mrs. Rogers had gone back to New Orleans to live.
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