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.