The boy ran gimpy, one leg cocked out straight. She watched him disappear up the street, a strange, scuttling figure.

An electric streetcar passed her, and she almost hailed it, to get a break from the muggy heat. It stopped at the corner, and the motorman stepped down to help two young white ladies aboard. When the black woman in line behind them boarded, the motorman stood aside, offering her no assistance. Gray Ellen decided to keep walking.

The lime dust from the oyster-shell paving parched her mouth and stung her eyes. Oyster-shell pavement—who’d ever heard of such a thing? Half the storefronts in town were dusted with it, their paint corroded by the lime, and the public parks were full of hacking children. The whiteness was blinding.

In the black neighborhood she had just come from, the streets were paved—those that were paved at all—with sawdust from the ice ships, spread to keep down the odor of fresh manure. But in neighborhoods like that, the manure didn’t lie in the streets long enough to stop steaming: people rushed out to collect it for their rose gardens, their vegetable plots.

A sudden emptiness overcame her, a hollowness of the spirit: what was she doing here? All she wanted was a baby and a home, and a husband sober enough to give her both. And to work quietly at her profession. Was that so much for a woman to want?

A Negro man and his wife passed her, arm in arm, nodding good day. A black man and a white man strode by her going the other way, too engrossed in their conversation to notice her.

The sidewalks were jammed with well-dressed blacks—lawyers and commercial men. She’d never seen so many Negro professionals mingling with whites in Chicago or Philadelphia. No one here seemed to find it remarkable.

A black policeman on the opposite corner smiled and nodded. She felt ogled, felt the burn of a blush—silly, but she couldn’t help it. She moved quickly up the street, not paying attention to where she was walking. Two white boys whipped past her chasing a colored boy. Black workmen and delivery boys crowded the alleys.

She smelled the river, the fish market, the sharp odor of the guano factory. Two mule-drawn freight wagons rumbled by, the hostlers whistling at her. She turned to see if they were white or Negro, then realized, all at once, that for the first time in her life, she was seeing the world in black and white.

She found herself back at Market Street. Up the block, across from the Messenger offices where Sam worked, there was a commotion in the street. She had no other pressing business, so she walked that way. A crowd of white men was gathered around the entrance to a saloon. Then she saw that the focus of attention wasn’t the saloon but the rooms above it. Two black men were leaning out of the open windows on the second story dismantling a large, artfully lettered sign: The Record Publishing Company.