Clowns! Jazzers! Band of dancers! . . . Harriett! Jimboy! Aunt Hager! . . . A band of dancers! . . . Sandy remembered his grandmother whirling around in front of the altar at revival meetings in the midst of the other sisters, her face shining with light, arms outstretched as though all the cares of the world had been cast away; Harriett in the back yard under the apple-tree, eagle-rocking in the summer evenings to the tunes of the guitar; Jimboy singing.... But was that why Negroes were poor, because they were dancers, jazzers, clowns? . . . The other way round would be better: dancers because of their poverty; singers because they suffered; laughing all the time because they must forget.... It’s more like that, thought Sandy.

A band of dancers.... Black dancers—captured in a white world.... Dancers of the spirit, too. Each black dreamer a captured dancer of the spirit.... Aunt Hager’s dreams for Sandy dancing far beyond the limitations of their poverty, of their humble station in life, of their dark skins.

“I wants you to be a great man, son,” she often told him, sitting on the porch in the darkness, singing, dreaming, calling up the deep past, creating dreams within the child. “I wants you to be a great man.”

“And I won’t disappoint you!” Sandy said that hot Chicago summer, just as though Hager were still there, planning for him. “I won’t disappoint you!” he said, standing straight in his sweltering red suit in the cage of the hotel elevator. “I won’t disappoint you, Aunt Hager,” dreaming at night in the stuffy little room in the great Black Belt of Chicago. “I won’t disappoint you now,” opening his eyes at dawn when Annjee shook him to get up and go to work again.

XXX. PRINCESS OF THE BLUES

One hot Monday in August Harrietta Williams, billed as “The Princess of the Blues,” opened at the Monogram Theatre on State Street. The screen had carried a slide of her act the week previous, so Sandy knew she would be there, and he and his mother were waiting anxiously for her appearance. They were unable to find out before the performance where she would be living, or if she had arrived in town, but early that Monday evening Sandy hurried home from work, and he and Annjee managed to get seats in the theatre, although it was soon crowded to capacity and people stood in the aisles.

It was a typical Black Belt audience, laughing uproariously, stamping its feet to the music, kidding the actors, and joining in the performance, too. Rows of shiny black faces, gay white teeth, bobbing heads. Everybody having a grand time with the vaudeville, swift and amusing. A young tap-dancer rhymed his feet across the stage, grinning from ear to ear, stepping to the tantalizing music, ending with a series of intricate and amazing contortions that brought down the house. Then a sister act came on, with a stock of sentimental ballads offered in a wholly jazzy manner. They sang even a very melancholy mammy song with their hips moving gaily at every beat.