Through his daze, he now saw a big grinning negro sitting close to her. He choked with horrified astonishment. Signaling a colored waiter, he slipped him a dollar and asked,

“Who is that man with the white woman over there?”

“Why, boss,” said the waiter, “that’s Money Johnson. Dat boy got so much money he do’ know which end to start spendin’ it. All duh women jus’ crazy ’bout him like he was duh Prince o’ Wales.”

So the big colored brute was Money Johnson.

Baldwin stared impolitely at them for several moments.

Money Johnson was a huge, lordly lion with plenty of self-assurance. His sunny features and hot burning eyes held a magnetism that irresistibly drew the attention of women to him. His magnificent body, lynx-eyes, and pearly-white grin had brought the women of Harlem crawling to him, hungering for even an affectionate glance.

A couple of years ago, Johnson was a curbstone pimp sporting custom built suits and barber-pole shirts because infatuated Harlem girls hustled for him and handed over their earnings for the thrill of his arm about their waists. Shop girls and waitresses turned over their week’s pay to him, only too happy if he thought enough of them to accept it. With the cash they harvested for him, Johnson opened basement gin mills, took racing bets and banked a “policy” game.

He cornered the business of playing the numbers in Harlem. Cash poured on him in a steady green river until he was neck deep in it. To use his own expression, “He was lousy with the filthy stuff.” Wherever he was seen he was taking or passing greenbacks, so Harlem called him “Money” Johnson.

Johnson lived like an emperor in highbrow Strivers’ Row, Harlem’s Park Avenue, with two cars and a chauffeur at the disposal of his mistresses. He had the pick of the dusky Harlem girls but no longer found colored women attractive. He craved white women. He wanted the whitest and most beautiful, and so he fell for Babe Gordon.

Yes, Babe Gordon had a nigger lover. Why not? Other white women had them.

Baldwin continued to look at the dazzling woman sitting close to Money Johnson—a chain of diamonds about her throat, shimmering stones on her fingers and slender wrists. The arm of the colored Apollo was over the back of Babe’s chair and his large, bronze hand rested on her ermine shoulders, the finger-tips caressing her cream white throat. The saxophones crooned a low barbaric jungle moan. Baldwin looked on fascinated, unable to take his eyes off the monstrous sight that held him spellbound.

God Almighty!—he thought. Could that woman be so blasé and jaded that she had to visit this jungle for thrills? He loathed her, yet desired her.

In spite of this instinctive antagonism toward the negro who was intruding into the forbidden circle of white caste, Baldwin was forced to admit that he was a magnificent animal.