Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our
midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in
the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person,
my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have
in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that
jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in
circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax
and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This
orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the
tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through
to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I
dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai
above my head, I hurl it true to the mark
yeeeeooww
! I am in the jungle and
living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body
is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to
slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But
the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their
fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last
tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking
calmly.
“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his
fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched
him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but
dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He
is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain
angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty
as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So
far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule
Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking
together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic
Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine
with its string of beads.
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored.
I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the
boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.
It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of
my company? It's beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a
wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow.
Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things
