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the fetid swimming pool heavy with chlorine, the screaming roller coaster, the old rain-splintered picnic tables, the broken iron swings. And the bands were also part of Southern drunkenness, couples drinking Coke and whiskey, vomiting, being unfaithful, lovelorn, frantic. The black musicians, with their cumbersome instruments, their tuxedos, were simply there to beat out time for the stumbling, cuddling fox-trotting of the period.
    The band buses, parked in the field, the caravans in which they suffered the litter of cigarettes and bottles, the hot, streaking highways, all night, or resting for a few hours in the black quarters: the via dolorosa of show business. They arrived at last, nowhere, to audiences large and small, often, with us, depending not upon the musicians but upon the calendar of the park, the other occasions from which the crowd would spill over into the dance hall. Jimmie Lunceford’s band? Don’t they ever do a slow number?
    At our high-school dances in the winter, small, cheap local events. We had our curls, red taffeta dresses, satin shoes with their new dye fading in the rain puddles; and most of all we were dressed in our ferocious hope for popularity. This was a hot blanket, an airless tent; gasping, grinning, we stood anxious-eyed, next to the piano, hovering about Fats Waller, who had come from Cincinnati for the occasion. Requests, insolent glances, drunken teen-agers, nodding teacher-chaperones: these we offered to the music, looking upon it, I suppose, as something inevitable, effortlessly pushing up from the common soil.
    On 52nd Street: Yeah, I remember your town, she said, without inflection.
    And I remember her dog, Mister. She was one of those women who admired large, overwhelming, impressive dogs and who gave to them a care and courteous punctuality denied everything else. Several times we waited in panic for her in the bar of the Hotel Braddock in Harlem. At the Braddock, the porters took plates of meat for the dog to her room. Soon, one of her friends, appearing almost like a child, so easily broken were others by the powerful, energetic horrors of her life, one of those young people would take the great dog to the street. These animals, asleep in her dressing rooms, were like sculptured treasures, fit for the tomb of a queen.
    The sheer enormity of her vices. The outrageousness of them. For the grand destruction one must be worthy. Her ruthless talent and the opulent devastation. Onto the heaviest addiction to heroin, she piled up the rocks of her tomb with a prodigiousness of Scotch and brandy. She was never at any hour of the day or night free of these consumptions, never except when she was asleep. And there did not seem to be any pleading need to quit, to modify. With cold anger she spoke of various cures that had been forced upon her and she would say, bearing down heavily, as sure of her rights as if she had been robbed: And I paid for it myself. Out of a term at the Federal Women’s Prison in West Virginia she stepped, puffy from a diet of potatoes, onto the stage of Town Hall to pick up some money and start up again the very day of release.
    Still, even in her case, authenticity was sometimes pushed aside. A vague stirring in her mind and for just a moment a stereotype burst through and hung there like a balloon over the head of the heroine in a cartoon. The little girl with her mop, clothes on the line, the wife at the stove, a plate or two, candles. An invitation for chili: my turn .
    J. and I went up to a street in Harlem just as the winter sky was turning black. Darkened windows with thin bands of watchful light above the sills. Inside, the halls were dark and empty, filled only with the scent of dust. We, our faces bleached from the cold, in our thin coats, black gloves, had clinging to us the evangelical diffidence of bell-ringing members of a religious sect. Determination glacial, timid, and yet pedantic. Our frozen alarm and fascination carried us into the void of the