The next morning when Manda, my girl friend, pushed the door open and saw Michael on the couch she exclaimed: "Foh the land's sake! I wonder what will happen next!" That was the most excitable state I had ever seen her in since our friendship began. I told her Michael was a friend in trouble and I was helping him out for awhile. She accepted the explanation and was not curious to know what the trouble was about. Like most colored southerners, she was hostile to "poor white trash," and the situation must not have been to her liking, but she took it as she did me. There was always a certain strangeness between Manda and me. Perhaps that helped our getting along comfortably together.
Manda was a pleasant placid girl from the Virginia country. She also was the result of a strange meeting. One late evening, when I got off the train, I ran into two of the fellows (an elevator runner and a waiter) who had worked with me at the women's club. We decided to give an impromptu party. It was too late to get any nice girls. So we said, "Let's go down to Leroy's and pick up some." Leroy's was the famous cellar cabaret at the corner of One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, and Harlem called it "The Jungle." Leroy's was one of the cabarets where you could make friends. Fellows could flirt with girls and change tables to sit with them. In those days the more decorous cabarets would not allow visiting between tables.
We knew the kind of girls to approach. In the Harlem cabaret of that time (before Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven and prohibition made the colored intelligentsia cabaret-minded) there were generally three types of girls. There were the lady entertainers who flirted with the fellows impersonally to obtain nice tips and get them to buy extra drinks to promote the business of the house. Some of them were respectably married and had husbands who worked in the cabarets as waiters or musicians.
Another class of girls was more personally business-like in flirting. They didn't make the fellows spend too much in the cabaret, and had a preference for beer as a treat, for they expected them to spend on the outside. They were easily distinguishable by the confederate looks that passed between them and their protectors, who usually sat at separate tables.
And there were the lonely girls, the kitchen maids, laundresses and general day workers for New York's lower middle classes, who came for entertainment and hoping to make a friend from some casual acquaintance they might pick up.
Five of us went down to Leroy's. We noticed three girls of the last-mentioned type sitting together, chummy over large glasses of beer. We got their eyes. They were friendly, and we went over to their table. A waiter brought more chairs. We ordered a round of drinks, and, without palavering, we told the girls that we were seeking partners for a party. They were willing to join us. As we got up to go, we noticed at a neighboring table another girl all alone and smiling at us. She had heard our overtures. She was different from the girls who were going with us, not chic, brown with a plump figure, and there was a domestic something about her which created the impression of a good hen.
The elevator operator, who was a prankish fellow, challenged the girl's smile with a big grin and said: "Let's ask her too." The three girls giggled. The other girl was so odd—her clothes were dated and the colors didn't match. But she wanted to come, and that astonished them. We thought she was a West Indian, and were surprised to find out that she was from the South.
We all went to my room in One Hundred Thirty-first Street, where we had a breakdown. In the party Manda was as different as she looked. She lacked vivacity, and since the other fellows preferred the nimbler girls, I had to dance with her most of the time. As host, I did not want her to feel out of the fun. She made herself useful, though, washing the glasses when they got soiled and mixed up, and squeezing lemons for the gin.
By dawn we were tired and everybody was leaving. But Manda said she would stay awhile and clean up. She wasn't going to work that day and I wasn't either. From then on we became intimate friends. She was a real peasant type and worked as a laundress in a boarding house. She always came to look me up when I got in from a trip. She had a room in One Hundred Thirty-third Street near Fifth Avenue, but I went there only once. I didn't like its lacey and frilly baby-ribboned things and the pink counterpane on the bed.
We didn't have a lot to say to each other. When she tidied the room she was careful about the sheets of paper on which I was writing. And if she came when I was writing or reading she would leave me alone and go into the basement to cook. There is always an unfamiliar something between people of different countries and nationalities, however intimate they may become. And that something between me and Manda helped rather than hindered our relationship. It made her accept little eccentricities on my part—such as the friendship with Michael, for instance. And so we sailed smoothly along for a couple of years. Manda was a good balance to my nervous self.