Liberator friends introduced me to a few of those Greenwich Village tearooms and gin mills which were not crazy with colorphobia. And I reciprocated by inviting some of them up to the cabarets and cozy flats of Harlem. I did not invite my friends to the nice homes of the Negro élite, simply because I did not have an entrée.
Once Sanina condescended to entertain I think four friends—all men. When we arrived we found Sanina set in a circle of dark-brown girls, all cunningly arranged to heighten her quadroon queenliness. It was an exciting tableau, with a couple of sweetmen decorating the background.
But Sanina knew that I held a genteel position, sitting in an editor's chair among the whites downtown. (She was a faithful reader of True Stories.) So more than ever that night Sanina invested her unique position in Harlem with majesty. She was the antithesis of the Little Brown Jug of Charlie Chaplin's party. She brought out a bottle of rum for the glory of Jamaica, and holding it like a scepter, she poured royally. I believe my friends were thinking that they also would have to pay royally. But the evening was Sanina's affair. She provided everything free and formally and with the air of a colored queen of respectability and virtue. Meanwhile her shrewd brown eyes seemed to be saying: "I'll show you white folks!" She was a different Sanina to me. Indeed, she was a creature of two races that night, with the blood of both warring in her veins.
Our editor-in-chief possessed none of the vulgar taste for cellar cabarets. Yet one evening Max Eastman said he would like to go on a cabaret party to Harlem. He was accompanied by another friend. We were welcomed at Barron's, where white people were always welcome and profitable business. Barron was a big man in Tammany politics. But I wanted particularly to go with my white friends to Ned's Place on Fifth Avenue. Ned and I had been friends when I had run a restaurant in Brooklyn some years previously. He was living in Brooklyn and often dropped in at my place to eat. Then my business went bankrupt and we lost sight of each other. A few years later, when I was waitering on the railroad, I discovered Ned operating a cabaret on Fifth Avenue in Harlem. I introduced all of my railroad friends to the place. Our crew used to rendezvous there and unload ourselves of our tips.
Ned's Place was a precious beehive of rare native talent and customers. A big black girl from Brooklyn with a mellow flutelike voice was the high feature. And there was an equivocal tantalizing boy-and-girl dancing team that I celebrated in Home to Harlem. When that boy and girl started to shake together they gave everybody the sweet shivers. The place was small and Ned was his own master of ceremonies. With a few snappy flashes he could start everybody swaying together in a merry mood, like a revival leader warming up his crowd.
Ned's was one place of amusement in Harlem in which white people were not allowed. It was a fixed rule with him, and often he turned away white slummers. This wasn't entirely from pride-of-race feeling, but because of the white unwritten law which prohibits free social intercourse between colored and white. The big shots of the amusement business in Harlem, such as Barron, got by the law, for they were Tammany men. But even they were surprised and messed up sometimes by the vice squads. Ned said he preferred to run a "small and clean business" rather than to start treading in the quicksands of bribes.
However, I had become so familiar with Max Eastman, and his ideas and ways were so radically opposed to the general social set-up of white-without-black, that it was impossible to feel about him as a black does about a white alien. And I was such a good and regular customer of Ned's that I thought he would waive his rule for me. But I thought wrong that time.
We arrived at the door of the cabaret, from where Max Eastman could get a glimpse inside. He was highly excited by the scene, and eager to enter. But the doorman blocked the way. I beckoned to Ned, but his jovial black face turned ugly as an aard-vark's and he acted as if I was his worst enemy. He waved his fist in my face and roared: "Ride back! Ride back, or I'll sick mah bouncers on you-all!"
Max Eastman and his friend and I made a quick retreat. Eastman didn't mind. He said he was happy that there was one place in Harlem that had the guts to keep white people out. There are no such places left today. Harlem is an all-white picnic ground and with no apparent gain to the blacks. The competition of white-owned cabarets has driven the colored out of business, and blacks are barred from the best of them in Harlem now.