Right after that a young white gentleman he comes looking for me to take down my full entitlements and he says I will be honorably mentioned by name on the program of the picture which they now is making, when it's done. And Mr. Dallas he tells me I can take the rest of the day off for to celebrate having broke into the movies.
Chapter X
Black Belt
BUT I figures I has got something better to do than just to be gallivanting to and fro on a frolic. A notion has busted out insides of my brains. So right off I puts off across town for West One-Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street hoping for to find one U. S. G. Petty, Colored.
Some time back, as I remembers, I made brief mention about having affiliated myself into the Pastime Colored Pleasure and Recreation Club, Inc. Only, the last word—Inc.—is not usually spoke when you is naming the club, by reason of its sounding so much like a personal reflection upon the prevailing complexion of some of the members. Still, that is the way it is wrote out on the letter-heads and the initiation blanks.
I has belonged for going on more than a month now and I spends much of my spare time in the club-rooms. I feels more comfortable among my fellow-affiliators than I does any place else in this town. Looking back on it I'm convinced 'twas up there I first began to get shut of the grievous homestick pangs which afflicted me so sorefully following after our advent into these parts. Up to now I has not spoke of my being homesick because it seemed like to me the mainest job was to set down what come to pass without paying much heed to private sensations upon the part of the scribe thereof, but, if the truth must now be confessed, I oftentimes was mighty nigh completely overcome by my sufferings from the same during them opening weeks of the present sojourn.
At the beginning I used to get so tired, night-times, tramping about streets which was full of utter strangers and not never speaking a word to nobody nor seeing a friendly face, that I liked to died, dad-blame if I didn't! If I stood still they'd run right on over me and if I walked on I didn't have nowheres to go and I'd be so exhaustified from looking at sights all by myself that I'd get to wishing I'd never see another sight again as long as I lived, without I had somebody I knowed along with me to help me look at it. And then I'd come morosing on back to the apartment and probably Mr. Dallas he'd be out and nobody there but that there slick-headed Japanee boy. I tried sociable talk with him once or twice but you really don't derive no great amount of nourishment from talking with somebody which thinks language is sucking your breath in through your front teeth and once in awhile grinning like one of these here pumpkin Jack-mer-lanterns. So I soon learned the lesson of just letting him be.
I'd go on back to my room and take off my shoes for to ease my aching feet; but whilst taking off your shoes is good for your feet it don't help the ache in your soul none. I'd set at the window and look out on them millions and millions of lights, all winking and blinking at me like hostile bright eyes, and away down below me in the street I could hear old automobile horns blatting like lost ghosts, and every now and then there'd rise up to my ears a sort of a rumble and a roar, like as if New York City was having indigestion pains; and I'll say it positively was lonesome. I could shut my eyes and see my own home-town with the shade trees leaning down towards the sidewalks like they was interested in what went on underneath them, and I could hear the voices of the neighbors, both white and black, calling back and forth to one another and I could seem to smell frying cat-fish spitting in the skillet at old Uncle Isom Woolfolk's hot snack-stand down back of the Market House, and I also could smell that damp, soothing kind of a smell which it rolls in off the river on a warm night and then—oh, my Blessed Maker!—something would hurt me like having the misery in your side.
That's the way it was very frequent at the outsetting. But pretty soon I gets acquainted with a couple of colored boys which works in the apartment house next door to ours—not West Indians but regulation colored boys, one being from Macon, Georgia, and one from Memphis, Tennessee—and they takes to escorting me round with 'em at night, mainly in what the white folks calls the Harlem Black Belt. Fussing back and forth, thuslike, I makes yet more acquaintances and then—bam!—all at once there's a quick change in me and I ain't so choked up with lonesomeness like I was. All of a sudden my having lived heretofore always down in Kentucky has become to me just a kind of a far-off dream and it's almost like as if I had been a New York residenter for years past. 'Specially does I feel so when I goes up to the Pastime Club; which I joins it by invitation about a month ago and is now already being talked of for one of the honory offices at the next annual election which will come along in about five or six weeks from now.