“De world all say she to marry de son ob ole Mamma Luna, dat keep de lil shop.”
“Suz! Wha’ nex’?” Mrs. Mouth returned, breaking off to focus Papy Paul, apparently, already, far from sober: “I hav’ saw God, an’ I hav’ spoke wid de President, too!” he was announcing impressively to Mamma Luna, a little old woman in whose veins ran the blood of many races.
“Dair’s no trute at all in dat report,” Mrs. Mouth quietly added, signalling directions to a sturdy, round-bottomed little lad, who had undertaken to fill the gap caused by Primrose and Phœbe.
Bearing a panier piled with fruit, he had not got far before the minstrels called forth several couples to their feet.
The latest jazz, bewildering, glittering, exuberant as the soil, a jazz, throbbing, pulsating, with a zim, zim, zim, a jazz all abandon and verve that had drifted over the glowing savannah and the waving cane-fields from Cuna-Cuna by the Violet Sea, invited, irresistibly, to motion every boy and girl.
“Prancing Nigger, hab a dance?” his wife, transported, shrilled: but Mr. Mouth was predicting a Banana slump to Mrs. Walker, the local midwife, and paid no heed.
Torso-to-torso, the youngsters twirled, while even a pair of majestic matrons, Mrs. Friendship and Mrs. Mother, went whirling away (together) into the brave summer dusk. Accepting the invitation of Bamboo, Miami rose, but before dancing long complained of the heat.
“Sh’o, it cooler in de Plantation,” he suggested, pointing along the road.
“Oh, I too much afraid!”
“What for you afraid?”