“Whar’s we gwine?” Jake asked.

They had walked down Madison Avenue, turned on 130th Street, passing the solid gray-grim mass of the whites’ Presbyterian church, and were under the timidly whispering trees of the decorously silent and distinguished Block Beautiful.⁠ ⁠… The whites had not evacuated that block yet. The black invasion was threatening it from 131st Street, from Fifth Avenue, even from behind in 129th Street. But desperate, frightened, blanch-faced, the ancient sepulchral Respectability held on. And giving them moral courage, the Presbyterian church frowned on the corner like a fortress against the invasion. The Block Beautiful was worth a struggle. With its charming green lawns and quaint white-fronted houses, it preserved the most Arcadian atmosphere in all New York. When there was a flat to let in that block, you would have to rubberneck terribly before you saw in the corner of a windowpane a neat little sign worded, Vacancy. But groups of loud-laughing-and-acting black swains and their sweethearts had started in using the block for their afternoon promenade. That was the limit: the desecrating of that atmosphere by black love in the very shadow of the gray, gaunt Protestant church! The Ancient Respectability was getting ready to flee.⁠ ⁠…

The beautiful block was fast asleep. Up in the branches the little elfin green things were barely whispering. The Protestant church was softened to a shadow. The atmosphere was perfect, the moment sweet for something sacred.

The burning little brown-skin cuddled up against Jake’s warm tall person: “Kiss me, daddy,” she said. He folded her closely to him and caressed her.⁠ ⁠…

“But whar was you all this tur’bly long time?” demanded Jake.

Light-heartedly, she frisky like a kitten, they sauntered along Seventh Avenue, far from the rough environment of Sheba Palace.

“Why, daddy, I waited foh you all that day after you went away and all that night! Oh, I had a heartbreak on foh you, I was so tur’bly disappointed. I nev’ been so crazy yet about no man. Why didn’t you come back, honey?”

Jake felt foolish, remembering why. He said that shortly after leaving her he had discovered the money and the note. He had met some of his buddies of his company who had plenty of money, and they all went celebrating until that night, and by then he had forgotten the street.

“Mah poor daddy!”

“Even you’ name, sweetness, I didn’t know. Ise Jake Brown⁠—Jake for ev’body. What is you’, sweetness?”

“They calls me Felice.”

“Felice.⁠ ⁠… But I didn’t fohget the cabaret nonatall. And I was back theah hunting foh you that very night and many moh after, but I nevah finds you. Where was you?”

“Why, honey, I don’t lives in cabarets all mah nights ’cause Ise got to work. Furthermore, I done went away that next week to Palm Beach⁠—”

“Palm Beach! What foh?”

“Work of course. What you think? You done brokes mah heart in one mahvelous night and neveh returns foh moh. And I was jest right down sick and tiahd of Harlem. So I went away to work. I always work.⁠ ⁠… I know what youse thinking, honey, but I ain’t in the reg’lar business. ’Cause Ise a funny gal. I kain’t go with a fellah ef I don’t like him some. And ef he kain make me like him enough I won’t take nothing off him and ef he kain make me fall the real way, I guess I’d work like a wop for him.”

“Youse the baby I been waiting foh all along,” said Jake. “I knowed you was the goods.”

“Where is we gwine, daddy?”

“Ise got a swell room, sweetness, up in ’Fortiet’ Street whar all them dickty shines live.”

“But kain you take me there?”

“Sure thing, baby. Ain’t no nigger renting a room in Harlem whar he kain’t have his li’l company.”

“Oh, goody, goody, honey-stick!”

Jake took Felice home to his room. She was delighted with it. It was neat and orderly.

“Your landlady must be one of them proper persons,” she remarked. “How did you find such a nice place way up here?”

“A chappie named Ray got it foh me when I was sick⁠—”

“O Lawdy! was it serious? Did they all take good care a you?”

“It wasn’t nothing much and the fellahs was all awful good spohts, especially Ray.”

“Who is this heah Ray?”

Jake told her. She smoothed out the counterpane on the bed, making a mental note that it was just right for two. She admired the geraniums in the window that looked on the large court.

“These heah new homes foh niggers am sure nice,” she commented.

She looked behind the curtain where his clothes were hanging and remarked his old English suit. Then she regarded archly his new nigger-brown rig-out.

“You was moh illegant in that other, but I likes you in this all the same.”

Jake laughed. “Everything’s gotta wear out some day.”

Felice hung round his neck, twiddling her pretty legs.

He held her as you might hold a child and she ruffled his thick mat of hair and buried her face in it. She wriggled down with a little scream:

“Oh, I gotta go get mah bag!”

“I’ll come along with you,” said Jake.

“No, lemme go alone. I kain manage better by mahself.”

“But suppose that nigger is waiting theah foh you? You better lemme come along.”

“No, honey, I done figure he’s waiting still in Sheba Palace, or boozing. Him and some friends was all drinking befoh and he was kinder fulL Ise sure he ain’t gone home. Anyway, I kain manage by mahself all right, but ef you comes along and we runs into him⁠—No, honey, you stays right here. I don’t want messing up in no blood-baff. Theah’s too much a that in Harlem.”

They compromised, Felice agreeing that Jake should accompany her to the corner of Seventh Avenue and 135th Street and wait for her there. She had not the faintest twinge of conscience herself. She had met the male that she preferred and gone with him, leaving the one that she was merely makeshifting with. It was a very simple and natural thing to her. There was nothing mean about it. She was too nice to be mean. However, she was aware that in her world women scratched and bit into each other’s flesh and men razored and gunned at each other over such things.⁠ ⁠…

Felice recalled one memorable afternoon when two West Indian women went for each other in the back yard of a house in 132nd Street. One was a laundress, a whopping brown woman who had come to New York from Colon, and the other was a country girl, a buxom Negress from Jamaica. They were quarreling over a vain black bantam, one of the breed that delight in women’s scratching over them. The laundress had sent for him to come over from the Canal Zone to New York. They had lived together there and she had kept him, making money in all the ways that a gay and easy woman can on the Canal Zone. But now the laundress bemoaned the fact that “sence mah man come to New Yawk, him jest gone back on me in the queerest way you can imagine.”

Her man, in turn, blamed the situation upon her, said she was too aggressive and mannish and had harried the energy out of him. But the other girl seemed to endow him again with virility.⁠ ⁠… After keeping him in Panama and bringing him to New York, the laundress hesitated about turning her male loose in Harlem, although he was apparently of no more value to her. But his rejuvenating experience with the younger girl had infuriated the laundress. A sister worker from Alabama, to whom she had confided her secret tragedy, had hinted: “Lawdy! sistah, that sure sounds phony-like. Mebbe you’ man is jest playing possum with you.” And the laundress was crazy with suspicion and jealousy and a feeling for revenge. She challenged her rival to fight the affair out. They were all living in the same house.⁠ ⁠…

Felice also lived in that house. And one afternoon she was startled by another girl from an adjoining room pounding on her door and shrieking: “Open foh the love of Jesus!⁠ ⁠… Theah’s sweet hell playing in the back yard.”

The girls rushed to the window and saw the two black women squaring off at each other down in the back yard. They were stark naked.

After the challenge, the women had decided to fight with their clothes off. An old custom, perhaps a survival of African tribalism, had been imported from some remote West Indian hillside into a New York back yard. Perhaps, the laundress had thought, that with her heavy and powerful limbs she could easily get her rival down and sit on her, mauling her properly. But the black girl was as nimble as a wild goat. She dodged away from the laundress who was trying to get ahold of her big bush of hair, and suddenly sailing fullfront into her, she seized the laundress, shoulder and neck, and butted her twice on the forehead as only a rough West Indian country girl can butt. The laundress staggered backward, groggy, into a bundle of old carpets. But she rallied and came back at the grinning Negress again. The laundress had never learned the brutal art of butting. The girl bounded up at her forehead with another well-aimed butt and sent her reeling flop on her back among the carpets. The girl planted her knees upon the laundress’s high chest and wrung her hair.

“You don’t know me, but I’ll make you remember me foreber. I’ll beat you’ mug ugly. There!” Bam! Bam! She slapped the laundress’s face.

“Git off mah stomach, nigger gal, and leave me in peace,” the laundress panted. The entire lodging-house was in a sweet fever over the event. Those lodgers whose windows gave on the street had crowded into their neighbors’ rear rooms and some had descended into the basement for a closeup view. Apprised of the naked exhibition, the landlord hurried in from the corner saloon and threatened the combatants with the police. But there was nothing to do. The affair was settled and the women had already put their shifts on.

The women lodgers cackled gayly over the novel staging of the fight.

“It sure is better to disrobe like that, befoh battling,” one declared. “It turn you’ hands and laigs loose for action.”

“And saves you’ clothes being ripped into ribbons,” said another.

A hen-fight was more fun than a cockfight, thought Felice, as she hastily threw her things into her bag. The hens pluck feathers, but they never wring necks like the cocks.

And Jake. Standing on the corner, he waited, restive, nervous. But, unlike Felice, his thought was not touched by the faintest fear of a blood battle. His mind was a circle containing the girl and himself only, making a thousand plans of the joys they would create together. She was a prize to hold. Had slipped through his fingers once, but he wasn’t ever going to lose her again. That little model of warm brown flesh. Each human body has its own peculiar rhythm, shallow or deep or profound. Transient rhythms that touch and pass you, unrememberable, and rhythms unforgetable. Imperial rhythms whose vivid splendor blinds your sight and destroys your taste for lesser ones.

Jake possessed a sure instinct for the right rhythm. He was connoisseur enough. But although he had tasted such a varied many, he was not raw animal enough to be undiscriminating, nor civilized enough to be cynical.⁠ ⁠…

Felice came hurrying as much as she could along 135th Street, bumping a cumbersome portmanteau on the pavement and holding up one unruly lemonbright silk stocking with her left hand. Jake took the bag from her. They went into a delicatessen store and bought a small cold chicken, ham, mustard, olives, and bread. They stopped in a sweet shop and bought a box of chocolate-and-vanilla ice-cream and cake. Felice also took a box of chocolate candy. Their last halt was at a United Cigar Store, where Jake stocked his pockets with a half a dozen packets of Camels.⁠ ⁠…

Felice had just slipped out of her charming strawberry frock when her hands flew down to her pretty brown leg, “O Gawd! I done fohget something!” she cried in a tone that intimated something very precious.

“What’s it then?” demanded Jake.

“It’s mah luck,” she said. “It’s the fierst thing that was gived to me when I was born. Mah gran’ma gived it and I wears it always foh good luck.”

This lucky charm was an old plaited necklace, leathery in appearance, with a large, antique blue bead attached to it, that Felice’s grandmother (who had superintended her coming into the world) had given to her immediately after that event. Her grandmother had dipped the necklace into the first water that Felice was washed in. Felice had religiously worn her charm around her neck all during her childhood. But since she was grown to ripe girlhood and low-cut frocks were the fashion and she loved them so much, she had transferred the unsightly necklace from her throat to her leg. But before going to the Sheba Palace she had unhooked the thing. And she had forgotten it there in the closet, hanging by a little nail against the washbowl.

“I gotta go get it,” she said.

“Aw no, you won’t bother,” drawled Jake. And he drew the little agitated brown body to him and quieted it. “It was good luck you fohget it, sweetness, for it made us find one another.”

“Something to that, daddy,” Felice said, and her mouth touched his mouth.

They wove an atmosphere of dreams around them and were lost in it for a week. Felice asked the landlady to let her use the kitchen to cook their meals at home. They loitered over the wide field and lay in the sweet grass of Van Cortlandt Park. They went to the Negro Picture Theater and held each other’s hand, gazing in raptures at the crude pictures. It was odd that all these cinematic pictures about the blacks were a broad burlesque of their home and love life. These colored screen actors were all dressed up in expensive evening clothes, with automobiles, and menials, to imitate white society people. They laughed at themselves in such roles and the laughter was good on the screen. They pranced and grinned like good-nigger servants, who know that “mas’r” and “missus,” intent on being amused, are watching their antics from an upper window. It was quite a little funny and the audience enjoyed it. Maybe that was the stuff the Black Belt wanted.