VII

There is at least one occasion a year when Manhattan Casino requires no decorations, the occasion of the General Improvement Association’s Annual Costume Ball. The guests themselves are all the decoration that is necessary.

This is not only because many guests attend in costume, but also because, of all the crowds which Manhattan Casino holds during the year, none presents a greater inherent variety: There is variety of personal station that extends from the rattiest rat to the dicktiest dickty, for this is not an exclusive, invitational “function” but a widely advertised public affair; and it is supported by everybody, because the proceeds are to be given over to Negro advancement. There is variety of personal appearance that ranges from the dingiest dinge to the most delicate pink; variety of age, from little brown gnomes of nine or ten to Cleopatras of sixty; variety, finally, of occupation, related of course to variety of social standing. At the So-and-So’s Dance you would find chiefly doctors, lawyers, and undertakers; at the Speedway Club Dance, bootleggers, big-time gamblers, professional politicians; at the Barbers’ Ball, tonsorial artists, chauffeurs, and headwaiters. Anybody may achieve admittance to any one of these, but the crowd somehow remains in large measure distinct and characteristic. Not so with the G.I.A. Costume Ball. This is the one occasion in Harlem when everybody is present and nobody minds. The bootleggers raise no objection to their rivals, the doctors. The K.M.’s are seldom if ever seen to turn up their noses at the school teachers. Elevator boys and gamblers together discuss their ups and downs: and the richest real estate man in the colony greets his bootblack with a cordial smile. The bars are down. This is for the Race. One great common fellowship in one great common cause.

There was the great dance floor, large as a city block, with a fifteen-piece orchestra exhausting itself at the far end. On either side of this dance area, separated from it by railings and extending the length of the building between the dance floor and the lateral walls, a raised level or low terrace, occupied by a tangle of round-top tables and wire-legged chairs. Either terrace broken midway by a wide staircase, that turned at right angles and led up alongside the wall to the upper level, the level of the tier of boxes that encircled the hall and roofed in the two lateral terraces below.

Those who between dances repaired only so far as the terraces and sat at the round-top tables and drank Whistle, perhaps tinctured with corn, were either just ordinary respectable people or rats. But those who mounted the stairs and crowded into or about the boxes, who kept waiters busy bringing ginger ale, which they flavored from silver hip flasks⁠—those were dickties and fays.

Of the people downstairs, a few of the girls wore inexpensive costumes; others wore gaudy habiliments that were just as truly costumes but were probably not so intended. The men wore anything, from clothing so inconspicuous as to attract no attention to outfits positively stunning⁠—light gray suits, cerise crêpe ties and bright yellow, broad-toed oxfords.

Of the dickties, the women were all extravagantly dressed. Whether they wore costume or evening frock, it quite obviously had to outglitter everyone’s else. The men, however, uniformly clad in dinner-coats, performed well their sole esthetic function of background.

Of the usual sprinkling of fays, a few were the friends and guests of dickties; several were members of the Executive Board of the G.I.A., professional uplifters, determined to be broad-minded about this thing; and accompanying these two groups, a third consisting of newcomers to Harlem, all gasps, grunts, and ill-concealed squirms, or sighs and astonished smiles. The first group coming to enjoy not the Negroes but themselves, hence perfectly at ease; the second coming to raise up the darker brother, hence sweetly beaming and benevolent; the third coming to see the niggers, hence tortured with smothered comment and stifled expression. On the whole corresponding pretty well to their hosts, these visitors: usually dull and ordinary, occasionally bright and substantial, once in a blue moon brilliant or beautiful.

So swept the scene from black to white through all the shadows and shades. Ordinary Negroes and rats below, dickties and fays above, the floor beneath the feet of the one constituting the roof over the heads of the other. Somehow, undeniably, a predominance of darker skins below, and, just as undeniably, of fairer skins above. Between them, stairways to climb. One might have read in that distribution a complete philosophy of skin-color, and from it deduced the past, present, and future of this people.⁠ ⁠… Out on the dance floor, everyone, dickty and rat, rubbed joyous elbows, laughing, mingling, forgetting differences. But whenever the music stopped everyone immediately sought his own level.

One great common fellowship in one great common cause.