Dancing In The Dark

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I wish to acknowledge the help of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, which awarded me a Mel and Louis Tukman Fellowship. This enabled me to complete my research for this novel. I have also been dependent upon outstanding work by numerous scholars, in many fields, which has fed my imaginative reconstruction of both individuals and place. However, my biggest debt of gratitude is to Vanessa Garcia, whose helpful suggestions, and thorough research, I grew to value and depend upon.

If you walk down Seventh Avenue today he is a man who never existed. On this broad Harlem avenue a torn curtain might stir in response to the tug of a hand. Dark hand, now waving. If you walk down this broad Harlem avenue today it will soon become clear that old-fashioned dignity and civic pride have long fled the scene, and this would have broken his stout heart. Back then he dressed well, he walked tall, and the bright glare from his shoes could pick a man’s eyes clean out of his knobby head. Women watched him pass by, his hardback carriage upright, and they whispered half sentences about him from behind perfumed hand-kerchiefs that they held close to their full lips. But they never eye-balled him, for this was a man who lived way beyond their hips, and it didn’t make no sense to look too interested in such a man. Men watched him too, with their collars turned high, pulling on ash-heavy cigarettes, their broad feet helplessly anchored to the earth, but this was a man who looked neither left nor right as he strode through the streets.

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