number or address to the white Johns whocame around the end of the dance looking for "black
chicks."
Most of Roseland's dances were for whites only, and they had white bands only. But the only
white band ever to play there at a Negro dance, to my recollection, was Charlie Barnet's. The fact
is that very few white bands could have satisfied the Negro dancers. But I know that Charlie
Barnet's "Cherokee" and his "Redskin Rhumba" drove those Negroes wild. They'd jam-pack that
ballroom, the black girls in way-out silk and satin dresses and shoes, their hair done in all kinds of
styles, the men sharp in their zoot suits and crazy conks, and everybody grinning and greased
and gassed.
Some of the bandsmen would come up to the men's room at about eight o'clock and get
shoeshines before they went to work. Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie
Williams, Jimmie Lunceford were just a few of those who sat in my chair. I would really make my
shine rag sound like someone had set off Chinese firecrackers. Duke's great alto saxman, Johnny
Hodges-he was Shorty's idol-still owes me for a shoe-shine I gave him. He was in the chair one
night, having a friendly argument with the drummer, Sonny Greer, who was standing there, when I
tapped the bottom of his shoes to signal that I was finished. Hodges stepped down, reaching his
hand in his pocket to pay me, but then snatched his hand out to gesture, and just forgot me, and
walked away. I wouldn't have dared to bother the man who could do what he did with "Daydream"
by asking him for fifteen cents.
I remember that I struck up a little shoeshine-stand conversation with Count Basie's great blues
singer, Jimmie Rushing. (He's the one famous for "Sent For You Yesterday, Here You Come
Today" and things like that.) Rushing's feet, I remember, were big and funny-shaped-not long like
most big feet, but they were round and roly-poly like Rushing. Anyhow, he even introduced me
tosome of the other Basie cats, like Lester Young, Harry Edison, Buddy Tate, Don Byas, Dickie
Wells, and Buck Clayton. They'd walk in the rest room later, by themselves. "Hi, Red." They'd be
up there in my chair, and my shine rag was popping to the beat of all of their records, spinning in
my head. Musicians never have had, anywhere, a greater shoeshine-boy fan than I was. I would
write to Wilfred and Hilda and Philbert and Reginald back in Lansing, trying to describe it.
I never got any decent tips until the middle of the Negro dances, which is when the dancers
started feeling good and getting generous. After the white dances, when I helped to clean out the
ballroom, we would throw out perhaps a dozen empty liquor bottles. But after the Negro dances,
we would have to throw out cartons full of empty fifth bottles-not rotgut, either, but die best
brands, and especially Scotch.
During lulls up there in the men's room, sometimes I'd get in five minutes of watching the dancing.
The white people danced as though somebody had trained them-left, one, two; right, three, four-
the same steps and patterns over and over, as though somebody had wound them up. But those
Negroes-nobody in the world could have choreographed the way they did whatever they felt-just
grabbing partners, even the white chicks who came to the Negro dances. And my black brethren
today may hate me for saying it, but a lot of black girls nearly got run over by some of those
Negro males scrambling to get at those white women; you would have thought God had lowered
some of his angels. Tunes have sure changed; if it happened today, those same black girls would
go after those Negro men-and the white women, too.
Anyway, some couples were so abandoned-flinging high and wide, improvising steps and
movements-that you couldn't believe it. I could feel the beat in my bones, even though I had
never danced.