The morning after I quit Roseland, I was down at the men's clothing store bright and early. The
salesman checked and found that I'd missed only one weekly payment: I had "A-1" credit. I told
him I'd just quit my job, but he said that didn't make any difference; I could miss paying them for a
couple of weeks if I had to; he knew I'd get straight.
This time, I studied carefully everything in my size on the racks. And finally I picked out my
second zoot. It was a sharkskin gray, with a big, long coat, and pants ballooning out at the knees
and then tapering down to cuffs so narrow that I had to take off my shoes to get them on and off.
With the salesman urging me on, I got another shirt, and a hat, and new shoes-the kind that were
justcoming into hipster style; dark orange colored, with paper-thin soles and knob style toes. It all
added up to seventy or eighty dollars.
It was such a red-letter day that I even went and got my first barbershop conk. This time it didn't
hurt so much, just as Shorty had predicted.
That night, I timed myself to hit Roseland as the thick of the crowd was coming in. In the
thronging lobby, I saw some of the real Roxbury hipsters eyeing my zoot, and some fine women
were giving me that look. I sauntered up to the men's room for a short drink from the pint in my
inside coat-pocket. My replacement was there-a scared, narrow-faced, hungry-looking little
brown-skinned fellow just in town from Kansas City. And when he recognized me, he couldn't
keep down his admiration and wonder. I told nun to "keep cool," that he'd soon catch on to the
happenings. Everything felt right when I went into the ballroom.
Hamp's band was working, and that big, waxed floor was packed with people lindy-hopping like
crazy. I grabbed some girl I'd never seen, and the next thing I knew we were out there Undying
away and grinning at each other. It couldn't have been finer.
I'd been Undying previously only in cramped little apartment living rooms, and now I had room to
maneuver. Once I really got myself warmed and loosened up, I was snatching partners from
among the hundreds of unattached, free-lancing girls along the sidelines-almost every one of
them could really dance-and I just about went wild! Hamp's band wailing. I was whirling girls so
fast their skirts were snapping. Black girls, brownskins, high yellows, even a couple of the white
girls there. Boosting them over my hips, my shoulders, into the air. Though I wasn't quite sixteen
then, I was tall and rawboned and looked like twenty-one; I was also pretty strong for my age.
Circling, tap-dancing, I was underneath them when they landed-doing the "flapping eagle," "the
kangaroo" and the "split."
After that, I never missed a Roseland lindy-hop as long as I stayed in Boston.
The greatest lindy-dancing partner I had, everything considered, was a girl named Laura. I met
her at my next job. When I quit shoeshining, Ella was so happy that she went around asking
about a job for me-one she would approve. Just two blocks from her house, the Townsend Drug
Store was about to replace its soda fountain clerk, a fellow who was leaving to go off to college.
When Ella told me, I didn't like it. She knew I couldn't stand those Hill characters. But speaking
my mind right then would have made Ella mad. I didn't want that to happen, so I put on the white
jacket and started serving up sodas, sundaes, splits, shakes and all the rest of that fountain stuff
to those fancy-acting Negroes.
Every evening when I got off at eight and came home, Ella would keep saying, "1 hope you'll
meet some of these nice young people your age here in Roxbury." But those penny-ante squares
who came in there putting on their millionaires' airs, the young ones and the old ones both, only