*
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, fourthe
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.
"Showtime!" people would start hollering about the last hour of the dance. Then a couple of
dozen really wild couples would stay on the floor, the girls changing to low white sneakers. The
band now would really be blasting, and all the other dancers would form a clapping, shouting
circle to watch that wild competition as it began, covering only a quarter or so of the ballroom
floor. The band, the spectators and the dancers would be malting the Roseland Ballroom feel like
a big, rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning, pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the
couples lindy-hopping as if they had gone mad. "Wail, man, wail!" people would be shouting at
the band; and it would be wailing, until first one and then another couple just ran out of strength
and stumbled off toward the crowd, exhausted and soaked with sweat. Sometimes I would be
down mere standing inside the door jumping up and down in my gray jacket with the whiskbroom
in the pocket, and the manager would have to come and shout at me that I had customers
upstairs.
The first liquor I drank, my first cigarettes, even my first reefers, I can't specifically remember. But
I know they were all mixed together with my first shooting craps, playing cards, and betting my
dollar a day on the numbers, as I started hanging out at night with Shorty and his friends. Shorty's
jokes about how country I had been made us all laugh. I still was country, I know now, but it all felt
so great because I was accepted. All of us would be in somebody's place, usually one of the
girls', and we'd be turning on, the reefers making everybody's head light, or the whisky aglow in
our middles. Everybody understood that my head had to stay lanky awhile longer, to grow long
enough for Shorty to conk it for me. One of these nights, I remarked that I had saved about half
enough to get a zoot.
"Save?" Shorty couldn't believe it. "Homeboy, you never heard of credit?"He told me he'd call a
neighborhood clothing store the first thing in the morning, and that I should be there early.
A salesman, a young Jew, met me when I came in. "You're Shorty's friend?" I said I was; it
amazed me-all of Shorty's contacts. The salesman wrote my name on a form, and the Rose-land
as where I worked, and Ella's address as where I lived. Shorty's name was put down as
recommending me. The salesman said, "Shorty's one of our best customers."
I was measured, and the young salesman picked off a rack a zoot suit that was just wild: sky-blue
pants thirty inches in the knee and angle-narrowed down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a
long coat that pinched my waist and flared out below my knees.
As a gift, the salesman said, the store would give me a narrow leather belt with my initial "L" on it.
Then he said I ought to also buy a hat, and I did-blue, with a feather in the four-inch brim. Then
the store gave me another present: a long, thick-linked, gold-plated chain that swung down lower
than my coat hem. I was sold forever on credit.
When I modeled the zoot for Ella, she took a long look and said, "Well, I guess it had to happen."