When I told Ella why I had quit, she laughed aloud: I told her I couldn't find time to shine shoes
and dance, too. She was glad, because she had never liked the idea of my working at that noprestige
job. When I told Shorty, he said he'd known I'd soon outgrow it anyway.
Shorty could dance all right himself but, for his own reasons, he never cared about going to the
big dances. He loved just the music-making end of it. He practiced his saxophone and listened to
records. It astonished me that Shorty didn't care to go and hear the big bands play. He had his
alto sax idol, Johnny Hodges, with Duke Ellington's band, but he said he thought too many young
musicians were only carbon-copying the big-band names on the same instrument. Anyway,
Shorty was really serious about nothing except his music, and about working for the day when he
could start his own little group to gig around Boston.
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