Free In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior by Wil Haygood

have been more different. Elvera spoke her mind with an edge and in a rush of words. She cared not at all about consequences. In temperament, she was her mother. Elvera went to PS 89, and, from there, to a Catholic school. But school and teachers bored Elvera. She was impetuous, a free spirit. In the eighth grade, she grew increasingly restless. “I went to Catholic school and I was kind of bad and they put me out,” she would recall. Her sister, Julia, had a work permit. Elvera took the permit and forged her own name on it. With that, she began looking for work. She figured the theater—familiar territory to her because of her mother’s work—was as good a place as any to begin. Her hunch proved smart.
    Elvera got a job as an errand girl, working for a makeup artist out of the Astor Building, located on Broadway. She delivered packages around Manhattan. And as she ambled along the streets, she couldn’t help but notice the busy world spinning right before her eyes: big noisy streetcars rumbling by; the hustle-bustle of pedestrians, of businessmen and perfume-scented women. “One day I went all the way down to Fourteenth Street to deliver a package. On the way I stopped at the Automat and ate up all my lunch money because I knew I was going to get a tip from this lady on Fourteenth Street. Well, she fooled me! I walked from Fourteenth Street up to 137th Street! I didn’t know that I could have asked a cop for a nickel.” She’d sit alone in a dinette and order a slice of pie and gawk. She’d stroll the dark streets of Manhattan, a solo journeyer.
    The Sanchezes’ move to Harlem had come at a fortunate time. Shortly after their arrival—the community had recently gone from mostly Italian and Jewish to mostly Negro, in one of the more dazzling real estate upheavals in New York history—Harlem came alive with both Negro culture and pride. World War I unleashed some of that pride, as the young men of Harlem went off to Europe to fight. (At the war’s outset, actress Laurette Taylor and her personal maid and assistant, Luisa Sanchez, found themselves stranded in London because of the conflict. Eventually they sailed home.)
    America’s doughboys entered World War I with nary a moment to waste. Germany had nearly broken the back of France before it was pushed back by American and European forces. It was the war of General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, who had once chased the Apache through Arizona, and who had once led Negro soldiers in Cuba: “Black Jack” was meant as an epithet; he didn’t seem to mind. It was the war of young Ernest Hemingway, far from famous yet, who served with the Italian army and got hit by shrapnel: by war’s end, he’d have plenty of stories to put into the novels that would come. And it was the war of James Reese Europe, revered around Manhattan before the war as a society musician partial to wearing white suits and shoes to match. Europe signed up with the 369th Infantry Regiment from Harlem. (Among members of that outfit would be a vaudevillian by the name of Will Mastin, who was destined to discover Sammy Davis, Jr..)
    The Germans referred to Harlem’s soldiers as “bloodthirsty black men.” The French were more delicate: “hellfighters,” they called them. On February 17, 1919, the men, who had fought so gallantly—more than six consecutive months in the muddy trenches—staged a shoulder-to-shoulder march up Fifth Avenue into Harlem. They were thirteen hundred strong, and Lieutenant James Reese Europe—survivor of a German poison-gas attack in the war—was leading them. They came home having been awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French. They came home having led the Allied march through mud to the Rhine. And they came home highstepping down Fifth Avenue to a drum-rolland to women with tears in their eyes. Press baron William Randolph Hearst and a bevy of other dignitaries were among the onlookers.
    “The tide of khaki and black turned west on 110th Street to Lenox