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

playing before the curtain rose on vaudeville shows at the Lincoln on West 135th Street. The Tennessee-born Bessie Smith was wailing. Smith, who drove her very own customized car, recorded for the Columbia Record Company. “Up in Harlem ev’ry Saturday night / When the high brows git together it’s just too tight,” went one of her ditties. A stretch along West 133rd—just four blocks from the Sanchezes—became known as “Jungle Alley,” for its number of nightspots. One hot spot, known as the Clam House, featured a performer by the name of “Gladys Bentley.” A young Harlem artist, not yet famous—although fame would find Romare Bearden, as it would find so many others beginning to gather—would recall: “ ‘Gladys Bentley’ was a woman dressed as a man. You also had a male performer who called himself ‘Gloria Swanson.’ So Harlem was like Berlin, where they had such things going on in cabarets at the time.”
    It wasn’t long at all before whites began cruising into Harlem, especially after the downtown clubs closed for the night. In the deep nighttime, Harlem opened like a flower. You might, on any night of the week, catch a glimpse of Tallulah Bankhead or Joan Crawford or Hoagy Carmichael or Artie Shaw emerging from one of the hip nightspots.
    But the new arrivals—writers and poets and painters—seemed to be nonstop indeed. Langston Hughes showed up in 1921. W. E. B. Du Bois would publish Hughes’s soul-stirring poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” that very year. From then on, it seemed, the Negro in America had found a new muse. Hughes, caramel-colored and possessing an easy grin, took to hanging out at the Harlem Y with a parrot atop his shoulder.
    A young girl—a young Elvera Sanchez—waltzing along the streets of Harlem couldn’t help but become intoxicated by it all, the whiff of culture, thearoma of a certain kind of exalted nightlife. Eric Walrond, another young Negro writer new to the scene, thought of Harlem as “a sociological El Dorado.”
    If there was one individual who might have touched the consciousness of every young and excitable Negro girl in Harlem who dreamed of show business, it was surely Florence Mills. Mills had broken numerous racial barriers in New York theaters. She was the first to headline a show at the Palace Theatre downtown. Daughter of former slaves, she performed as a pickaninny with white vaudevillians as a child. She endured backbreaking working conditions, but seemed suffused with a pride to uplift Negroes through her entertaining. In 1921 she had her breakthrough in
Shuffle Along
, a black musical written by the team of Noble Sissle—who had been a sergeant in the 369th Regiment—and Eubie Blake. White audiences had never seen anything like
Shuffle Along
, melding, as it did, Negro music and dance in a sophisticated manner.
    But swoon as she might, Elvera was at war with her show-business dreams and her mother, Luisa, who felt smothered by Negro Harlem. Luisa Sanchez spent her time in the white world with Laurette Taylor. Luisa Sanchez traveled. She dined at the table with gifted thespians. These were not pastimes—travel and dining—she engaged in with Negroes. Negro New York with its theaters and salons might have spoken of culture indeed, but it was not Luisa’s culture. She felt her culture much closer to white America than Negro America. And yet, Elvera Sanchez saw and heard so much of this growing Negro Harlem. It intoxicated her: “Right around the corner where the Abyssinian Church is now was the Marcus Garvey Building. They had a low building. I could get into my kitchen window and look into 138th Street and I could see all the buildings,” she later said. She frequented the movie houses along Lenox Avenue with her girlfriends. “We’d go there on Saturday, and it was five cents. You could sit there all day long for five cents,” Sanchez recalled.
    A significant part of the Harlem scene was now a heady mingling of poets, dancers,