Free Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas by Maya Angelou Page B

up?”
    “No, thanks. I'll wait for a customer to buy me something.”
    I looked around the club. A few men had come in, but the other dancers had already fanned out to sit at their tables. There was a dense romance to the room I hadn't noticed before. The white faces hovered like dully lighted globes and the gloom was fired by glinting rhinestone jewelry.The musicians' stands glittered under red, orange and blue revolving spotlights.
    Eddie announced, “And now the Garden of Allah proudly presents Rusty dancing 'Salome and the Seven Veils.'”
    Rusty got up from her chair and shrugged off her filmy wrap. She draped it over the customer's lap and stepped up onstage. Her body angled stiffly across the floor in contradiction to the floating chiffon veils.
    I hadn't watched any of the women perform since that first day of audition, and so I sat fascinated with Rusty's conception of what was erotically exciting. She glided and stopped, glided and stopped, while her long, lethargic hands draped to the cups of her bra, promising to remove it, then a better idea motivated them to float away and descend to the chiffon at her crotch where they arrived with the same intent. Miraculously a veil would drift off her figure and slowly onto the floor. Rusty's face seemed divorced from the actions of her body. It wore the resignation of a tired traveler on a cross-country bus ride. I knew that that wasn't carnal, but when I turned to get confirmation from the customers, their eyes were focused on the indifferent dancer. They were using her feinting body to erase their present and catapult themselves into a fantasy where sex-starved women lay submissive and split open like red, ripe watermelons.
    If I was going to be a success, I had to elicit if not the quality then the same quantity of response.
    I had heard all my life that white males, from boyhood to senility, dreamed of slipping into the slave cabin of young “hot mommas” and “ripping off a piece of black tail.” My arrogance and my hatred of slavery would not allowme to consciously batten on that image. I decided during Rusty's dance that I would interest the customers in my movements and hold them in the present, even as a tightrope walker hypnotizes an audience.
    Eddie announced, “Rita dancing Scheherazade.” I stepped upon the stage and into a thousand and one nights. The musicians were forgotten behind me as I moved to the edge of the stage. And the furtive men with their lonely longings became the sultans whom I had to entertain. I watched their faces come alive to me as I pointed and gyrated and swept my arms over my head and out and down to my sides as if I might fly offstage straight to a camel caravan waiting. I convinced myself that I was dancing to save my life, and without knowing why, the audience responded to my predicament. The amount of applause startled me, and even Eddie pursed his lips and nodded as I walked by the bar, headed for the stairs.
    The dressing room was empty. I stood amid the costumes and wigs and hair rats considering my success and the next move. There was no time to waste. The men had liked my dance and surely one would buy me a drink. While I toweled my body I planned my strategy. Unlike the other dancers, I would not sit around the bar with kimono or peignoir thrown over my costume. I put on street clothes and went up to the bar.
    Eddie showed his pleasure at seeing me by introducing a customer. “Rita, here is Tom. He wants to buy you a drink.”
    The first conversation was repeated so often, all customers might have been handed questions on slips of paper at the door and been forced to memorize the questions.
    “Where'd you learn to dance like that?”
    “In school.”
    “Did you ever make love to a white man?”
    “No.”
    “Would you like to?”
    “No. No, I don't think so.” Leave room for them to hope. Leave space for me to ask for another drink. “May I have another drink?”
    “Sure. Where're you from?”
    “NY.”