Drunk, probably. I bet he was drunk. Even with the Prohibition going on, I still see people wandering around the streets, not walking in a perfect line. That’s expected, along with the drunken street gangs fighting for their places to sell illegal liquor. But what I don’t expect, and what I don’t particularly want, is drunken audience members during my momma’s shows at the Cotton Club. If you’re two years behind the times, the Cotton Club is the old Club Deluxe.
As I was cleaning up the stage after Momma’s performance, a white man in the audience came up to me and asked, “Young lady, why’re you associating yourself with all these people here?” Excuse me, sir? You mean my mother and all her friends, her colleagues? The ones who are nice enough to give me sheet music and wax cylinders of their own music, free of charge? I guess he meant them because he continued. “Don’t you know that you can come off as white? You look like a mutt to me, you do, but that’s because I just saw your mother perform. But yer a whole lot whiter than her, and I suspect that you can get away with it.”
I ran off stage. I wasn’t about to holler at him; he’d throw a fit and tell people that they shouldn’t see my momma perform, that her daughter will ruin the whole experience for them. But I suspect that this man must have been from out of the state. Maryland, maybe. In all the history of New York state, never did they once pass a law against colored people and whites marrying. Maryland has those laws. They refuse to let the whites marry blacks and Filipinos down there.
It’s just like a book I read last year, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. He was biracial, too, and someone in the book kept trying to tell him that he should just give up being colored and act like a white man. He could pass, the person said. He could pass as white. But I’m not doing that. I refuse. That drunk man isn’t worth a second of my time.
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