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OCEOLA Jones, pianist, studied under Philippe in Paris. Mrs. Dora Ellsworth paid her bills. The bills included a little apartment on the Left Bank and a grand piano. Twice a year Mrs. Ellsworth came over from New York and spent part of her time with Oceola in the little apartment. The rest of her time abroad she usually spent at Biarritz or Juan-les-Pins, where she would see the new canvases of Antonio Bas, a young Spanish painter who also enjoyed the patronage of Mrs. Ellsworth. Bas and Oceola, the woman thought, both had genius. And whether they had genius or not, she loved them, and took good care of them.

Poor dear lady, she had no children of her own. Her husband was dead. And she had no interest in life now save art, and the young people who created art. She was very rich, and it gave her pleasure to share her richness with beauty. Except that she was sometimes confused as to where beauty lay—in the youngsters or in what they made, in the creators or the creation. Mrs. Ellsworth had been known to help charming young people who wrote terrible poems, blue-eyed young men who painted awful pictures. And she once turned down a garlic-smelling soprano-singing girl who, a few years later, had all the critics in New York at her feet. The girl was so sallow. And she really needed a bath, or at least a mouth wash, on the day when Mrs. Ellsworth went to hear her sing at an East Side settlement house. Mrs. Ellsworth had sent a small check and let it go at that—since, however, living to regret bitterly her lack of musical acumen in the face of garlic.

About Oceola, though, there had been no doubt. The Negro girl had been highly recommended to her by Ormond Hunter, the music critic, who often went to Harlem to hear the church concerts there, and had thus listened twice to Oceola’s playing.

“A most amazing tone,” he had told Mrs. Ellsworth, knowing her interest in the young and unusual. “A flair for the piano such as I have seldom encountered. All she needs is training—finish, polish, a repertoire.”

“Where is she?” asked Mrs. Ellsworth at once. “I will hear her play.”

By the hardest, Oceola was found. By the hardest, an appointment was made for her to come to East 63rd Street and play for Mrs. Ellsworth. Oceola had said she was busy every day. It seemed that she had pupils, rehearsed a church choir, and played almost nightly for colored house parties or dances. She made quite a good deal of money. She wasn’t tremendously interested, it seemed, in going way downtown to play for some elderly lady she had never heard of, even if the request did come from the white critic Ormond Hunter, via the pastor of the church whose choir she rehearsed, and to which Mr. Hunter’s maid belonged.

It was finally arranged, however. And one afternoon, promptly on time, black Miss Oceola Jones rang the doorbell of white Mrs. Dora Ellsworth’s gray stone house just off Madison. A butler who actually wore brass buttons opened the door, and she was shown upstairs to the music room. (The butler had been warned of her coming.) Ormond Hunter was already there, and they shook hands. In a moment, Mrs. Ellsworth came in, a tall stately gray-haired lady in black with a scarf that sort of floated behind her. She was tremendously intrigued at meeting Oceola, never having had before amongst all her artists a black one. And she was greatly impressed that Ormond Hunter should have recommended the girl. She began right away, treating her as a protégée; that is, she began asking her a great many questions she would not dare ask anyone else at first meeting, except a protégée. She asked her how old she was and where her mother and father were and how she made her living and whose music she liked best to play and was she married and would she take one lump or two in her tea, with lemon or cream?

After tea, Oceola played. She played the Rachmaninoff Prelude in C-sharp Minor. She played from the Liszt Etudes. She played the “St. Louis Blues.” She played Ravel’s “Pavanne pour une Enfante Défunte.” And then she said she had to go. She was playing that night for a dance in Brooklyn for the benefit of the Urban League.

Mrs. Ellsworth and Ormond Hunter breathed, “How lovely!”

Mrs. Ellsworth said, “I am quite overcome, my dear. You play so beautifully.” She went on further to say, “You must let me help you. Who is your teacher?”

“I have none now,” Oceola replied. “I teach pupils myself. Don’t have time any more to study—nor money either.”

“But you must have time,” said Mrs. Ellsworth, “and money, also. Come back to see me on Tuesday. We will arrange it, my dear.”
And when the girl had gone, she turned to Ormond Hunter for advice on piano teachers to instruct those who already had genius, and need only to be developed.

II

Then began one of the most interesting periods in Mrs. Ellsworth’s whole experience in aiding the arts. The period of Oceola. For the Negro girl, as time went on, began to occupy a greater and greater place in Mrs. Ellsworth’s interests, to take up more and more of her time, and to use up more and more of her money. Not that Oceola ever asked for money, but Mrs. Ellsworth herself seemed to keep thinking of so much more Oceola needed.

At first it was hard to get Oceola to need anything. Mrs. Ellsworth had the feeling that the girl mistrusted her generosity, and Oceola did—for she had never met anybody interested in pure art before. Just to be given things for art’s sake seemed suspicious to Oceola.

That first Tuesday, when the colored girl came back at Mrs. Ellsworth’s request, she answered the white woman’s questions with a why-look in her eyes.

“Don’t think I’m being personal, dear,” said Mrs. Ellsworth, “but I must know your background in order to help you. Now, tell me …”

Oceola wondered why on earth the woman wanted to help her. However, since Mrs. Ellsworth seemed interested in her life’s history, she brought it forth so as not to hinder the progress of the afternoon, for she wanted to get back to Harlem by six o’clock.

Born in Mobile in 1903. Yes, m’am, she was older than she looked. Papa had a band, that is, her stepfather. Used to play for all the lodge turnouts, picnics, dances, barbecues. You could get the best roast pig in the world in Mobile. Her mother used to play the organ in church, and when the deacons bought a piano after the big revival, her mama played that, too. Oceola played by ear for a long while until her mother taught her notes. Oceola played an organ, also, and a cornet.

“My, my,” said Mrs. Ellsworth.

“Yes, m’am,” said Oceola. She had played and practiced on lots of instruments in the South before her stepfather died. She always went to band rehearsals with him.

“And where was your father, dear?” asked Mrs. Ellsworth.

“My stepfather had the band,” replied Oceola. Her mother left off playing in the church to go with him traveling in Billy Kersands’ Minstrels. He had the biggest mouth in the world, Kersands did, and used to let Oceola put both her hands in it at a time and stretch it. Well, she and her mama and step-papa settled down in Houston. Sometimes her parents had jobs and sometimes they didn’t. Often they were hungry, but Oceola went to school and had a regular piano teacher, an old German woman, who gave her what technique she had today.

“A fine old teacher,” said Oceola. “She used to teach me half the time for nothing. God bless her.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Ellsworth. “She gave you an excellent foundation.”

“Sure did. But my step-papa died, got cut, and after that Mama didn’t have no more use for Houston so we moved to St. Louis. Mama got a job playing for the movies in a Market Street theater, and I played for a church choir, and saved some money and went to Wilberforce. Studied piano there, too. Played for all the college dances. Graduated. Came to New York and heard Rachmaninoff and was crazy about him. Then Mama died, so I’m keeping the little flat myself. One room is rented out.”

“Is she nice?” asked Mrs. Ellsworth, “your roomer?”

“It’s not a she,” said Oceola. “He’s a man. I hate women roomers.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Ellsworth. “I should think all roomers would be terrible.”

“He’s right nice,” said Oceola. “Name’s Pete Williams.”

“What does he do?” asked Mrs. Ellsworth.

“A Pullman porter,” replied Oceola, “but he’s saving money to go to med school. He’s a smart fellow.”

But it turned out later that he wasn’t paying Oceola any rent.

That afternoon, when Mrs. Ellsworth announced that she had made her an appointment with one of the best piano teachers in New York, the black girl seemed pleased. She recognized the name. But how, she wondered, would she find time for study, with her pupils and her choir, and all. When Mrs. Ellsworth said that she would cover her entire living expenses, Oceola’s eyes were full of that why-look, as though she didn’t believe it.

“I have faith in your art, dear,” said Mrs. Ellsworth, at parting. But to prove it quickly, she sat down that very evening and sent Oceola the first monthly check so that she would no longer have to take in pupils or drill choirs or play at house parties. And so Oceola would have faith in art, too.

That night Mrs. Ellsworth called up Ormond Hunter and told him what she had done. And she asked if Mr. Hunter’s maid knew Oceola, and if she supposed that that man rooming with her were anything to her. Ormond Hunter said he would inquire.

Before going to bed, Mrs. Ellsworth told her housekeeper to order a book called Nigger Heaven on the morrow, and also anything else Brentano’s had about Harlem. She made a mental note that she must go up there sometime, for she had never yet seen that dark section of New York; and now that she had a Negro protégée, she really ought to know something about it. Mrs. Ellsworth couldn’t recall ever having known a single Negro before in her whole life, so she found Oceola fascinating. And just as black as she herself was white.

Mrs. Ellsworth began to think in bed about what gowns would look best on Oceola. Her protégée would have to be well-dressed. She wondered, too, what sort of a place the girl lived in. And who that man was who lived with her. She began to think that really Oceola ought to have a place to herself. It didn’t seem quite respectable …

When she woke up in the morning, she called her car and went by her dressmaker’s. She asked the good woman what kind of colors looked well with black; not black fabrics, but a black skin.

“I have a little friend to fit out,” she said.

“A black friend?” said the dressmaker.

“A black friend,” said Mrs. Ellsworth.

III

Some days later Ormond Hunter reported on what his maid knew about Oceola. It seemed that the two belonged to the same church, and although the maid did not know Oceola very well, she knew what everybody said about her in the church. Yes, indeedy! Oceola were a right nice girl, for sure, but it certainly were a shame she were giving all her money to that man what stayed with her and what she was practically putting through college so he could be a doctor.

“Why,” gasped Mrs. Ellsworth, “the poor child is being preyed upon.”

“It seems to me so,” said Ormond Hunter.

“I must get her out of Harlem,” said Mrs. Ellsworth, “at once. I believe it’s worse than Chinatown.”

“She might be in a more artistic atmosphere,” agreed Ormond Hunter. “And with her career launched, she probably won’t want that man anyhow.”

“She won’t need him,” said Mrs. Ellsworth. “She will have her art.”

But Mrs. Ellsworth decided that in order to increase the rapprochement between art and Oceola, something should be done now, at once. She asked the girl to come down to see her the next day, and when it was time to go home, the white woman said, “I have a half hour before dinner. I’ll drive you up. You know I’ve never been to Harlem.”

“All right,” said Oceola. “That’s nice of you.”

But she didn’t suggest the white lady’s coming in, when they drew up before a rather sad-looking apartment house in 134th Street. Mrs. Ellsworth had to ask could she come in.

“I live on the fifth floor,” said Oceola, “and there isn’t any elevator.”

“It doesn’t matter, dear,” said the white woman, for she meant to see the inside of this girl’s life, elevator or no elevator.

The apartment was just as she thought it would be. After all, she had read Thomas Burke on Limehouse. And here was just one more of those holes in the wall, even if it was five stories high. The windows looked down on slums. There were only four rooms, small as maids’ rooms, all of them. An upright piano almost filled the parlor. Oceola slept in the dining room. The roomer slept in the bedchamber beyond the kitchen.

“Where is he, darling?”

“He runs on the road all summer,” said the girl. “He’s in and out.”

“But how do you breathe in here?” asked Mrs. Ellsworth. “It’s so small. You must have more space for your soul, dear. And for a grand piano. Now, in the Village …”

“I do right well here,” said Oceola.

“But in the Village where so many nice artists live we can get …”

“But I don’t want to move yet. I promised my roomer he could stay till fall.”

“Why till fall?”

“He’s going to Meharry then.”

“To marry?”

“Meharry, yes m’am. That’s a colored medicine school in Nashville.”

“Colored? Is it good?”

“Well, it’s cheap,” said Oceola. “After he goes, I don’t mind moving.”

“But I wanted to see you settled before I go away for the summer.”

“When you come back is all right. I can do till then.”

“Art is long,” reminded Mrs. Ellsworth, “and time is fleeting, my dear.”

“Yes, m’am,” said Oceola, “but I gets nervous if I start worrying about time.”

So Mrs. Ellsworth went off to Bar Harbor for the season, and left the man with Oceola.

IV

That was some years ago. Eventually art and Mrs. Ellsworth triumphed. Oceola moved out of Harlem. She lived in Gay Street west of Washington Square where she met Genevieve Taggard, and Ernestine Evans, and two or three sculptors, and a cat painter who was also a protégée of Mrs. Ellsworth. She spent her days practicing, playing for friends of her patron, going to concerts, and reading books about music. She no longer had pupils or rehearsed the choir, but she still loved to play for Harlem house parties—for nothing—now that she no longer needed the money, out of sheer love of jazz. This rather disturbed Mrs. Ellsworth, who still believed in art of the old school, portraits that really and truly looked like people, poems about nature, music that had soul in it, not syncopation. And she felt the dignity of art. Was it in keeping with genius, she wondered, for Oceola to have a studio full of white and colored people every Saturday night (some of them actually drinking gin from bottles) and dancing to the most tom-tom-like music she had ever heard coming out of a grand piano? She wished she could lift Oceola up bodily and take her away from all that, for art’s sake.

So in the spring, Mrs. Ellsworth organized weekends in the upstate mountains where she had a little lodge and where Oceola could look from the high places at the stars, and fill her soul with the vastness of the eternal, and forget about jazz. Mrs. Ellsworth really began to hate jazz—especially on a grand piano.

If there were a lot of guests at the lodge, as there sometimes were, Mrs. Ellsworth might share the bed with Oceola. Then she would read aloud Tennyson or Browning before turning out the light, aware all the time of the electric strength of that brown-black body beside her, and of the deep drowsy voice asking what the poems were about. And then Mrs. Ellsworth would feel very motherly toward this dark girl whom she had taken under her wing on the wonderful road of art, to nurture and love until she became a great interpreter of the piano. At such times the elderly white woman was glad her late husband’s money, so well invested, furnished her with a large surplus to devote to the needs of her protégées, especially to Oceola, the blackest—and most interesting of all.

Why the most interesting?

Mrs. Ellsworth didn’t know, unless it was that Oceola really was talented, terribly alive, and that she looked like nothing Mrs. Ellsworth had ever been near before. Such a rich velvet black, and such a hard young body! The teacher of the piano raved about her strength.

“She can stand a great career,” the teacher said. “She has everything for it.”

“Yes,” agreed Mrs. Ellsworth, thinking, however, of the Pullman porter at Meharry, “but she must learn to sublimate her soul.”

So for two years then, Oceola lived abroad at Mrs. Ellsworth’s expense. She studied with Philippe, had the little apartment on the Left Bank, and learned about Debussy’s African background. She met many black Algerian and French West Indian students, too, and listened to their interminable arguments ranging from Garvey to Picasso to Spengler to Jean Cocteau, and thought they all must be crazy. Why did they or anybody argue so much about life or art? Oceola merely lived—and loved it. Only the Marxian students seemed sound to her, for they, at least, wanted people to have enough to eat. That was important, Oceola thought, remembering, as she did, her own sometimes hungry years. But the rest of the controversies, as far as she could fathom, were based on air.

Oceola hated most artists, too, and the word art in French or English. If you wanted to play the piano or paint pictures or write books, go ahead! But why talk so much about it? Montparnasse was worse in that respect than the Village. And as for the cultured Negroes who were always saying art would break down color lines, art could save the race and prevent lynchings! “Bunk!” said Oceola. “My ma and pa were both artists when it came to making music, and the white folks ran them out of town for being dressed up in Alabama. And look at the Jews! Every other artist in the world’s a Jew, and still folks hate them.”

She thought of Mrs. Ellsworth (dear soul in New York), who never made uncomplimentary remarks about Negroes, but frequently did about Jews. Of little Menuhin she would say, for instance, “He’s a genius—not a Jew,” hating to admit his ancestry.

In Paris, Oceola especially loved the West Indian ballrooms where the black colonials danced the beguine. And she liked the entertainers at Bricktop’s. Sometimes late at night there, Oceola would take the piano and beat out a blues for Brick and the assembled guests. In her playing of Negro folk music, Oceola never doctored it up, or filled it full of classical runs, or fancy falsities. In the blues she made the bass notes throb like tom-toms, the trebles cry like little flutes, so deep in the earth and so high in the sky that they understood everything. And when the nightclub crowd would get up and dance to her blues, and Bricktop would yell, “Hey! Hey!” Oceola felt as happy as if she were performing a Chopin étude for the nicely gloved Oh’s and Ah-ers in a Crillon salon.

Music, to Oceola, demanded movement and expression, dancing and living to go with it. She liked to teach, when she had the choir, the singing of those rhythmical Negro spirituals that possessed the power to pull colored folks out of their seats in the amen corner and make them prance and shout in the aisles for Jesus. She never liked those fashionable colored churches where shouting and movement were discouraged and looked down upon, and where New England hymns instead of spirituals were sung. Oceola’s background was too well-grounded in Mobile, and Billy Kersands’ Minstrels, and the Sanctified churches where religion was a joy, to stare mystically over the top of a grand piano like white folks and imagine that Beethoven had nothing to do with life, or that Schubert’s love songs were only sublimations.

Whenever Mrs. Ellsworth came to Paris, she and Oceola spent hours listening to symphonies and string quartettes and pianists. Oceola enjoyed concerts, but seldom felt, like her patron, that she was floating on clouds of bliss. Mrs. Ellsworth insisted, however, that Oceola’s spirit was too moved for words at such times—therefore she understood why the dear child kept quiet. Mrs. Ellsworth herself was often too moved for words, but never by pieces like Ravel’s Boléro (which Oceola played on the phonograph as a dance record) or any of the compositions of les Six.

What Oceola really enjoyed most with Mrs. Ellsworth was not going to concerts, but going for trips on the little riverboats in the Seine; or riding out to old chateaux in her patron’s hired Renault; or to Versailles, and listening to the aging white lady talk about the romantic history of France, the wars and uprisings, the loves and intrigues of princes and kings and queens, about guillotines and lace handkerchiefs, snuffboxes and daggers. For Mrs. Ellsworth had loved France as a girl, and had made a study of its life and lore. Once she used to sing simple little French songs rather well, too. And she always regretted that her husband never understood the lovely words—or even tried to understand them.

Oceola learned the accompaniments for all the songs Mrs. Ellsworth knew and sometimes they tried them over together. The elderly white woman loved to sing when the colored girl played, and she even tried spirituals. Often, when she stayed at the little Paris apartment, Oceola would go into the kitchen and cook something good for late supper, maybe an oyster soup, or fried apples and bacon. And sometimes Oceola had pigs’ feet.

“There’s nothing quite so good as a pig’s foot,” said Oceola, “after playing all day.”

“Then you must have pigs’ feet,” agreed Mrs. Ellsworth.

And all this while Oceola’s development at the piano blossomed into perfection. Her tone became a singing wonder and her interpretations warm and individual. She gave a concert in Paris, one in Brussels, and another in Berlin. She got the press notices all pianists crave. She had her picture in lots of European papers. And she came home to New York a year after the stock market crashed and nobody had any money—except folks like Mrs. Ellsworth who had so much it would be hard to ever lose it all.

Oceola’s onetime Pullman porter, now a coming doctor, was graduating from Meharry that spring. Mrs. Ellsworth saw her dark protégée go South to attend his graduation with tears in her eyes. She thought that by now music would be enough, after all those years under the best teachers, but alas, Oceola was not yet sublimated, even by Philippe. She wanted to see Pete.

Oceola returned North to prepare for her New York concert in the fall. She wrote Mrs. Ellsworth at Bar Harbor that her doctor boyfriend was putting in one more summer on the railroad, then in the autumn he would intern at Atlanta. And Oceola said that he had asked her to marry him. Lord, she was happy!

It was a long time before she heard from Mrs. Ellsworth. When the letter came, it was full of long paragraphs about the beautiful music Oceola had within her power to give the world. Instead, she wanted to marry and be burdened with children! Oh, my dear, my dear!

Oceola, when she read it, thought she had done pretty well knowing Pete this long and not having children. But she wrote back that she didn’t see why children and music couldn’t go together. Anyway, during the present depression, it was pretty hard for a beginning artist like herself to book a concert tour—so she might just as well be married awhile. Pete, on his last run in from St. Louis, had suggested that they have the wedding Christmas in the South. “And he’s impatient, at that. He needs me.”

This time Mrs. Ellsworth didn’t answer by letter at all. She was back in town in late September. In November, Oceola played at Town Hall. The critics were kind, but they didn’t go wild. Mrs. Ellsworth swore it was because of Pete’s influence on her protégée.

“But he was in Atlanta,” Oceola said.

“His spirit was here,” Mrs. Ellsworth insisted. “All the time you were playing on that stage, he was here, the monster! Taking you out of yourself, taking you away from the piano.”

“Why, he wasn’t,” said Oceola. “He was watching an operation in Atlanta.”

But from then on, things didn’t go well between her and her patron. The white lady grew distinctly cold when she received Oceola in her beautiful drawing room among the jade vases and amber cups worth thousands of dollars. When Oceola would have to wait there for Mrs. Ellsworth, she was afraid to move for fear she might knock something over—that would take ten years of a Harlemite’s wages to replace, if broken.

Over the teacups, the aging Mrs. Ellsworth did not talk any longer about the concert tour she had once thought she might finance for Oceola, if no recognized bureau took it up. Instead, she spoke of that something she believed Oceola’s fingers had lost since her return from Europe. And she wondered why anyone insisted on living in Harlem.

“I’ve been away from my own people so long,” said the girl, “I want to live right in the middle of them again.”

Why, Mrs. Ellsworth wondered further, did Oceola, at her last concert in a Harlem church, not stick to the classical items listed on the program. Why did she insert one of her own variations on the spirituals, a syncopated variation from the Sanctified Church, that made an old colored lady rise up and cry out from her pew, “Glory to God this evenin’! Yes! Hallelujah! Whooo-oo!” right at the concert? Which seemed most undignified to Mrs. Ellsworth, and unworthy of the teachings of Philippe. And furthermore, why was Pete coming up to New York for Thanksgiving? And who had sent him the money to come?

“Me,” said Oceola. “He doesn’t make anything interning.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Ellsworth, “I don’t think much of him.” But Oceola didn’t seem to care what Mrs. Ellsworth thought, for she made no defense.

Thanksgiving evening, in bed, together in a Harlem apartment, Pete and Oceola talked about their wedding to come. They would have a big one in a church with lots of music. And Pete would give her a ring. And she would have on a white dress, light and fluffy, not silk. “I hate silk,” she said. “I hate expensive things.” (She thought of her mother being buried in a cotton dress, for they were all broke when she died. Mother would have been glad about her marriage.) “Pete,” Oceola said, hugging him in the dark, “let’s live in Atlanta, where there are lots of colored people, like us.”

“What about Mrs. Ellsworth?” Pete asked. “She coming down to Atlanta for our wedding?”

“I don’t know,” said Oceola.

“I hope not, ’cause if she stops at one of them big hotels, I won’t have you going to the back door to see her. That’s one thing I hate about the South—where there’re white people, you have to go to the back door.”

“Maybe she can stay with us,” said Oceola. “I wouldn’t mind.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Pete. “You want to get lynched?”

But it happened that Mrs. Ellsworth didn’t care to attend the wedding, anyway. When she saw how love had triumphed over art, she decided she could no longer influence Oceola’s life. The period of Oceola was over. She would send checks, occasionally, if the girl needed them, besides, of course, something beautiful for the wedding, but that would be all. These things she told her the week after Thanksgiving.

“And Oceola, my dear, I’ve decided to spend the whole winter in Europe. I sail on December eighteenth. Christmas—while you are marrying—I shall be in Paris with my precious Antonio Bas. In January, he has an exhibition of oils in Madrid. And in the spring, a new young poet is coming over whom I want to visit Florence, to really know Florence. A charming white-haired boy from Omaha whose soul has been crushed in the West. I want to try to help him. He, my dear, is one of the few people who live for their art—and nothing else … Ah, such a beautiful life! … You will come and play for me once before I sail?”

“Yes, Mrs. Ellsworth,” said Oceola, genuinely sorry that the end had come. Why did white folks think you could live on nothing but art? Strange! Too strange! Too strange!

V

The Persian vases in the music room were filled with long-stemmed lilies that night when Oceola Jones came down from Harlem for the last time to play for Mrs. Dora Ellsworth. Mrs. Ellsworth had on a gown of black velvet, and a collar of pearls about her neck. She was very kind and gentle to Oceola, as one would be to a child who has done a great wrong but doesn’t know any better. But to the black girl from Harlem, she looked very cold and white, and her grand piano seemed like the biggest and heaviest in the world—as Oceola sat down to play it with the technique for which Mrs. Ellsworth had paid.

As the rich and aging white woman listened to the great roll of Beethoven sonatas and to the sea and moonlight of the Chopin nocturnes, as she watched the swaying dark strong shoulders of Oceola Jones, she began to reproach the girl aloud for running away from art and music, for burying herself in Atlanta and love—love for a man unworthy of lacing up her bootstraps, as Mrs. Ellsworth put it.

“You could shake the stars with your music, Oceola. Depression or no depression, I could make you great. And yet you propose to dig a grave for yourself. Art is bigger than love.”

“I believe you, Mrs. Ellsworth,” said Oceola, not turning away from the piano. “But being married won’t keep me from making tours, or being an artist.”

“Yes, it will,” said Mrs. Ellsworth. “He’ll take all the music out of you.”

“No, he won’t,” said Oceola.

“You don’t know, child,” said Mrs. Ellsworth, “what men are like.”

“Yes, I do,” said Oceola simply. And her fingers began to wander slowly up and down the keyboard, flowing into the soft and lazy syncopation of a Negro blues, a blues that deepened and grew into rollicking jazz, then into an earth-throbbing rhythm that shook the lilies in the Persian vases of Mrs. Ellsworth’s music room. Louder than the voice of the white woman who cried that Oceola was deserting beauty, deserting her real self, deserting her hope in life, the flood of wild syncopation filled the house, then sank into the slow and singing blues with which it had begun.

The girl at the piano heard the white woman saying, “Is this what I spent thousands of dollars to teach you?”

“No,” said Oceola simply. “This is mine … Listen! … How sad and gay it is. Blue and happy—laughing and crying … How white like you and black like me … How much like a man … And how like a woman … Warm as Pete’s mouth … These are the blues … I’m playing.”

Mrs. Ellsworth sat very still in her chair looking at the lilies trembling delicately in the priceless Persian vases, while Oceola made the bass notes throb like tom-toms deep in the earth.

Oh, if I could holler

sang the blues,

Like a mountain jack,
I’d go up on de mountain

sang the blues,

And call my baby back.

“And I,” said Mrs. Ellsworth rising from her chair, “would stand looking at the stars.”