singing and dancing chorus of Negro girls. They
were clad in yellow and crimson and mauve combinations with white tapes on one side from the
lace edge of the knicker to their dusky arms.
They danced from the thigh rather than from the
knee, moving waist and bosom in unrestrained
undulation, girls with large, startled seeming eyes
and uncontrollable masses of dark hair.. A dance
of physical joy and abandon, with no restraint
in the toes or the knees, no veiling of the eyes, no
half shutting of the lips, no holding in of the
hair. Accustomed to the very aesthetic presentment of the Bacchanalia in the Russian ballet, it
might be difficult to call one of those Negro dancers a Bacchante, and yet there was one whom I
remarked again and again, a Queen of Sheba in
her looks, a face like starry night, and she was
clad slightly in mauve, and went into such ecstacies
during the many encores that her hair fell down
about her bare shoulders, and her cheeks and
knees, glistening with perspiration, outshone her
eyes. . . . I had seen nothing so pretty or so
amusing, so bewilderingly full of life and color,
since Sanine’s production of the ‘Fair of Sorochinsky’ in Moscow.”
Turning now to painting, we note a young African painter contemporary with Phyllis Wheatley who had gained some little renown.
