Strivers Row by Kevin Baker

up—and there, momentarily empty, shining in the middle of the ballroom, was the dance floor.
    It was at least two hundred feet long, Malcolm thought. An endless expanse of polished maple and mahogany, undulating faintly in the reflected, golden light. More than twice the size of the Roseland State Ballroom up in Boston, and far bigger and grander than anything he had ever seen back in Michigan—with not one but two bandstands down at the end, and nothing but the vast, shimmering space of unlimited possibility from here to there.
    The music started again, and the floor was instantly filled with dancers. Every one of them, men and women, better dressed, better looking, moving faster and looser than any crowd he had ever seen before. Hampton’s band he had seen up in Boston, but he had never heard them play this fast or this tight. They played as if there were something they were dying to catch up to before it got away. The frenzy of the crowd and the band playing off each other, surging back and forth across the dance floor, as if daring each other to the edge. Illinois Jacquet stood for his solo, then all the rest of Hampton’s incomparable sidemen, Alvin Hayse, and Joe Newman, and George Jenkins—tenor sax, then trombone, trumpet, and drums, before Hamp himself raised his sticks, and everything stopped on a dime. The dancers grinning as they caught their breath, the people seated at the side booths still jumping and dancing in place— imploring Hamp to play their favorite.
    â€œ Oh, play ‘Flying Home’! Oh, please, Hamp, play ‘Flying Home’!”
    â€œ ‘Flying Home’! ‘Flying Home’!”
    The band teased them, playing the first few notes of their big hit—then launching into “Pick a Rib,” instead. The dancers gleefully took it up anyway. Their speed all the more remarkable to Malcolm for how crowded the floor was, every inch of it filled save for a ten-foot square just to the right of Hamp’s bandstand that was almost empty. There were only six dancers there, moving apart from all the rest, circling around a tall man with impossibly long legs and a face that was screwed up into a permanent smirk. He was dressed all in white, with a white hat that was even broader than Malcolm’s lid, and he moved faster than anyone Malcolm had ever seen—keeping the same disdainful expression on his face.
    â€œWho that?” Malcolm asked, enraptured.
    â€œThat’s Twist Mouth Ganaway, son—the King of The Track,” Sandy warned him. “Keep away from him, Nome. You go on Cat’s Corner there without his permission, he gonna break your ankles for you, an’ that’s no joke, son.”
    â€œI bet he would, too,” Malcolm said, grinning weakly—dying to get out on the floor now but still holding back. Remembering what had happened up in Boston with Laura—
    Instead he stayed back with the rest of the kitchen crew, just behind the floor-side booths and tables. Nearly half of these were occupied exclusively by white people. Some of them were just watching the darker-skinned dancers, he saw, but others rushed out on the floor to dance as freely as everyone else—many of them white women lindy-hopping with colored men, allowing themselves to be as freely handled and flung about as anyone else. He had seen black men dancing with white women at the Roseland, of course, but it had never been anything like this—never so free and easy. Up in Boston the mixed dancers had always had a furtive, slightly shamed air about them, the white women hurrying off the dance floor with their heads down when a number ended.
    Here, it felt different—as if the ballroom had nothing to do with what was outside, all the shoving MPs and the loud, crude mobs of white soldiers and sailors. The white women on the floor actually laughing out loud, their black partners grinning back. He saw at least two mixed couples kiss on the