He came in the place of honour on the programme, the spotlight full upon him, heralded by a fanfare of snare drums and saxophones. To my surprise, it was not the elegant gentleman I had promised my companions. He had left to lesser luminaries the fine raiment, the spats, and the gardenia. Even the neat moustache had been sacrificed to art. He had deliberately reverted to type. Barefoot, in ragged trousers, and a hat without a crown, it was a Sam’l any one in that audience would recognize, as we did, and love because he was their own. He had shown the intuition of genius; achieved the crowning artistry of imitating himself. The audience, with one gasp of surprise, went wild. There were shrieks of welcome and approval, congratulatory howls. “Attaboy, Slippyfoot!” they yelled. “You show ’em, King!” And of course they laughed at him, as people always did and always would. But it was a new laughter, sympathetic, almost affectionate. Sam’l, I realized, had become to his public a sort of symbol, like the Charleston itself, like the tune “Dixie”; a reminder of a South that was passing now, and would never come again. He paid no attention to laughter or to cheers; a ludicrous enough figure with his great flat feet and exquisitely awkward body, yet oddly dignified. It was the dignity of conscious power; Sam’l knew what he was about. Those melancholy, anxious hound’s eyes roamed over the enormous audience till suddenly they paused and lighted. He had found his white folks. He smiled at us; I think I had never seen Sam’l smile before. It was an experience; sudden, irradiating, infinitely proud and trustful. He was among friends. He began to move, a strange, slow prance with measured jerks and pauses, which I recognized--Mahaly before the great god Mumbo-jumbo! Suddenly he crouched, shivering, trembling, and began to run desperately--all without leaving one spot; he fought against unseen enemies, shield before him, thrusting his spear, flinging his assegai; he moved away, drooping, heavy, a captive in chains; never losing a single beat of the wild rhythm, a single intricate double pat of the foot. I began to understand what he was doing. This was no mere exposition of the Charleston “as it should be did, its origins, methods, and significations.” Sam’l, the despised and rejected of them, was interpreting his people for our benefit, dramatizing in dance the history of his race, even as Roland Hayes in song, as others in literature. There was something hypnotic in that ceaseless beating rhythm, those constant, significant movements of the half-naked body. We saw through his imagination; we remembered through his race-memory. Hoeing and sowing; picking cotton under the eye of an overseer with a lash; escaping into the swamp, with bloodhounds following; terror he danced for us, the terror that crouches and prays and kills; ecstasy, the shouting joys of religion, the release of freedom--springing up and up as if he would dance with the stars.