Queen Dido

The most Beautiful Female I knew in my youth was a Negro girl named Dido De Long; the most beautiful and the most loving. I never witnessed nor read of a devotion more unremitting than Dido had for her man. He called himself Prince Ephraim. But he was hanged in Chicago's Cook County jail as Howard Givin, a Negro dentist who had murdered two mounted policemen. Dido's love survived the breaking of her Prince's neck. For how long, I don't know. But my guess is forever.

I met Dido, as I met most people in those days, through the machinations of my city editor, Mr. Eddie Mahoney. It was an idle June morning in the Chicago Journal's local room.

"See if there is anything to this foolish and inconsequential rumor," said Mr. Mahoney, handing me a letter. The letter stated that Mrs. Emaline Busse. widow of Chicago's Mayor Fred Busse, was in danger of starving to death on the wages she received as a lowly employee of an ungrateful municipality. The letter writer considered the matter "an outrage."

I knew that during his buccaneer reign as Mayor of Chicago, the obese Mr. Busse had put the city's nose out of joint by marrying a young Negro girl and proclaiming her Chicago's First Lady. I tracked down the widow Busse. I had seen her often without knowing who she was. She ran one of the elevators in the Criminal Court Building.

A gaunt, dark-skinned Mrs. Busse, now in her 60s, begged me not to put anything in the paper about her. If I did, she was sure that "Mayor Busse's Widow" would lose her job.

"Ours was not a popular marriage," she smiled, "and there are many reformers who would also feel it their duty to stamp out the last of the Fred Busse regime -- which is me running an elevator."

The dark eyes had a mirth in them that won me over. As a reward for my promised silence, the widow Busse gave me a tip on another story.

"There's a Negro movement in Chicago," she said, "that you may find worthy of publication. My niece can give you the full information. I don't know her address, but you can meet her at the Sunset No. 1 Café. She's a singer there. Her name is Dido De Long."

• • •

The Sunset was a Negro café in the heart of the city's brothel and Turkish bath sector on the Near South Side. The district was known to the town journalists as the "lava beds."

The Sunset was unlike most of the other Negro cafés in that it tried to discourage white customers.

"Have you a reservation?" the dark heavyweight at the door asked me.

I showed him a note signed by Mrs. Fred Busse. He led me to a table on the edge of the dance floor which was hardly larger than a pool-table top. The music had stopped. Dancers were wedging their way back to their seats. In the purple light and veils of tobacco smoke the café was almost invisible. The near darkness was full of noise and agitation, as if a revel or a battle were hatching in it.

After some minutes, the café became visible -- its peeling walls, broken fixtures and total lack of ornamentation, except for a six-foot flag on one of the walls. I couldn't make out its colors. A dark, wide stripe was across its middle.

I noted only a few white skins in the place. They belonged to the line crossers -- the white men and white women with Negro sweethearts. My few fellow whites looked washed-out and ineffectual in these premises.

The Negroes jammed around the tables flared with vigor and delight. The men seemed a convention of black athletes. Many of them were, including the pugilist Jack Johnson -- still a world champion. A white girl sat clinging to Champion Jack -- the blonde Lucille Cameron whom he was to marry soon.

I found myself looking more at the men than at their women companions. The women were in brightly hued silk gowns, bulging like seductive rainbows with half-out bosoms offering a harvest of dark fruits. They glittered under shiny coiffures like locomotives of sex, achug with laughter.

Yet the men held my eyes more. These muscled drinkers and diamond-flashing dudes had a look on their faces I had not seen in Negroes before -- the look of pride. They sat in silence like dignitaries who were being served. They smiled on their women like black Santa Clauses loaded with gifts.

A spotlight cut through the café fog and threw a noose of light on the vacant dance floor. In the sudden silence, a young spotlighted Negro announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, for your pleasure and delight the management offers (Continued on page 78) Queen Dido (Continued from page 55) you the best there is -- Miss Dido De Long."

Applause muffled the 10-piece orchestra that started playing. Dido De Long appeared.

It is a tricky business, describing a beauty seen long ago. I have my diary entries of the time to help, and some outbursts of poetry dedicated "To Dido." I quote from them: "When Dido entered the spotlight, the smoky, shabby-walled café seemed to become suddenly full of riches. All who beheld her sat in silent surprise as if a treasure had been cast up at their feet." I was not yet 19 and a stranger to literary caution. I quote again, of this first sighting of Dido: "Her skin was a gleam of darkness. Out of a curving frame of copper hair that hung to her shoulders, Dido's ink-black eyes glowed like large sequins. When she smiled it was as if the moon came out."

But I don't need the fevered jottings of that young diarist who lived in a cubbyhole overlooking the river. Dido still looks at me, unmisted by time. Her dark face was beautiful because it seemed as much her soul as her features. She looked like happiness in a Negroid mask.

As for Dido's body, I've kept it alive in my head by attributing it through the years to a number of my fictional heroines. But the original was always better because of the coloring.

Dido was tall, and her silver slippers raised her another three inches. Her long legs in silver opera hose, her torso in clinging silver net, her naked back and shoulders were a single symmetrical statement of sex. Dido's arms were as alluring as the swell of her breasts. Her flanks were as evocative as her abdomen, whose breathing was like a call to battle. There was no preferred segment to Dido.

I quote again: "When Dido sang, the pink lining of her mouth was an almost frightening glimpse of a secret body with red streaming arteries and milk-white bones."

While Dido sang I wrote a number of couplets. Two of them were:

"Her face bewildered me as if some queen

Smiled in splendor from a throne unseen."

And:

"Around her spread a crude and smoky room,

But where she stood a kingdom seemed to bloom."

I remember the song Dido sang that night: "Tonight will never come again for you and me, never will we hear again that same sweet melody." Her voice was true and melodious. It filled the crowded room without the aid of any microphone.

If Dido was amazing, so was her audience. Its men and women alike looked on the black-and-silver Venus in the spotlight as if she were a work of art. This most voluptuous-looking of girls seemed to stir no lechery in her lusty onlookers.

• • •

I talked to Dido in the manager's office, which was also her dressing room. The conversation began with my reading aloud the couplets I had written -- always a favored opening for a writer.

Vivid and half nude, and sitting in a chair facing me, Dido was a magnet that pulled at eyes, heart and hands. But I remained faithful to my couplets.

When I had finished, Dido said, "Thank you. I'm glad you know about me." I said nothing. "About my being a queen," she added.

I felt depressed that anyone so beautiful should be a touch deranged. Dido frowned at my silence.

"But you must know about me," she said, "you wrote about it. About my being a queen in a kingdom. Mrs. Busse must have told you."

"Nobody told me," I said, "it was just the way you made me feel. I put my reaction into rhyme."

"You must think I'm crazy," Dido said.

She looked at me with a smile that was like a lasso. But an instinct, and an open office door, held me motionless. I knew, somehow, from the ache of emotion Dido gave me that she was not a girl for grabbing.

"I'll tell you about it," she said, "while I change. Pardon me, please."

Dido stepped behind a small screen. She talked as she removed her silver costume. I sat staring at the screen like a Peeping Tom in blinders.

Dido told me of a Negro Knights of Africa movement that had been started a year ago by a man she called Ephraim. Her voice caressed the name. The objective of Ephraim's movement was to induce 5000 of the ablest American Negroes to "return" to Africa and set up a Negro kingdom in Liberia, with Ephraim as its first king, and Dido its first queen.

It was a startling fantasy that Dido recited, of black warriors with modern weapons and a flag -- the black-striped one I had seen on the café wall -- 5000, then 100,000, then 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 -- abandoning the land that despised them and finding pride and power in Africa.

But I knew as I listened that Dido's story was of no use to me as a reporter. In that day, Negro aspirations were not considered newsworthy. The white world was implacably locked against Negroes of all shades and degrees of culture. Even its cafés were Negroless. There was only one colored band playing in a white joint in Chicago, Peyton and Swetman's Dixie Group in Ray Jones' South Side café, and the city's guardians were a little fretful over the innovation -- colored men playing music for white women to dance to.

As a young reporter, I had looked on Negroes with the eyes of my elders -- as slum captives, as tenement huddlers on the outskirts of white civilization. When we whites "went on the town," we avoided the Negro spots. They were hostile and touchy. There was danger in any barroom discussion, danger and defeat. For Negroes fought more desperately than whites. There was more rage in them, and they fought like men who have little to lose by dying.

All these matters were part of my ensuing friendship with Dido. They were interlaced in her moods and words. However friendly she felt toward me, it was always a Negro woman who spoke or laughed. She looked out of her dark skin as out of a prison. Her loveliness opened no cell door for her.

I remember our months of talks as if they were a single conversation. In a way they were. We talked always about the same things, in the same place -- the manager's office from one A.M. to two A.M. It was Dido's only idle hour.

During the day, Dido worked as an assistant in Dr. Givin's dental office. Dr. Givin was Ephraim. She also typed out the speeches he wrote in pencil, and arranged for their printing as pamphlets. At seven she dined with Ephraim and a dozen of his adjutants. After dining, Ephraim went forth to spread his message of an African kingdom. He made speeches in meeting halls and on street corners under naphtha lights. Dido came nightly to the Sunset to sing for $50 a week. Her dollars went mostly into propaganda work for the kingdom.

From my first visit to my last, Dido came out from behind the screen in a street dress that never varied. She wore an ivory-white, accordion-pleated skirt and a long-sleeved white blouse. Her slim shoes and provocative stockings were gray. She was more alluring in her street dress than in her performer's costume. No work of art sat in the office, but a soft and intimate human figure; a face that belonged in a museum beside the sculpture of Nefertiti, and a husky, dreamy voice.

There are quotes of a dozen talks in my diary. I run them together as a picture of Dido's soul in the last days of its happiness.

"Why do you want to go back to Africa, Dido?"

"To become a human being."

"Do you have to be a queen and sit (continued on page 134) Queen Dido (continued from page 78)on a throne in order to become a human being?"

"No. I have to be where there aren't any white people." (A smile) "I hate white people."

"All of them?"

"Yes."

"Me, too?"

"Not yet."

"Why am I temporarily exempt, Dido?"

"You don't look at me as if I were a freak or a sexual novelty--not yet."

"If I said I loved you, I'd be saying it only to a beautiful girl. So help me."

"You mustn't ever say it."

"Why not, Dido?"

"Because I'm in love. Deeply and forever."

"With Africa?"

"With Ephraim."

"That's the dentist you work for."

"Yes, I work for him. I live for him."

"Do you live together?"

"You mean, do I sleep with him? No, I don't. We're engaged. We'll be married in Africa." (A sigh) "I'll come to his bed then, with rejoicing."

"It's odd. if you love him so much, that you don't go to bed with him now."

"You can't imagine a nigger girl being a virgin, can you?"

"I don't think of you as a nigger girl."

"You must. Because that's all I am here. Poems don't change me. I'm different -- different from you."

"If there's a difference, Dido, it's not in my favor."

"I won't lie to you, white boy. I'm not a virgin."

"Don't call me white boy, please."

"Would you care to hear how I lost my virginity?"

"If you want to tell me."

"I was born in Mississippi and lived there on a farm. I never spoke to any white men till I was 13. I spoke to them for the first time when two white men grabbed me while I was walking in the road, going home from work. I begged and screamed. They raped me, both of them. My brother found me at night. He thought I was dead. I came alive in the morning. That day five other white men came to our farmhouse. They ordered us to move away, because they didn't want any troublemakers or nigger whores in their peaceful neighborhood. I was the nigger whore. They had evidence that I solicited men on the road. That's how I came to Chicago. It was six years ago that I spoke to my first white men."

"That was an accident, Dido, like being run over. It's wrong to think of all white men as part of that accident."

"They are." (A shiver) "They keep on all the time, taking something from me. More than virginity. They rob my soul out of me. They leave me hiding away -- a coon, dinge, nigger, boogie, shine. They disfigure me."

"They are only words, Dido. I'm a Jew, and Jews hear mean words now and then."

"You can answer them, Mister Jew. They can spit on you, but they can't spit on your answers, because they come out of a white skin. They're white-man answers. White people kill each other, but they can't silence each other, not even Jews. Jesus Christ was a Jew and they killed Him. And look how His friends answered back. If Jesus had been a black man on that cross nobody would have spoken up for Him, or written a book about Him. He would have stayed in His grave with silence for His tombstone. And it would have been a great setback for God." (A smile) "Ephraim wrote that. I'll give you the pamphlet if you want it."

"I'd like to read it. Does Ephraim hate white people as you do?"

"No. Ephraim only loves his own people. He says the hands of black people are like music notes. And that there is a light of dawn always in their dark faces. He says their hearts are made of prayer and laughter." (Her eyes glowed.) "Tomorrow will be saved by the black people. They shall lead it back to humanity under the 10,000 banners of joy." (A smile again) "No, Ephraim hasn't any hate in him. Only love for the Negro soul."

"Especially yours."

"Yes, especially mine!"

"Does Ephraim love you as much as you love him?"

"He loves me with all his heart, forever."

"It's hard to understand his not being your real lover."

"You mean his not cohabiting with me?" (I nod.) "Does sex make love real?"

"It helps."

"There's a kind of love that doesn't need any help -- spiritual love that bathes your heart with light and keeps you living in a dream."

"And afraid to wake up."

"Wake up to what?"

"Truth, life, the real wonders of human relationship."

"You mean hands grabbing you. A mouth trying to eat you. Eyes rolled up and somebody else stamping inside you." (A shiver) "I hate sex."

"That's like the sun saying it hates flowers."

"Not flowers. weeds." (A smile) "That's what cohabitation is when it's not blessed by love. The human body degenerates without love, and its beauty becomes the rubbish of pleasure."

"Is that some more of Ephraim's writings?"

"Yes. Would you care to meet Ephraim? I've told him all about you."

"No, thanks. I see quite enough of Ephraim when I look at you."

"I know. He's part of me. He breathes inside me. His eyes are my eyes. I love him. Oh, I love him with my blood and my soul!" (A smile) "Do you know why I talk to you like this? Because it makes me happy to see a white man jealous of Ephraim." (A sigh) "That's mean of me, isn't it? I'm very sorry. You've written such sweet poems about me. I read them to Ephraim -- between tooth pullings."

"I'm flattered."

"Please don't be sore at me. Ephraim understands you. He says you have a sensitive mind. He says you are in love with me like a troubadour of olden times."

"Who expired of love for a lady who gave him only her hair ribbon. You haven't even given me that."

"I don't wear one." (A laugh)

"Does Ephraim kiss you after you read him my inspiring poems?"

"No."

"Doesn't he ever embrace you when you're alone together in his office?"

"No."

"He's a hell of a lover, is all I can say."

"You're a strange boy. All you think of is sex. Yet you're always polite and poetic toward me, as if I were a black nun. I am, too. The kissing will come later -- in Africa. When Ephraim and I become human beings with full human rights."

"I may be strange," I said, "but you are completely nuts. You and your fairy tale about a kingdom. And your life of virtue! Do you know why I'm polite to you? Because I feel your craziness. I know that if I put my arms around you, you'd start screaming like you did six years ago on that Mississippi road. That's not being spiritual. It's being crazy."

Dido laughed. "I'll be quite sane in Africa," she said, "and if you come to visit us, I'll find a bride for you -- who looks like me."

"There's no such woman," I said.

"I'll see you tomorrow night," Dido smiled.

"No you won't," I said. "You won't see me for quite a while. I'm going on my vacation tomorrow. I'm going to see my folks in Wisconsin. I think I'll stay there for some time. It all depends."

I was referring aloofly to the ache and cry for Dido in me. Dido stood looking at me with gentle eyes.

"Do you want to kiss me goodbye?" she asked.

Her lips were cushion-soft and bloodwarm. Her face against mine was dark and aromatic. The press of her body was like a thousand doors flying open, to nowhere. I touched her cheek and neck. The flowerlike skin made my fingers tremble.

"Why do you close your eyes?" I asked.

"You know why, white man," Dido whispered.

So much beauty, love, rapture -- all of it like useless fineries packed away in a dream; all of it useless to me.

• • •

I stayed in Wisconsin for five weeks, three of them without pay. Mr. Mahoney had assured me over the long-distance phone that he and his staff would be able to keep the Journal going without my help for another three weeks. I stayed away the extra time for two reasons. One was the sailboat I still owned in Racine. The other was Dido. At 19, frustration is a nasty business that darkens the day and disrupts the night. Three weeks more of sailing a wind-lashed Lake Michigan in my boyhood's friend, the Sea Bird, quieted the clamor in me for my black-and-silver Venus who despised sex and was, to boot, daft with love for another man.

Mr. Mahoney greeted me with feigned relief. The Journal, he said, was beginning to feel the strain of my absence. I grinned at Mr. Mahoney's sarcasm. It was a quality I seemed to inspire in those who liked me.

"If you feel sufficiently rested," Mr. Mahoney said, "you can hop over to Mr. Jacobi's jail and talk to the colored gentleman there who's waiting to be hanged shortly. We've carried a few items about him, but nothing with your Dostoievsky insight. Here are some clips on this black cuckoo."

Mr. Mahoney handed me a dozen clippings. They headlined the crime, trial and conviction of Dr. Howard Givin, a prominent Negro dentist. I read them without any telltale outcries for Mr. Mahoney's ears.

I read that on a Sunday morning five weeks ago, Dr. Givin had led a parade of 300 colored citizens who called themselves the Negro Knights of African Freedom. The paraders were on foot. Dr. Givin was mounted on a black horse. He carried a large blue flag with a black stripe across its middle, its pole resting in a stirrup. He was dressed in a blue military uniform, as were a number of the marchers. But Dr. Givin was the only knight with a sword dangling at his side and a holstered gun on his hip.

A 20-piece band, behind him, was lustily playing a Sousa march. As the music ended, six mounted white policemen came trotting toward the head of the parade.

The newspaper clipping related, "Sergeant Purcell called upon Dr. Givin to halt. 'This parade is illegal,' the sergeant explained. 'You have no city permit. Disperse your men and clear this street!'

"In reply to Sergeant Purcell's request, Dr. Givin shouted the single word, 'Charge!' Drawing his gun as his horse dashed forward, the Negro dentist started firing at the surprised police. His first two shots killed Sergeant Neill Purcell and Officer Bernard Feeney.

"The remaining four mounted policemen opened fire in self-defense, killing four Negroes and wounding five others. Dr. Givin, whose murderous rage had launched the Battle of Archer Avenue, surrendered meekly. He was sitting slumped on his horse and weeping when police reinforcements arrested him."

The reports of Dr. Givin's trial were brief and carried in the back pages. They identified Howard Givin as a fanatic who called himself Prince Ephraim and who had long devoted himself to the fomenting of race riots in Chicago. The trial had lasted only four days. The jury had returned its verdict in 20 minutes -- hanging.

Thus, I finally met Ephraim -- in the death cell of the Cook County jail. Jacobi insisted on two guards' watching over me as I interviewed the doomed man.

"He's nutty as hell," Jacobi explained, "and dangerous every minute."

Inside the cell, Ephraim held his hand out to me.

"I'm happy to see you at last," he said. "Please be seated."

I sat on a stool and stared at a tall, thin, small-shouldered man with a bony, black-satin face and deep-socketed eyes. The eyes smiled as he spoke:

"You can be of great help to me, as I know you will from everything Miss De Long has told me. I'm negotiating with the Cunard Steamship Line for the transport of 1000 Negroes to Dakar. Our pioneer contingent. Men of high heart and strong hands. I have been unable to get in touch with Mr. Laurence Anderson, the Cunard representative in Chicago. Will you be good enough to tell Mr. Anderson that I shall have all the visas cleared in a few weeks -- by September 21, the latest?"

September 21 was the day set for his hanging.

Apparently, Dr. Givin hadn't heard of that disturbing event. Nor was he even aware that he sat in a prison cell. A thin, coal-eyed Negro, entirely divorced from reality, talked to me for an hour about the kingdom he was rearing. As I listened I remembered the basic law of our land -- an insane man must not be hanged. I wondered how the State of Illinois could flout this law and hang anyone so obviously demented as Ephraim. But remembering that he was a Negro and that he had killed two white policemen, I knew he would hang on September 21 despite any law to the contrary.

As I was leaving, skinny Jacobi and his soiled batwing face stood in the doorway of his office.

"There's a lady inside wishes to talk to you," he said, and winked archly.

Dido sat on the battered black-leather couch in the warden's office. But it wasn't the Dido I had known. An erotic caricature of that Dido held out a lace-gloved hand to me as she spoke my name in a coy, throaty voice. Her cheeks were brightened with carnelian tints, her lips heavily reddened, her eyes mascaraed. She wore a tight coral dress that competed with her skin. Glistening black stockings made her legs look like exclamation marks.

Sitting beside Dido was a lawyer I knew, Jacob Joslyn. Attorney Joslyn was a heavyset dandy with curly gray, perfume-reeking hair. His thick fingers held Dido's bare arm in a full-ownership grip.

Joslyn was one of the most expensive legal silver-tongues of the town. His talents were available only to criminals with sturdy bank accounts. A sick feeling told me he was being well rewarded as Dr. Givin's new counsel. His bloodshot face beaming at Dido looked like an opened bedroom door.

Dido said to me as I sat dumbly beside her, "I've picked out the best of Ephraim's pamphlets. I would appreciate it if you could get some of them quoted in your newspaper. Mr. Joslyn thinks it would be a big help -- don't you, Jacob?"

"I intend to leave no stone unturned, sir," lawyer Joslyn said. "Have them printed in your newspaper, by all means."

Dido removed a dozen small pamphlets from a new handbag.

"I'll try," I said, pocketing Ephraim's oratory, "and when can I see you?"

"After I comes back," Dido said. Her shadowed eyes smiled at the cloud of perfume beside her. "I'm going to Springfield with Mr. Joslyn to get a pardon for Ephraim form Governor De-neen."

"Wouldn't it be better," I asked, "to get a commission of alienists appointed to examine Ephraim and prove that he's insane? I just talked to him and --"

Dido interrupted with a loud cry. Tears ran from her eyes as she wailed, "No! No! Ephraim isn't crazy! He's sane! He's sane! Oh, God, I thought you were my friend." Her gloved hands seized my cheeks. "Look at me," she said in the voice I remembered, "look at Dido. Be her friend."

"I am," I said.

Her gloved fingers clung to my face as the tears dripped from her cheeks.

"Then remember," Dido said, "remember that Ephraim is a great man. With a great dream. Don't rob him."

"There, there," lawyer Joslyn put a nicely tailored arm around her and squeezed hard, "no need to weep, Dido. Just put your faith in my hands, my dear child, and I'll carry your dream to victory."

I watched the gloating, gray-haired dandy guide Dido out of the office as if she were a prize captured on the high seas.

• • •

Mr. Mahoney would have none of the pamphlets. Not of the copy I handed him, detailing the obvious insanity of the doomed dentist.

"I wish you would bear in mind," said Mr. Mahoney, "that you are being paid to be a reporter, not a crusader. And the possible lunacy of Prince Ephraim is zero in news."

I visited Ephraim once a week and took him paper and pencils for his cell labors. He was writing out, elaborately, the legal, military and judicial structure of his new Negro Kingdom in Africa.

"It's coming along fine," the deep-socketed eyes smiled at me. "Miss DeLong will see to having the work printed as soon as I've completed it." He looked lovingly at his pile of copy. "The first Negro constitution since Carthage," he said.

I marveled at how a man as mentally alive as Ephraim could so persistently ignore the fact that he was going to be hanged soon, ignore even the fact that he was a prisoner in a jail cell. Obviously, craziness was a world of its own. It supplied its own decor as well as preferred events.

And I tried not to think of Dido. Her name made my heart feel desperate. Mr. Mahoney asked me one afternoon, "Has your friend, Prince Ephraim, made any comment on his royal fiancée -- a certain Miss Dido De Long? Our Spring field man tells me she's staging a one-woman sexual assault on the capitol. Yes, sir," Mr. Mahoney enjoyed the tale, "hopping from bed to bed in quest of a governor's pardon."

I almost hated Mr. Mahoney.

I had never before known anything wrong in the world of myself. Crime, murder, suicide, swindle and perversion were my daily pickings. But they were outside my world, a storm that blew and rattled wildly beyond its snug windows. Now the storm was inside the windows, the wrong was around me. I had discovered a new fact -- that injustice existed, and that everybody I knew was somehow a part of it, was somehow involved in the destruction of Dido and Ephraim.

• • •

There were only a few of us on the benches in the hanging chamber. The City Press, our local news service, had a man on the story. The other papers weren't covering it, not even the Journal. I was there on my own.

I sat staring at the small steel door that opened on the balcony leading to the scaffold. Jacobi had given me a "scoop" a half hour ago. He was going to let the doomed man's girlfriend watch the hanging from the balcony doorway. He added, with a leer, "She bought a ticket from me last night." The scoop never saw print, but it remained a leech on my memory.

Dr. Howard Givin led the death march onto the gallows platform. He was in his best suit and his shoes were freshly shined. He looked spruced up, as if for some social event, except that his collar and tie were missing, and his long neck was bare. The small steel balcony door remained slightly opened behind him.

In the dim gallows light it was hard to make out the expression on the doomed man's satin-black face. The head was lifted, the body straight in its well-pressed suit. No more could be noted, until the guards started strapping his arms to his sides. Then I saw that Dr. Givin was holding a pile of copy paper in his hand. It was his manuscript of the laws for his Negro kingdom. The guards left it in his hand. It disappeared under the white robe they put on him.

Warden Jacobi adjusted the rope noose around the long black neck. This done, he removed a white hood from his pocket. The moment of hush had come.

Warden Jacobi asked his routine question, "Howard Givin, have you anything you want to say?"

"Not at this time," Prince Ephraim answered ...

I closed my eyes when the trap banged down.

• • •

In my attic room above the river, I wrote stories about Dido De Long and tore them up. Winter came. Great snowfalls stood outside my high window. I dreamed of my iceboat in Racine. The days were lively with new and raucous doings. I scurried after tragedies and disasters, won a few by-lines, and capered with cronies through carnival nights. Many things came and went in the sieve of youth. But Dido remained, like a sly pain.

One spring afternoon, snooping for some data in the coroner's office, I found a new clerk in charge of the files -- Mrs. Fred Busse. My heart bounced and my voice shook as I asked her, "Is Dido De Long in town?"

Mrs. Busse gave me an address.

In the spring evening I walked up a flight of back stairs to a broken door in a two-storied shanty close to the railroad tracks. Dido was inside the door. I saw the room first -- small, barefloored, broken-walled and empty, except for a cot.

Dido was sitting on the cot. She wore a gray dress with narrow white collaring. Her face was thinner, but the rest was Dido -- the one I had known. I sat on the cot beside her and listened to the husky, dreamy voice tell me of her new work. She was associated with the revivalist Reverend Henry Thompson. She sang in his choir at all his tabernacle rallies. His tabernacle was a tent.

In this cell of a room, Dido was as beautiful as I remembered her. She became silent and looked at me with glowing eyes. A longing for something wonderful ached in me, for something that was flesh, and soul and dream.

I put my arms around her and tried to kiss her. Dido's white teeth smiled at me as she moved out of my embrace.

"Not at this time," said Dido, in a kindly voice.