gowns postured, fingers elegantly crooked as they held a fan, a rose, a programme, meanwhile smiling condescendingly out upon an envious world flattening its nose against the plate glass barrier. A sociable woman, Selina, savouring life, she liked the lights, the colour, the rush, the noise. Her years of grinding work, with her face pressed down to the very soil itself, had failed to kill her zest for living. She prowled into the city’s foreign quarters—Italian, Greek, Chinese, Jewish. She penetrated the Black Belt, where Chicago's vast and growing Negro population shifted and moved and stretched its great limbs ominously, reaching out and out in protest and overflowing the bounds that irked it. Her serene face and her quiet manner, her bland interest and friendly look protected her. They thought her a social worker, perhaps; one of the uplifters. She bought and read the Independent, the Negro newspaper in which herb doctors advertised magic roots. She even sent the twenty-five cents required for a box of these, charmed by their names—Adam and Eve roots, Master of the Woods, Dragon’s Blood, High John the Conqueror, Jezebel Roots, Grains of Paradise.
“Look here, Mother,” Dirk would protest, “you can’t wander around like that. It isn’t safe. This isn’t High Prairie, you know. If you want to go round I'll get Saki to drive you.”
“That would be nice,” she said, mildly. But she never availed herself of this offer. Sometimes she went over to South Water Street, changed now, and
