A dream
Max Disher and Bunny Brown had been “pals” since the war when they “soldiered together” in France. Max was “one of the Aframerican Fire Insurance Company’s crack agents.” Bunny was “a teller in the Douglass Bank” and both bore the reputation of “gay blades in black Harlem.” The two had in common “a weakness rather prevalent among Aframerican bucks: they preferred yellow women.” Both swore that there were three things important for happiness of “a colored gentleman: yellow money, yellow women and yellow taxis.” They had little difficulty in getting “the first and none at all in getting the third but the yellow women they found flighty and fickle.” This imagery helps to understand Max Disher better.
The melting pot
Max Disher and Bunny Brown sat in the bar, they “drank in silence” and looked at “the motley crowd” around them. There were “blacks, browns, yellows, and whites chatting, flirting, drinking,” and “rubbing shoulders in the democracy of night life.” “A fog of tobacco smoke” wreathed their heads and the din from “the industrious jazz band made all but the loudest shrieks inaudible.” “In and out” among the tables “danced the waiters, trays balanced aloft,” while the patrons, “arrayed in colored papers caps,” beat time with the orchestra. This imagery helps readers to immerse themselves into the atmosphere of a jazz bar.
Mighty and loved
Max fell asleep about five o’clock and “promptly dreamed of” then woman who he met that evening. He “dreamed of dancing with her, dining with her, motoring with her.” He dreamt of “sitting beside her on a golden throne” while “millions of white slaves prostrated themselves before him.” Then there was “a nightmare of grim, gray men with shotguns,” “baying hounds,” “a heap of gasoline-soaked faggots,” and “a screeching fanatical mob.” This imagery evokes a feeling of fear.
