One dance had made me the most famous colored woman in the world.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

Since I personified the savage on the stage, I tried to be as civilized as possible in daily life.

Is that what they call a vocation, what you do with joy as if you had fire in your heart, the devil in your body?

Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.

I was learning the importance of names - having them, making them - but at the same time I sensed the dangers. Recognition was followed by oblivion, a yawning maw whose victims disappeared without a trace.

He was my cream, and I was his coffee - And when you poured us together, it was something.