I’m transported into Dessi’s world: a city struggling to drag itself from the Great Depression. Black people, striving to live and love and laugh and sing in a world that sometimes made all those things harder to do. But they carved out a vibrant, spectacular community in Harlem. A time of excellence and style and art. Of fur-trimmed coats and pomade-slicked hair and satin gloves. A place populated with dancers and dreamers and thinkers and agitators and writers and folks just living. Making do and making history in the trench of everyday life.
