It's rare that a person gets to live a dream so I guess I should consider myself lucky. I'm not living out my dream exactly but I am living somebody's: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s to be exact. OK, not all of it, just the part, "where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers." I have many good friends in Tampa and most of them are white. The fact that I'm black doesn't keep us from going to the movies, having dinner, sharing secrets or doing any of the things that friends do together. This is good. It means that while racism is still in full effect, it has receded to the point where I can comfortably be friends with people of another race.
I used to think it was a shame when I read that in school cafeterias across the country, black kids and white kids segregate themselves. But lately, I find myself wanting to pick up my tray and go sit at the black table for a while.
The people there share my culture. I don't have to explain my hair. They may not celebrate Kwanzaa, but they at least know what it is. They celebrate the Fourth of July but they know that it's just an excuse to have a barbecue, that the premise of the holiday is a sham.
Most important, among my own I can be an individual. Most black people know enough other black people to know that we don't all think, act or dance alike.
Finding the black table in Tampa is a different story.
I've lived in Long Beach, Calif., and in Buffalo, N.Y., and in both of those cities I was able to not only find a black table but whole rooms full of them. Tampa is different. Tampa is southern, not just geographically but culturally. Miami is in the south but it's not southern.
Being single and still young enough to pretend I'm in my 20s, I hit the club scene first. There are three types of night club in Tampa: those with an all-black clientele, those with an all-white clientele, and those that have a mostly white clientele but have a kind of "black night" where they play hip-hop and R&B and a large number of black people show up. But only on that night. On other nights the club plays some form of rock, Goth or other music that blacks tend to avoid in droves.
The Cotton Club is an all-black club all the time. It's located off North Howard Avenue in a neighborhood that has seen more prosperous times. I was a little skeptical about what sort of crowd I would find there. I needn't have been. On Friday night the streets around the club are surrounded by cars of every make and model, and the club is so packed it can be hard to move around. But even with all of those people and the music blaring, the vibe is mellow and relaxed. The people are mostly older — in their 30s and 40s and the owner prefers it that way. "I don't go for that young jitterbug stuff," he told me. And the youngsters stay away.
If you arrive at the Cotton Club early enough on Friday, you might hear Luther Vandross and other old-school R&B artists who get your body swaying and make you reminisce about what you were doing when Luther's "Bad Boy/Having a Party" came out. The club's patrons seemed to enjoy this since the song is about a young man sneaking out to a party when his mother said he couldn't go, and most of them were old enough to have done that when the song came out. I was in elementary school when the song hit the airwaves, and most of the parties I was invited to involved bobbing for apples and getting home by nightfall. It was my parents who had to sneak off to parties while I terrorized a babysitter.
Later the DJ skillfully switches from Luther to Outkast to Gerald Levert. The dance floor is elbow to elbow but it doesn't get wild. Probably because the patrons don't want to muss their three-piece suits or fall from their 3-inch heels.
"Dress to impress" written on fliers advertising clubs or a party is code for "welcome black people" and the crowd at the Cotton Club is proof. There are no grungy jeans or thrift store specials here. This is both nice to see and a bit of a problem given my penchant for grungy jeans and thrift store specials. I am far too cheap to wear the designer clothes that are the norm in these places. To prepare for my journey into the nightclub scene, a friend with better fashion sense had to take me shopping for clothes that wouldn't make me stand out like the poser that I was.
