The Philosophy of Miss Cynthie
In the opening scene Miss Cynthie gives some advice to the helpful Red Cap which recurs again at the end when David relays the same advice to the audience in the theater. One can effectively call this advice Miss Cynthie’s philosophical foundation: “whatever you do, do like a church-steeple: aim high and go straight.”
Apartment Living
Apartment buildings—especially those of the vertical structural type—were not exact common anywhere in the south in the first half of the 20th century. Miss Cynthie’s initial exposure to David’s living quarters is placed into the only context she can conceive that connects living in spacious Dixie to living in cramped Manhattan:
“Y’all live like bees in a hive, don't y’?”
Entering the Lion’s Den
The very religious and non-hypocritically pious Miss Cynthie has been taken to the great secret of her grandson’s means of living. And it couldn’t come as a bigger surprise—even a bootlegger’s speakeasy would have been less shocking: a theater. Unlike a speakeasy, however, Miss Cynthie is willing to be coerced into entry. Even so, the scene is painted with Biblical imagery: “She let him and Ruth lead her, like an early Christian martyr, into the Lafayette Theater.”
A Grandmother Runs Through It
Miss Cynthee may see herself as a martyr to the Christian cause, but her grandson sees her through a different lens of Christian imagery. He is a fisherman who must cast his net (or line) in order to make Miss Cynthee an apostle to his cause:
“Having thus baited her interest, the show now proceeded to play it like the trout through swift-flowing waters of wickedness. Resist as it might, her mind was caught and drawn into impious subsequences.”
Reverend Tappen
While raising young David, Miss Cynthee had dared to hope that one day he might grow up to become a preacher. That he has instead become a tap-dancing fool entertaining big-city sinners breaks her heart. Until, that is, a miracle occurs and the famous entertain Dave Tappen does something that only the greatest preachers have ever done on their best day:
“David had dwarfed into unimportance, wiped off their faces, swept out of their minds every trace of what had seemed to be sin; had reduced it all to mere trivial detail and revealed these revelers as a crowd of children, enjoying the guileless antics of another child.”
