Miss Cynthie stands on the train platform having arrived in the Big Apple for the first time in her life, an older from a small southern town. Even so, she is not overwhelmed nor afraid, but a little bewildered by the buzz of activity among the Red Caps handling baggage this way and that. She’s also a little breathless over something happening to her for the first time in long existence on this earth: one of the Red Caps addressed her as “Madam.” After all, back home everybody just calls her plain old “Miss Cynthie.”
Turns out, this here trip is the first time she’s ever more than fifty miles away from Waxhaw. She’s come to the New York to pay a visit on her grandson. Conversation ensues and the Miss Cynthie learns that the well-spoken young baggage handler isn’t intent on making it a career, but is in school studying to be a doctor. He tells her he bets she’ll have a great time in the big city to which she responds—seriously, but in light-tone—that he mustn’t ever bet because that is a sin. She also tells him that her grandson wanted to become a doctor as well. He never did, but she’s not entirely sure what became of him. Something good, however, because he’s been able to send money home and was dressed to the nines when he once returned last year. Still, David was a little squirrelly when it came to telling people exactly what he did that paid so well. Miss Cynthie reckons it might be something not spoken of in polite company like maybe being an undertaker.
When David arrives, he is flamboyant in his public declaration of affection for his grandmother, but the Red Cap acts a little strange. He recognizes the man immediately and someone he and another handler know as Dave Tappen. He also shares a joke with the other Red Cap: “She hopes that David has turned out to be an undertaker!” This is cause for both men to laugh out loud.
Meanwhile, David has to pat down his grandmother’s initial fears that he’s gotten mixed up in bootlegging. She presses the issue of trying to get him to spill the beans, but he merely puts her off, telling her that everything will become clear by the following night. Then he takes her for a drive through town and Miss Cynthie begins to perceive by reputation where they are heading, excited and thrilled to see the famous Harlem she’s heard about with her own eyes. When David tries to specifically point out the theaters of 125th St.—“little Broadway”—however, she is unimpressed and distracted by an enormous church just for colored parishioners. When they get to David’s apartment, it is luxurious to the point of even housing a grand piano. Whatever it is that David is doing in New York, it is most certainly not tending to the preparation of the dead for the afterlife. Miss Cynthie is also introduced to Ruthie, David’s girlfriend who, when they get a moment alone, tries to warn him of the potential for shocking the old woman if he reveals what he does for a living in the way he plans. Just then Miss Cynthie’s voice is heard from the bedroom singing a song about dancing with a woman who has a run in her stocking.
The next night the big moment finally arrives when David and Ruth lead Miss Cynthie into the Lafayette Theater where her grandson is suddenly set upon with furious devotion by various attendants. They take a seat in the front row just in time for a “miraculous device of the device” to come to an end: a motion picture. At this, the entire theater explodes in a fantasia of lights, sound and music. Every seat in the magnificent hall is filled with faces, not just black faces white, brown, tan, and even yellow faces all staring toward the stage in intense expectation and excitement.
Some men take the seats behind Miss Cynthie and David introduces them as his managers, who call him Tap and mention his great little partner. Then a life musical act takes the stage and performs amid a set resembling cotton fields. When it’s over, David and Ruthie leave, telling his grandmother to stay and enjoy the show while they’re gone. She hardly notices, however, as her initial contempt for the sinfulness of the theater is overcome by emotions stirred through the memories of her own youth spent among the cotton fields of the south. A ragtime production which follows captures the fancy of the “sinners” in the audience, but still she is captivated. She even finds the two black-face comedians who appear and do a routine to be comical. The smile dissipates with the next act, a musical in which the participants are inappropriately dressed in skimpy costumes displaying too much flesh. The slump of the smile instantly turns into a stiffening of her whole body at the sight of her grandson suddenly appearing from behind the mingled bodies of the skimpily dressed women. His tap dancing is a display of irrefutable virtuosity, becoming one with the stage and music, a performance that captivates everyone but one. Miss Cynthie stares on horror at the abomination of the sight of the young boy she raised to know right from wrong and whom she dared dream might one day become a preacher now turned into an “unholy prince among sinners.”
The show continues and delights the entire crow, but Miss Cynthie watches through eyes which now belongs to a wretched failure who could not save her grandson from a terrible fall from grace into the temptations of iniquity. The performance comes to an end with its usual set of encores and then the famous Dave Tappen does something he’s never done before. He appears on stage alone and begins to tap softly, sweetly and with none of the furious energy which had consumed the stage before. The tapping begins to form into a rhythm and when the pattern of the rhythm has become clear, he begins to sing softly and sweetly. It is a song about dancing with a woman who has a run in her stocking and as he sings, he looks toward his grandmother and smiles. And soon a transformation takes place in what he sees as Miss Cynthie stiffness begins to loosen and her body moves forward and she listens more rapturously.
Miss Cynthie then turns own attention away from the stage and looks out over the crowd where she is stunned to see an alteration herself. Gone are the greedy faces consumed with drinking in the sinful behavior being openly enacted on the stage. Instead, the faces are smiling with a grin of innocent glee no longer stimulated by sinful desires. In the span of hardly a few minutes, her grandson single-handedly tamed the hellish deviltry of the entire audience into guileless children simply enjoying the antics of one of them. And when the song concludes, David introduces his grandmother and informs the crowd that she is the one person in the world responsible for all his success and all the enjoyment they have gotten from his performance. Picking up one of the many flowers ritualistically tossed onto the stage, he walks over to Miss Cynthie and presents it to her and in that single moment, every remaining vestige of doubt about her grandson’s life and future drains away. As she sits waiting for David and Ruth to reappear following the finale, she taps her own foot in a rhythmic pattern and sings to herself a song about a woman who has a run in her stocking.
