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may want to deny (why, I’ll never quite know), but there are some that they just can’t escape. For instance, they can’t deny that they know how to make dancing music better than anyone else, that they give better parties than anyone else, that they are better at dancing spontaneously than anyone else. The spirit of these three things makes a successful discothèque, and black discothèques are better than anyone else’s. I visited La Martinique a couple of Fridays ago, and here are some of the things I noticed about the place.
    La Martinique is a very welcoming discothèque. It has real-wood chairs at small fake-marble-topped tables, soft lighting, a large dance floor that always seems freshly sanded, a bar where you will get good Screwdrivers (and it would be
wise not to have anything but), and a cigarette machine that charges seventy-five cents for a pack of cigarettes and takes only quarters.
    In the evenings, La Martinique becomes a regular discothèque, and the people who are responsible for the evening entertainment are not the same people who put on the lunchtime dancing affair. The people responsible for the lunchtime dancing are Pjay Jackson, a secretary with an advertising agency; Roni Bovette; and Marvin Gathers. Pjay and the two men have a corporation that they call The Open Nose Production. It’s a funny name but not unusual. It seems that whenever two or more black people go into the disco-party business in New York they give themselves names like A Nautilus Production or A Critical Path Production or The Winston Collection. Usually, at a disco party given by any one of the groups mentioned above, you are expressly forbidden to wear blue jeans, sneakers, or any other kind of clothing that will make you look poverty-stricken.
    Here are some of the things I noticed about the people at La Martinique:
    The people who go dancing there at lunch offer a special look at a new class of black people. It’s the class whose men are particularly fond of well-tailored suits made up in a polyester fabric, wear moderately high-heeled shoes, have their hair styled in a small, neat Afro, smoke Kool or Pall Mall cigarettes, and never say to a young lady, “Hey, sugah, what you doin’?” Clarence McDade, a sales representative for DHJ Industries, at 1345 Sixth Avenue, is a good example of this. He was wearing a maroon suit that was sedate in cut and fit. He
said about dancing at lunchtime at La Martinique, “I come here on Fridays because it’s a way of letting off tensions. The setup is nice, the crowd is nice, most of the men are junior executives, like myself. When I go dancing in the evening, I usually patronize places like Leviticus, Gatsby’s, and Nemo’s, but every Friday I come here.”
    The women look something like this: pants suits or stylishly cut dresses made from another kind of polyester fabric, six-inch wedge platform shoes, plastic jewelry, and hair styles that suggest the use of a great deal of Dixie Peach Bergamot, a perfumed hairdressing pomade. This genre of black-female grooming has two things going for it: it is constantly pushed in the magazine Essence, and it is often marketed under the heading “Easy Elegance.”
    Dancing at lunchtime at La Martinique is reasonably priced. Not only will two-fifty allow you to dance but it will also entitle you to a lunch of cold cuts, salad, and fruit. The music isn’t the top of black pop that you hear in most white discothèques. All the time I was there, I didn’t hear my favorite song, “Kung Fu Fighting.” The music that Ray, the resident d.j., is most fond of is long album cuts by B. T. Express, L.T.D., MFSB, Brian Auger, Manu Dibango, Hot Chocolate, The Bar-Kays, and the Average White Band.
    There is one advantage to going dancing in the daytime, and Jimmy Jackson, who works at a post office somewhere in Brooklyn, pointed it out to me just before I left. “I work during the