ABSTRACT
Economic depressions are usually measured in the adult world by increasing unemployment, declining stock market prices, business bankruptcies, and assorted ailments all too well known to require repetition. Children have a far less grandiose view of such catastrophic matters. The author’s childhood in Harlem during the so-called Great Depression of 1929-1939, gave a less scientific, and certainly a far less hygienic, view of a depressed economy—an experience the author pray that neither him nor anyone else will need to repeat over the coming decade. The Great Depression played out as a dance macabre against a background of a Harlem world that displayed its own strange interior mixture of economic blues and theological joys. Losing movie money was a serious matter; films were a critical escape hatch from a world of grinding poverty to one of divine, if momentary, affluence.
