ABSTRACT
She had the most beautiful clothes: stylish gray silk dresses and plush fur coats. She looked like a movie star and lived in a luxurious apartment with a uniformed doorman who called her taxis and monitored her visitors. She was called Queenie or Madame St. Clair and she was the queen of illegal gambling in Harlem in New York City. Nobody is sure exactly where Stephanie St. Clair was born. She liked to tell people that she came from “European France,” and bragged that she spoke flawless European French—not the common French spoken by people of the Caribbean. In reality, she was probably born on either the island of Martinique or Guadeloupe, but she immigrated to America through Marseilles, France.
