Chapter 9 reconstructs Ilf and Petrov’s adventures in Black New York, which they largely omitted from their published work. Soviet antiracism offered little guidance when it came to understanding or recounting the unsettling intersections of gender, sexuality, pleasure, and race the writers encountered at a Harlem nightclub or the unexpected meeting with a Russian-speaking African American singer in the cast of "Porgy and Bess." To the extent that Ilf and Petrov told the story of Black New York at all, they relied on a “romantic racialization” of African Americans as naturally spiritual and musical.