by Carla Kaplan
Harlem Renaissance physician and writer Rudolph Fisher captured the interracial excitement of these gatherings in his essay “The Caucasian Storms Harlem”:
It may be a season’s whim, then, this sudden, contagious interest in everything Negro. . . . But suppose it is a fad—to say that explains nothing. How came the fad? What occasions the focusing of attention on this particular thing. . . . Is this interest akin to that of the Virginians on the veranda of a plantation’s big-house—sitting genuinely spellbound as they hear the lugubrious strains floating up from the Negro quarters? Is it akin to that of the African explorer, Stanley, leaving a village far behind, but halting in spite of himself to catch the boom of its distant drum? Is it significant of basic human responses, the effect of which, once admitted, will extend far beyond cabarets? . . . Time was when white people went to Negro cabarets to see how Negroes acted; now Negroes go to these same cabarets to see how white people act.
All the sudden popularity could be offensive. The idea that blacks should provide a social safety valve for stifled white passions was especially insulting, as was the pressure to perform a version of blackness that satisfied whites’ expectations. “Ordinary Negroes,” Langston Hughes maintained, did not “like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo.” One black newspaper called the influx of whites into Harlem “a most disgusting thing to see.” A 1926 article in the New York Age noted that “the majority of Harlem Negroes take exception to the emphasis laid upon the cabarets and night clubs as being representative of the real everyday life of that section. . . . All this has but little to do with the progress of the new Negro.” Wallace Thurman, usually known for irreverence, was uncharacteristically sober in objecting to the fact that “few white people ever see the whole of Harlem. . . . White people will assure you that they have seen and are authorities on Harlem and things Harlemese. When pressed for amplification they go into ecstasies over the husky-voiced blues singers, the dancing waiters, and Negro frequenters of cabarets who might well have stepped out of a caricature by Covarrubias.”
Others, however, while agreeing that the “vogue” was suspect and sure to be short-lived, advocated taking advantage of the sudden surge of interest as long as it lasted. Black novelist Nella Larsen urged her friends to “write some poetry, or something” quickly, before the fad ended. Zora Neale Hurston took white friends to hear jazz and see black church services. It never occurred to her to charge for doing this. Enterprising black tour guides, on the other hand, charged $5 a person for “slumming” parties of the Harlem cabarets. One “slumming hostess” mailed prospective white clients an invitation that read:
Here in the world’s greatest city it would both amuse and also interest you to see the real inside of the New Negro Race of Harlem. You have heard it discussed, but there are very few who really know. Because the new Negro will be looked upon as a novelty, I am in a position to carry you through Harlem as you would go slumming through Chinatown. My guides are honest and have been instructed to give the best of service, and I can give the best of references of being both capable and honest so as to give you a night or day of pleasure. Your season is not completed with thrills until you have visited Harlem through Miss _________________’s representatives.
Yet there were those who agreed with the black gossip columnist Geraldyn Dismond that the Harlem “vogue” represented an important cultural moment and was a form of “social revolution,” in spite of its limitations. For example, Chandler Owen, one of the editors and founders of the black radical journal The Messenger, believed that the racially integrated Harlem cabaret was “America’s most democratic institution . . . a little paradise within.” He argued that Harlem’s nightlife provided an education in interracial understanding unavailable elsewhere in the nation and was, hence, invaluable:
Here white and colored men and women still drank, ate, sang and danced together. Smiling faces, light hearts, undulating couples in poetry of motion conspired with syncopated music to convert the hell and death from without to a little paradise within. . . . These black and tan cabarets establish the desire of the races to mix and to mingle. They show that there is lurking ever a prurient longing for the prohibited association between the races which should be a matter of personal choice. . . . They prove that the white race is taking the initiative in seeking out the Negro; that in the social equality equation the Negro is the sought, rather than the seeking factor. . . . Fundamentally the cabaret is a place where people abandon their cant and hypocrisy just as they do in going on a hike, a picnic, or a hunting trip.
Harlem’s parties could be seen in a similar light. Carl Van Vechten and his wife, Fania Marinoff, threw spectacular parties in their apartment on West 55th Street (sometimes referred to as the “Midtown office of the N.A.A.C.P.”). According to Langston Hughes, they were parties “so Negro that they were reported as a matter of course in the colored society columns, just as though they occurred in Harlem.” Careers could be created from the networking opportunities such parties provided. Van Vechten’s daily notebooks detail that. Nella Larsen, who was trained as a nurse, married to a chemist, and working as a librarian—partly as an assistant to white librarian Ernestine Rose of the Harlem branch library—wanted to write her way into the “vogue” in 1927 but had no background as a writer. She wrote a short, intense novella about the myriad obstacles to a young black woman’s fulfillment. Without Harlem’s social whirl, it would have stalled.
Parties were her opportunity. On March 16, 1927, she went to a party at the Van Vechten–Marinoffs’ at which she mingled with Nickolas Muray, the era’s most important photographer; Louise Bryant, a New Woman activist and the wife of John Reed; Harlem celebrity James Weldon Johnson; William Rose Benét, the publisher of The Saturday Review of Literature; his wife, writer Elinor Wylie; and editor and publisher Blanche Knopf. Four nights later, she joined Van Vechten and Marinoff for another party, that time at the home of actress Rita Romilly, where she spent the evening with Harry Block, a senior editor at Knopf; T. R. Smith, the senior editor at Boni & Liveright (then the second most important publisher of black literature); and Blanche Knopf again. Nine days later, she joined some of the same group at a party that also included Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walter White, Rebecca West, French writer Paul Morand, and others.
White editors such as Blanche Knopf were anxious for black manuscripts but also insecure about their ability to judge black literature. They leaned heavily on the advice of a few white advisers and favored black writers recommended by them, especially those they had come to know socially.
That month, Knopf accepted Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand. While it was being edited at Knopf, Larsen attended another party, on April 6, that included A’Lelia Walker; Paul Robeson; Walter White; Geraldyn Dismond; and the editor of the Chicago Defender, one of the most important black newspapers in the country. A few nights after that, she attended another small party with Van Vechten and Marinoff, Langston Hughes, and Dorothy Peterson, a poet and writer. Over the next few nights she attended parties given by Dorothy Peterson and by Eddie Wasserman, the heir to the Seligman banking fortune; these parties included such guests as Harlem Renaissance writer and gadfly Richard Bruce Nugent, poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, writer Alice Dunbar-Nelson, writer and editor Arna Bontemps, salonista and writer Muriel Draper, and, again, editor Blanche Knopf. In March 1928, Larsen won second place in the coveted Harmon Award for literature. In the fall of 1929, her second novel, Passing, was accepted by Knopf. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Passing was feted with a “tea” (cocktail party) at Blanche Knopf’s on the day of its publication, ensuring that it received widespread critical attention and good initial sales.
There were many forms of modern rebellion; Blanche Knopf in drag.
In spite of he
r extraordinary talent, without the social opportunities Van Vechten and Marinoff’s parties provided, such success might not have occurred. Those parties were Harlem’s Rotary Club or Chamber of Commerce. Once Larsen dropped out of that social world in the early 1930s, she never published again.
Most of the parties were hosted by women, principally the white women of Harlem. Indeed, Carl Van Vechten’s parties, as they are always known, were mostly the work of his wife, Fania Marinoff. She ordered the food, checked on invitations, and kept conversations from getting out of hand. Though often dismissed as inconsequential, hostessing was a way for white women to turn the roles available to them toward more professional goals. Dismissing these events as merely frivolous—in comparison with the serious work of culture building through journalism and organizing—has buried some of white women’s most earnest, if also sometimes awkward, attempts to take part in the “New Negro” movement. But given the world that Miss Anne entered and the unique place she occupied within it, sometimes awkward gestures were also deemed effective.
“An Interracial Extravaganza”: Libby Holman and the NAACP
On December 8, 1929, black and white New York came together to raise money for the NAACP on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. In spite of the stock market crash, the benefit, sponsored by the Women’s Auxiliary of the NAACP and produced by Walter White (in his new role as acting secretary) was completely sold out. White rented the four-year-old Forrest Theatre on West 49th Street (now known as the Eugene O’Neill Theatre) for the princely sum of $500 (just under $10,000 in today’s currency). The NAACP had already sponsored a midnight showing of the wildly successful all-black musical Shuffle Along, which White now intended to top with his own “extravaganza,” the “biggest benefit that Broadway has ever known,” he promised. He engaged more than two dozen of the most popular black and white performers of the day. Thanks to his aggressive lobbying, the lineup ranged from Duke Ellington with his Cotton Club Orchestra to blues singer Clara Smith to Jimmy Durante (already a jazz and vaudeville star). There were performers from the London production of Show Boat, the Jubilee Singers, and even a female impersonator. The entertainer White wanted most is unknown now, but she was one of the most sought-after performers of the 1920s, and White faced stiff competition to secure her for the benefit. She was a white actress and torch singer named Libby Holman. Holman performed in a wildly popular sultry blackface number called “Moanin’ Low” as a Harlem prostitute.
Hollywood head shot of Libby Holman.
Today it is hard to imagine blackface and the NAACP together. The “crippling” black image that blackface presented to whites—“childlike . . . comic . . . pathetic . . . foolish . . . vulgar . . . lazy . . . unrestrained . . . and insatiable”—reinforced “deep emotional needs” at the core of white racism. But blackface did not die with the Civil War or even with Reconstruction. Nor was it merely a southern form. Although black newspapers urged its demise, the form was still popular throughout the nation in the 1920s, “standard material for stage comedy.” The Harlem nightclubs that catered to whites regularly featured blackface comedians as well as mulatto chorines. The man or woman in blackface was a “surrogate” for the guilty pleasures of his white creators, licensing a range of behaviors that the “Protestant ethic” prohibited. Blackface could still be found from vaudeville stages to the Metropolitan Opera House, and it was performed for black audiences as well as white. There were renowned blackface performers of both races. In a nightclub description in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man, black blackface minstrel performers, great black prizefighters, and Frederick Douglass are all accorded equal status as emblems of black achievement.
Libby Holman’s blackface “Moanin’ Low” had been the runaway hit of New York City’s 1929 season, and White had been especially determined to secure it for his benefit. “We would want by all means to have you sing ‘Moanin’ Low,’” he wrote to her.
New York’s literati turned out in force. Harlem novelist Nella Larsen rhapsodized about the “fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty” that made up the audience’s “moving mosaic” that night: “sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, white.” Carl Van Vechten, one of White’s advisers, was there with Fania Marinoff. Amy and Arthur Spingarn, benefactors and NAACP officials, had one of the six boxes available that night. So did Mary White Ovington, who was honored with a quarter-page photograph as the “mother” of the NAACP and whose family paid for a full-page ad for their department store. Alfred and Blanche Knopf also had a box, as did A’Lelia Walker. James Weldon Johnson and his wife, activist Grace Nail, attended. Artist Miguel Covarrubias, Harold Jackman, performer Taylor Gordon, and Geraldyn Dismond were all present. Most of the white women in this book were there. Nancy Cunard was in Europe in 1929, and Lillian Wood rarely left Tennessee. But Annie Nathan Meyer, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, Charlotte Osgood Mason, and Fannie Hurst were all checked off, on internal NAACP memorandums, as responding favorably to requests to be patrons.
The show was a “huge success” financially and, in the eyes of the NAACP, an even bigger symbolic victory as a model of integration. Blacks and whites mingled freely throughout the $4 orchestra, $2 balcony, and $5 box seats of the Forrest Theatre. Such an intimate mingling, music historian Todd Decker has pointed out, was highly unusual in the still segregated 1920s. Even black celebrities such as Paul Robeson were “afraid to purchase orchestra seats for fear of insult” at most Broadway shows. The evening’s interracialism would have been “extremely difficult, if not impossible” outside the auspices of the NAACP.
Such a display was indeed cause for self-congratulation in the Jim Crow world of 1929. But it also entailed complications. Just a few months before the benefit, James Weldon Johnson had tagged those complications the special “dilemma” of the Negro artist. “The Aframerican,” he wrote,
faces a special problem which the plain American author knows nothing about—the problem of the double audience. It is more than a double audience; it is a divided audience, an audience made up of two elements with differing and often opposite and antagonistic points of view. . . . This division of audience takes the solid ground from under the feet of the Negro . . . and leaves him suspended.
Given the Forrest Theatre’s mixed audience, White’s choice to headline Holman’s “Moanin’ Low” seems peculiar indeed. Raw, undignified, and titillating, “Moanin’ Low” evoked an imaginary black “low life” steeped in sexuality, primitive emotions, and violence. Those were the very stereotypes the NAACP worked to contest as not “representative of the real everyday life” of blacks. Hence this performance of a mulatta prostitute begging her black pimp not to leave her—“My sweet man is gonna go / When he goes, Oh Lordee! / Gonna die / My sweet man should pass me by”—seemed destined to offend its black audience and pander to the worst misconceptions of its white one. Why, then, did Walter White pursue that particular piece so avidly? And why did black newspapers, usually quick to point out stereotypes, note only that the mixed audience had been “well pleased” by “Moanin’ Low”? Why was Holman not seen—as she surely would be seen today—as insulting her hosts and promoters—trespassing upon, rather than just impersonating, blackness?
Those who study whiteness would call such impersonation “onerous ownership,” the arrogant assumption of defining blackness. But not only were intellectuals such as White not offended; they welcomed an extraordinary range of responses to what Judith Butler calls “ready-mades,” or conventional ideas of identity. Many Harlemites felt that Nigger Heaven had focused too bright a light on Harlem’s cabarets and nightclubs and portrayed its citizens as possessing “a birthright that all civilized races were struggling to get back to . . . this love of drums, of exciting rhythms, this naïve delight in glowing colour . . . this warm, sexual emotion,” when they needed to be seen, by whites, as lawyers, doctors, professors, and politicians. Nevertheless, White’s souvenir brochure for the be
nefit included an essay by Van Vechten that encouraged blacks to “keep inchin’ along,” advice usually anathema to the militant spirit of the New Negro movement. It was not White’s only risky gambit that night.
The printed program, which sold for 50 cents as a souvenir brochure, with autographed copies auctioned off for much more, was designed especially for the evening by Harlem’s favorite artist, Aaron Douglas. Its cover image of a white man and a black woman, their facial silhouettes touching evocatively, bathed in the light of a radiating sun labeled “NAACP,” depicted one of the most taboo issues in race politics. Was White using his vaunted status as “voluntary Negro,” someone who had chosen the “struggle of the black people of the United States,” to make a point about interracial affiliation? If so, his program and his inclusion of Libby Holman both made space for Miss Anne in Harlem, suggesting that choosing—even impersonating—blackness over whiteness could be a meaningful act of solidarity. As someone who looked entirely white and who had to insist on his blackness daily, was Walter White suggesting that passing for black, performing as black, and identifying with blacks should be encouraged, not discouraged, throughout Harlem?
NAACP benefit program, close-up.
The space given to Holman by the NAACP would most likely have encouraged both Edna Margaret Johnson’s bid for acceptance and Nancy Cunard’s assumption, printed on the same page as Johnson’s “Prayer,” that she could speak as—and for—a black man bent on destroying racist “crackers.” With so much discussion in American culture of blacks crossing the “color line” and passing as white, it would have been inevitable that some white women—including Johnson and Cunard—would imagine a reverse crossing that passed from white to black.
