by Carla Kaplan
Marriages between black men and white women, as George and Josephine well knew, were especially stigmatized. It was fashionable to cross race lines in cities such as New York and Paris if one crossed them just so: dancing at nightclubs, watching black revues on Broadway, visiting black churches, sponsoring black literature and arts, and attending interracial parties. But marrying black men, even where such marriages were legal, was not part of the accepted Harlem “vogue.” Josephine noted a “difference in attitude among Aframericans [George’s word] toward the Alice and Kip Rhinelander affair and the two marriages of Jack Johnson.” She knew that “love between a white woman and a black man was sensational even in the tumulte noir of the 1920s.”
Josephine and George were newspaper buffs. To keep up with his competition, in fact, George sometimes read as many as a dozen papers a day. Josephine had been reading black papers since the early 1920s, when she had departed Texas for San Francisco. (In fact, they had met through The Messenger, which he edited and to which she subscribed.) Both were keenly aware that they were making themselves “outcasts.” Their chief worry that day was keeping their marriage a secret from Josephine’s family. “My family is incapable of ever understanding my marriage as anything but insane and disgraceful,” Josephine believed.
Racial norms are maintained, for the most part, in the breach. Those who crossed race lines in the 1920s and 1930s could expect “crazy” retaliation—not only beatings, murder, or ostracism but also the loss of social identity that the court’s assault on Alice Jones Rhinelander’s womanhood demonstrated. The tabloids would have been thrilled to obtain a photo of the Texas heiress and the smirking black writer. As it happened, the Schuylers married on a day when the nation’s attention was riveted on Charles Lindbergh’s successful landing in Nicaragua. Taking advantage of that, marrying late in the day, informing no one of their plans, and deploying every subterfuge they could devise, the couple successfully evaded the very press attention that, a few years later, when their daughter was born, they would begin to actively court.
During the Depression, George and Josephine became Harlem’s most vocal proponents of intermarriage, advocating interracial intimacy as “the permanent solution,” Josephine called it, to America’s race problem. With Josephine’s help, George became “the most recognizable name in black journalism . . . a star.” Their daughter, Philippa, born in 1931, turned out to be a genius, and they proudly showed her off as an example of the benefits of “miscegenation.” Josephine had very set—and unusual—views about child rearing that Philippa’s musical talent helped her disseminate. Prominent publications such as Life, Time, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, as well as Ebony, The Pittsburgh Courier, and many other national black magazines, profiled the Schuyler family. Josephine and George became “the first interracial celebrity marriage in Harlem since the [marriages of] boxer Jack Johnson.”
For the next two decades, the Schuylers straddled contradictions. They were a national news item—“America’s Strangest Family,” as one magazine put it. Amazingly enough, given the mainstream coverage, they were also kept a secret from the Texas Cogdells. Every Christmas, D. C. Cogdell sent his daughter in New York a big box of pecans harvested from the family’s trees. He never imagined that in their apartment in Harlem’s tony “Sugar Hill,” a black son-in-law would eat the nuts while reading Opportunity and writing about the absurdities of the “pork-skins,” while a “mulatta” granddaughter, in her room down the hall, ate the pecans while practicing her piano. Josephine’s sisters came to see her in New York, even visited her Harlem apartment, yet remained somehow unaware of both husband and daughter. Family mail was addressed to Miss Josephine Cogdell or to her pen name, Heba Jannath. Every year, Josephine went home to Texas alone. No one asked questions. George found the studied silence remarkable. He tested it by writing about it in Modern Quarterly, a well-known socialist journal with a mostly white, national readership. “It is incredible,” he remarked, “how long a mixed couple can be married, their marriage be well known throughout Aframerica, and yet be unknown in the white world. . . . Nothing more forcibly reveals the social chasm dividing the two races.” In a world where blacks and whites led separate lives, whites could afford not to know what they could not accept. Women like Josephine could hide not only in plain sight but under klieg lights.
In addition to straddling the nation’s contradictions over privacy and publicity, the Schuylers embodied all of their era’s contradictory ideas about race itself. They became Harlem’s most strident anti-essentialists, arguing that the “general terms ‘Negro’ and ‘Caucasian,’ ‘black’ and ‘white’ are convenient propaganda devices” and that “race is a superstitution [sic].” Yet they also constructed a marriage based on the erotic appeal of the very difference they decried. Sometimes they advocated all manner of passing and race-crossing, believing that none of us have “our own” people, distinct from others. At other times, they talked about “we” or “us” in ways that were inescapably racialized.
Today, when we are surrounded by interracial images, it may be hard to grasp how brave George and Josephine were in their time. The lines they crossed did not begin to break down until recently. The first interracial kiss, for example, did not take place on television until the late 1960s. In the 1920s and 1930s, these were not lines that most people were willing to cross in the open. But Josephine and George founded their marriage on their shared willingness to brave censure, violence, and isolation for what they thought was right. As they often put it, they spent their lives trying to “break down race prejudice” so that the challenges they faced would fade in future generations.
To that task they brought their own myriad contradictions about race. Throughout their lives, the two principals of Harlem’s “interracial celebrity marriage” oscillated among all of the available positions on the race debates of their day (debates that remain central in ours): Is “race blindness” a goal or another form of racism? Can one attack racial essentialism and still celebrate race difference? What, if anything, do we owe our “own” race? Can we switch races, opting for an identity based on affiliation rather than blood? Sometimes the oscillation brought them closer together. Sometimes it drove a wedge between them. In that, too, they mirrored the texture of political and emotional ties in Harlem. Those were the questions creating mixed reactions to blond, blue-eyed NAACP leader Walter White’s decision to declare himself black and use his light skin to go undercover among lynchers. These questions created the divided view that Zora Neale Hurston was both too race-proud and too white-focused. They generated controversy about white Annie Nathan Meyer’s Black Souls, held up as a model for black theater. They fueled an uproar over white writer Carl Van Vechten’s 1926 novel Nigger Heaven.
Carl Van Vechten was one of the Schuylers’ best friends and a walking set of contradictions all by himself. He paid a telling tribute to his friend Josephine. In addition to being Harlem’s most famous “honorary Negro,” Van Vechten was also an incurable pack rat and kept every scrap of paper that ever came his way (much to the horror of his wife, Fania, who had to move his teetering piles in order to sit down anywhere in their huge Central Park West apartment). Van Vechten loved letters. He wrote thousands of them, was unusually well connected, and was one of the best correspondents of the century. His correspondence registry reads like a Who’s Who of the epoch: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Muriel Draper, Theodore Dreiser, Waldo Frank, Lillian Gish, Fannie Hurst, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, Gertrude Stein, Ethel Waters, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, W. E. B. Du Bois, Dorothy Peterson, Chester Himes, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Countée Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, and others. When it came time to turn that vast archive of letters over to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University as the core of the collection Van Vechten created and named for his friend James Weldon Johnson, he faced a difficult decision: should he retain or discard the filing sys
tem that he had used at home and that had been so important to him for decades? In Van Vechten’s careful system, every letter he kept (which means every letter he ever received) was meticulously categorized under either “Letters from Blacks” or “Letters from Whites.” This system was not merely a clerical convenience; over the years it became one of the nation’s best resources for determining the race of less-known members of modern America’s literary and artistic circles. Van Vechten built his reputation as an “honorary Negro” partly on his ability to detect anyone’s race. He prided himself on being the one who could always “tell the sheep from the goats,” as Nella Larsen put it in a famous caricature of him. His racial radar, as we would now say, proved his bicultural bona fides. There is only one exception in this vast racial schema: all of Josephine’s letters he placed under “B: Letters from Blacks.”
Why? In part it was an inside joke between fellow race-crossers. In just the same playful spirit, Josephine sometimes referred to them all—Carl, Fania, George, and herself (all white, except for George)—as “Us Darkies.”
But Van Vechten’s sly miscategorization was also his homage to Josephine’s effort. He put his friend where she did her best to fit in, detractors and naysayers be damned. This tribute recognized that once she had married George and given birth to Philippa, she did not “belong” anywhere and ceased, in an important sense, to be white. As a married bisexual and “honorary Negro” hated by many whites, Van Vechten had a keen sense of the costs, and the joys, of not fitting in. As he knew well, freedom from constraints is a taxing kind of freedom. It is different from the freedom that comes from privilege and standing: freedom to—to represent oneself, express oneself, pursue happiness, and so on, all the freedoms we pursue within our socially recognized identities rather than by escaping them. We do not have to look far, Van Vechten was keenly aware, to find unhappy stories of those who free themselves from social categories only to find that they have nowhere to go.
On January 6, 1928, as she stood on the steps of the municipal building, all of those challenges and questions were still in her future. Josephine’s objective that darkening Friday winter afternoon was simpler. She was trying not to faint.
“My White Fortress”
The white woman was almost as much a serf in Dixie as the black man.
—Josephine Cogdell
I beat the walls for wild release.
—Josephine Cogdell
Josephine Cogdell was born on June 23, 1897, in Granbury, Texas, a pioneer town rich in both natural resources and legendary townspeople (Jesse James, Davy Crockett, and John Wilkes Booth among them). Residents were—and are—proud of its Confederate past and the Confederate general for whom the town was named; when the general’s remains were brought back to Granbury for reinterment, the Hood County mourners stretched from one end of town to another, miles of mute testimony to the principle of never forgiving or forgetting their losses. Bloody battles with the Comanche and the Apache and the war with Mexico paved the way for Josephine’s ancestors: men who bought up towns, administered by force, and laid down the law. The Granbury “lynching tree” was just off the main road and visible in all directions, towering over a dusty clearing. Every Granbury resident knew that tree and what it was for. Granbury residents often referred to the town’s “colorful” past. Josephine called it “savage.” Nearly a hundred years later, residents remain testy about Granbury’s violent racial history. A few well-meaning older white residents of Granbury still exhibit the condescension and love-hate attitude toward blacks that Jody, as she was called then, was taught as a norm. Describing the “colony” or “nigger colony” where blacks then lived and that has now been flooded over to form the town’s lake, one local historian told me that blacks had been self-segregating by choice. Everyone was happy with the way things were, she believes. “It was understood that they [blacks] kept their place and there [were] so few black people here, and we all knew each other; we were all friends.” Another local historian, describing Jody’s cook, told me, “Her name was Nigger Phoebe, and she liked to be called that.”
When Jody was growing up, Granbury was still a thriving county seat with five cotton gins, wooden sidewalks, three jewelers, two milliners, three newspapers, three hotels, seven doctors, four law firms, five saloons, six grocery stores, a hardware store, an ice cream parlor, a saddle shop, and “little or no middle class.” While most residents scrambled in farming or ranching, the Cogdells presided over Granbury like royalty. Jody was raised to view herself as better than everyone else in town.
Her father, Daniel Calhoun (known as D.C.) Cogdell, had accumulated his wealth through banking, racehorses, and mills. With only a third-grade education, he had worked himself up to founding president of the First National Bank of Granbury in 1887, a position he held for forty-eight years. By the time Jody was born, the youngest by many years of the Cogdells’ eight children, D.C. owned “around a million acres of land scattered throughout the state, and always kept thousands of head of cattle.” He had the clout to bring the Fort Worth railroad right into the middle of his property, creating, just a mile or two from the town’s main depot, a personal station for transporting his cattle. D.C. was brutal, but he could also be generous. He doted on Jody. She had tutors, trips to Fort Worth, ballet, theater, concerts. She basked in his largesse. She admired her father’s “super-energy,” his “great deeds,” his “penetrating intellect.” D.C. was, she noted, “an excellent type of the Feudal Ruler.”
Whereas most of the town’s well-to-do families lived clustered around the town square and courthouse, D.C. installed his family on a lavish estate planted with live oaks and pecan trees. The Cogdells disdained their neighbors. But the house was designed for socializing and show, with a wide front porch, a full-length balcony on the second floor, large rooms, extra-wide hallways, and butler’s bells, all built to impress. D.C. didn’t care much about being liked. He required envy. “We lived on a scale people just don’t live on now,” said Jody’s brother Buster. “We had one of the finest collections of cut glass and sterling silver in the state of Texas. . . . We always had three, four, or five servants and clothes made by a dressmaker in Louisville, Kentucky.” D.C. spent money on things Granbury had never heard of: bird’s-eye maple floors, master cabinetry, leaded-glass doors and windows, a central heating system, a music room, and a library, even though “writers weren’t held in high esteem,” as one family member told me. He had a custom-made soaking tub more than six feet long which guests were exhorted to admire. Behind the house were quarters for the servants and stables for his prize racehorses. Every Cogdell was an excellent rider. It was a beautiful home. And Jody hated it. “How I loathe it all,” she wrote. “The house that smothered me and imprisoned my youth.”
The Cogdell family home, built by Josephine’s father. The house burned down when Josephine was in her late teens and was replaced by another on the same foundation.
In that world, Josephine wrote in an unpublished novel, feminism was dismissed as a “silly notion” held by women who should have been making do, not making a fuss. “Mama was a lady,” she wrote of her mother, Lucy Duke Cogdell, born on a Louisiana sugar plantation to a gentleman farmer and his French bride. “The defeat of the South hit them hard.” D.C. proposed to Lucy and married her when she was only fourteen to spite Lucy’s mother, an attractive thirty-four-year-old widow who had spurned him. It was a marriage foreordained to fail. Lucy exacted her own revenge. One family member described her as “savagely selfish.” Josephine said she was “determined, dogged, and overbearing.” Jody appreciated her mother’s stubborn efforts to “always put her best foot forward.” But she resented her dullness and neglect. “Her thoughts were all borrowed thoughts. . . . When you talked with her she showed not the slightest attention.” The mismatch of her parents’ marriage—a “pigmy and a giant, a hare and a lion, an oak and a vine”—always upset Jody. As a child, she set herself against marriage in her determination not to “be a bit like” her mother
, nor “any man’s slave.” Even as an older woman, exposed to a first-wave feminist understanding of domesticity, Josephine never showed any sympathy for her mother. Though she fought with her father, physically and once quite violently, she always took his side. After Jody was out of the house, Lucy Duke Cogdell hit her head on the top of a car as it went over a bump and broke her neck. She remained partially paralyzed for the rest of her life. Jody still refused to “sacrifice” her life to her mother’s conventional notions.
The Cogdells wrote their own rules in Granbury. “They were fiery, temperamental, uncompromising, ruthless, rapacious, arrogant, and strong-willed. They had a craving for danger and a desire for power.” They were a “‘godless family . . . they worshipped one thing and one thing only: money.’” Her older brother, a stunningly handsome alcoholic, was rumored to have killed a man. At home, he wandered about stark naked. Jody knew that many of the strategies by which her father, and later her brothers, acquired the family’s wealth were morally dubious at best, “superbly unmoral” at worst. With all the high moral standards of idealistic youth, she deplored their tricks, such as paying the taxes of wounded soldiers in exchange for their lands. But appalled as she was, she still thrilled to a sense of difference that came from knowing that the Cogdells were all “absolutely unfitted by temperament and intellect [for] . . . Domesticity!” They had all, she felt, succumbed to the family “tragedy” or “wasted” themselves by trying to fit in. She was bent on avoiding their fate.
