by Carla Kaplan
A true Cogdell, she was headstrong, adventurous, stubborn, and egotistical. Although she painted, read, wrote poetry, and embroidered—all traditional occupations for a young girl—she had unusual tastes, preferring astronomy, botany, and biology to the more typical drawing room pastimes. Allowed to take her pony out of the stables alone, she would ride him for miles through the scrubby Texas countryside. For her thirteenth birthday she asked her brother Buster for a penknife. Snakes did not faze her. Classical music bored her.
Although she had everything money could buy, “she was not happy,” a niece remembered. As much as she admired the Cogdell spirit, Cogdell behavior horrified her. Too many of the Cogdell men “murdered, quarreled, raped, and used their money recklessly in order to achieve their goals.” She could be most like them, she intuited, by putting distance between them and her. “‘She tried to have some kind of world view, something other than a parochial or provincial viewpoint. . . . She was groping. She had a fine mind,’” a nephew remembered. Brief stints at boarding schools did not work out. Jody made friends and was exposed to new ideas—she read Elinor Glyn’s scandalous novel of an adulterous affair, Three Weeks (one of Nancy Cunard’s favorites), with particular delight. But she could not conform to the discipline such schools demanded.
Jody had no siblings near her age and was not allowed to play with other children. She was forced to draw either on a family she could not fit into or on the servants whose intimacy she was denied. It made her an unusual and mercurial child, “‘liable to do most anything. She was histrionic and artistic, and prone to great mood swings. Always dancing, dressing up, horseback riding, memorizing poems and plays or writing in her diary, she was continually in motion as if warding off something terrifying yet unknown.’”
Without her family’s knowledge, Jody took her pony to visit “all the iconoclasts, who became my veteran cronies, black and white, ex-rangers, gamblers, one-legged cowboys, rheumatic washerwomen, and country philosophers.” Her favorite companions were the Cogdell family servants, Aniky, Rhoda, Joe, Mandy, Ivory, Linky (the cook), Bup (the houseboy), and Big Jim (the groom), who, oddly enough, also served as Jody’s nurse. He took her riding daily and taught her “how to shoot, skin a possum, ride a bronco, and rope a cow.” Her friendship with Big Jim probably “doomed” her to a sexual preference for black men, she later felt. She wrote that when she was a child,
the activities of the Negroes fascinated me. The were always doing something interesting—branding and dipping cattle, slaughtering hogs and sheep, shooting wild game or chasing coyotes out of the pastures, gathering pecans from the towering trees along the creeks. . . . Good-naturedly, they let us white children follow them as they went about their work. On social occasions they provided music for dancing and entertained our guests with cakewalks and songs. [Elsewhere, she wrote:] I preferred sitting in our large, airy kitchen with the honeysuckle and wisteria vines poking into the windows, amid pleasant odors of baking and frying, listening to the sardonic comments on life which were flung out in a running repartee between Jim, Linky the cook, and Bup our long-legged black houseboy, to hearing the musty platitudes soberly pronounced by my mother and her friends in our marble and mahogany parlor. I particularly liked Monday, which was wash day, for then Linky would help Rhoda, who was washing under the big live oak in the back yard. The clean scent of the lye-soap boiling in the pot, the acrid odor of burning twigs under [it], the bed and table linen flapping on the line, dazzlingly white in the sunshine, and the two robust Negresses standing over their tubs of hot suds in the cool shade. [And she noted:] My mother, watching us hang around the half-dozen colored laundresses when they gathered under the big oak trees in the back yard to do the weekly washing, would sigh, “You are just like your father. He never knew what class or color he was.”
Jody trailed after the servants into the “colony,” where all of Granbury’s black people were forced to reside. She could never understand such segregation. But as a child she accepted it.
Josephine and the family cook.
Like many of the southerners around her, she both loved black people and saw herself as superior to them. In her own words, she was a “thoroughgoing Negrophobe, a believer in the superiority of my white skin, in the preciousness of my white womanhood, in the gallantry of Southern white men, and the mental and spiritual inferiority of all people with dark skins. Sentiments eminently befitting the daughter of a cotton and cattle baron.” Believing in white superiority did not detract from feeling comforted “among these black people . . . soothed as in a dark swan’s nest.” Such ambivalence was part of her Cogdell (and southern) legacy. Her father was a member of the local Ku Klux Klan. “Any mention of the Negro, save in a servile role, infuriated” him. Yet, Jody noted, he drew “no color line in his love life.” He had a black mistress for more than forty years and subjected his wife to what one family member called “countless humiliations.” Josephine’s brother Gaston also had black mistresses and a biracial daughter. “Interracial love was not unknown in my environment.” But such hypocrisy was revolting to the young Josephine. She wanted to be proud of her family’s success. She was eager to offer unconditional love.
Once she left home, and for the rest of her life, Josephine thought about her father and brothers, wrote about them, traced their complex genealogies, longed for them, and—with the exception of her brother Buster—refused to speak with them. They haunted her nonetheless. For her daughter’s fourth birthday, for example, Josephine’s cake was an elaborate reconstruction of the Cogdell family home, complete with chimney, roof, a well, and footsteps made of coconut and cinnamon. Growing up in thrall to their exploits, indulged by them, petted by them, but enraged by them made her choice to give them up both inevitable and heartbreaking. It left her with a bottomless resentment toward any kind of duplicity. Her fierce determination to forge a life free of sex stereotypes and racial hypocrisy became, in its way, a private dialogue with them, a way to keep them in her life, to cherish a memory of “a romantic era.”
“From Texas to Harlem with Love”
I was a thoroughgoing Negrophobe.
—Josephine Cogdell Schuyler
I became a Negrophile.
—Josephine Cogdell Schuyler
Josephine always considered her exodus from Texas and her eventual arrival in Harlem an adventure story worth telling. She wrote it up as “From Texas to Harlem with Love,” a novel that she shopped around, without success, for decades, until all known copies of it eventually vanished. She was especially proud of going from Negrophobe to Negrophile. It proved that self-education and clear thinking could triumph over convention.
A historian who was Josephine’s contemporary wrote that “it is possible for the Southern girl now to an extent never permitted before to . . . become a person and not just another woman.” Josephine could not become a person under the Cogdell roof, so she chose a time-honored, even clichéd, maneuver: she eloped. At sixteen years old, after what must have been a lightning-quick courtship, she married Jack Lewis, a traveling salesman she met through the boy she was then dating. She hardly knew Lewis when she married him. The Cogdells did not consider him a proper suitor for their daughter, and he courted her in secret. Josephine married him in spite of feeling that he had seduced and taken advantage of her. Lewis was an alcoholic and a womanizer. He had swaggering self-confidence and “flaming joviality,” but to Josephine he was “crude.” The marriage failed quickly, as they found themselves incompatible in every way but sexually. Lewis’s work as a “drummer”—a company representative for Purity breakfast cereals—made cheating all too easy, and she found keepsakes from other women in his suit pockets during his returns from sales trips. In response, she tried to “humiliate wifehood” with affairs of her own, playing out sexual scenarios she’d read about in novels. Quickly becoming pregnant, she had a clandestine—and dangerous—abortion. According to one guarded reference in her diaries, Lewis was killed not long after his return from military service, in
something she described cryptically as a “very strange affair.” Josephine never referred to herself as a widow and all but erased the marriage. Her reference to Jack’s death may have been angry wish fulfillment on her part. Though they separated not long after marrying, they seem to have divorced only once Jack was drafted into the army and went to war as a soldier with the American Expeditionary Forces in Siberia. Whatever Jack’s fate, Josephine kept the Lewis name in reserve, in case she ever needed an alternative identity.
Determined to “be a rebel,” in 1920, Josephine did what many young women from small towns did to escape “Domesticity!” She moved to California, starting first in Los Angeles, where she hoped to parlay her good looks and excellent figure into a film career. Josephine liked Los Angeles well enough, but the movie industry, she thought, was run by idiots. “Taking orders from people [I] knew to be [my] inferior” proved intolerable. Her “temperment rebelled.” She fled Los Angeles.
She then went north to San Francisco, which had been known as early as the 1850s as a kind of “second Paris.” By 1920, when Josephine arrived, it had been a hotbed of rebellion for years. “More open than Eastern cities because it had no established old families, no longstanding mercantile houses, no dominant banks,” San Francisco had countercultural traditions that were well ingrained. Guidebooks to San Francisco promised the “brave bohemian” a “place where one could be done with conventionality for good,” a way to “dynamite the baked and hardened earth” of conventions and traditions in art, sex, family life, business, politics, food, and friendship. Imbued with the Cogdell confidence and raised on Texas’s “baked earth,” Josephine was more than ready to blow things up.
Bohemia was a mix of the exotic and the familiar. As one guidebook put it, bohemia could offer “solace for your wounded heart.” The San Francisco bohemians, like “scores of other young radicals and intellectuals,” sought escape in the arts, in nature, in childlike states of exploration, and in communion with Gypsies, Native Americans, and Eastern philosophies. Following Harold Stearns’s then-famous call in the modern magazine The Freeman to “Get out!” they turned away from mainstream America’s Babbittry, prohibition, and consumerism. If they could not achieve Malcolm Cowley’s “salvation by exile” abroad, they could create an internal exile on American soil. Popular myths and movies about America’s bohemias portray democratic worlds of free love and equal relations. In reality, however, gender stereotypes prevailed. In bohemia, mainstream traditions of “male authority and female subservience” were the norm. San Francisco’s bohemian world was by and large the product of white men. Its pleasures were their pleasures. And so were its prerogatives. The San Francisco Bohemian Club, which built an international reputation for radicalism, for example, was closed to women.
So Josephine faced a quandary. Granbury was behind her. The kinds of social reform and social work that many first-generation New Women and feminists had pursued to escape their stultifying choices—activists such as Mary White Ovington and Eleanor Roosevelt; settlement workers such as Florence Kelley, Lillian Wald, Jane Addams, and Dorothy Day—interested her not one whit. She wanted the arts, not social service. “San Francisco supported a milieu of writers and painters attuned to the glorious light-washed landscape.” It seemed to offer a meaningful artist’s life, albeit inside a male-defined world. Josephine took up painting, working in a highly colorful style that crossed impressionism and realism. She took acting and dance classes with a number of teachers, including Ruth St. Denis, who as one of the founders of modern dance would work with Zora Neale Hurston and her folklore troupes in the coming decades and who was introducing San Franciscans to the ideas and dances of east India. Josephine also began to write, trying her hand at fiction, essays, and poetry simultaneously. She studied literature and politics, attended lectures on capitalism and human nature, read Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, studied Emma Goldman and James Joyce, immersed herself in novels by George Sand and Anzia Yezierska, and looked for paying work.
The easiest route would have been to attach herself to a man again. But Josephine was intrigued by the independent women she met in San Francisco, even if she did not become intimate with any of them. The New Woman seemed to be taking over the streets of San Francisco: “She could be seen on the streets, walking alone, or on the omnibuses on her way to work, marked by a graceful, athletic bearing and the lack of a wedding ring.” Josephine had at least one love affair, with an Indian man named Bhogwan, with whom she stayed friendly for many years. It was not a serious relationship. She was testing the waters, like many New Women, exploring her sexuality and discovering her pleasures, experimenting with a form of interracial intimacy that would raise few eyebrows in San Francisco but would have been scandalous in Granbury. The fact of having had relationships meant more to her than the relationships she was having. They were her rite of passage. She was moved by a vision of artists and intellectuals “helping to shape a more humane social and economic system” through art, love, and pleasure. She was especially drawn to the individualism that both New Women and bohemians espoused: “We intend simply to be ourselves . . . our whole big human selves.”
Josephine was petite, with an hourglass figure, a heart-shaped face, twinkling eyes, athletic self-confidence, thick brown hair, and Cupid’s-bow lips. She believed that she was not a natural beauty. Most people disagreed. She had the excellent bearing of a superior horsewoman. She wore her long brown hair loose down her back to the tops of her thighs, giving her the melancholy look of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting. In California, she cut it into a becoming modern bob. To supplement the small allowance her father was sending from Granbury, she found work as a nude artist’s model and posed for Mack Sennett’s “bathing beauty” pinup cards, distributed nationally through tobacconists. Tame by our standards, they were then considered very racy. In one, she is wearing a black bathing suit, with her white arms crossed across her bare white legs and her calves laced into tight leather boots; her sexy smile challenged both national and familial norms. She kept meticulous scrapbooks of her cards and modeling assignments. When she went home to Granbury to visit the family, she carried her heavy scrapbooks with her and laid them out on the large oak dining table. As both a model and a pinup girl, she was successful beyond any of her expectations; it was her first taste of sexual and economic power. She could create a persona, a different Josephine. They’d buy it. “I know I’m not beautiful,” she wrote. “And it always surprises and amuses me for people to be trapped into thinking so by my carriage and toilette.”
Josephine as a Mack Sennett pinup girl; she took pains to ensure that her family saw the photos, considered quite scandalous in their day.
In California, Josephine was taken with the idea that cooking destroyed nutrients and released carcinogens. She began a lifelong advocacy of raw food. The diet appealed to her health consciousness, her affinity for rules, and her delight in shocking others. Whereas most raw foodists became vegetarians, Josephine continued to eat meat. She took a special pleasure in delicately slicing up raw organ meats ordered at restaurants. “All cooked food is dead food” and all cooked-meat eaters are “carrion-eaters” like “the buzzard, the jackal and the fly,” she’d serenely tell her dinner companions just before they tucked into their grilled steaks. She linked diet to the ills of modernity. The one thing that “most distinguishes and characterizes civilization,” she wrote, “is disease.” “To be healthy . . . we must return to a wild animal diet.” Being a New Woman bohemian artist who ate a “wild animal diet” was also a good way to distinguish herself from the Texas Cogdells.
She was ever alert to hypocrisy (hypervigilant about it, in fact), and the contradictions she saw in her bohemian circles, which preached individual liberty but expected women to follow men, led her into politics. Socialism and civil rights especially appealed to her, and she identified more strongly with the wrongs done to workers and blacks than she did with women’s oppression. “California was flaming with ‘Red’ activities,” all of t
hem fascinating to her. Unlike Max Eastman and others, who had begun to see a conflict between socialism and individualism that began to make the former seem “an insular, irrelevant, hole-in-the-corner thing,” Josephine felt that anarchism and socialism could both nurture individualism. “Socialism has always drawn to itself the leading artists & creative thinkers . . . realizing that Individualism is the product of opportunity.” She studied Marxism, sang the left-wing anthem “The Internationale,” and subscribed to magazines such as The Messenger, The Liberator, and The Crisis. She gave away as much of D. C. Cogdell’s money as she could spare to causes such as Irish freedom, labor, and Chinese and Hindu revolutionary support struggles. She gave money to women’s suffrage but did not record joining its marches or demonstrations.
Increasingly, her growing political awareness was focused on race. “Like all intelligent Southerners, the Negro problem distressed me,” she wrote. She was torn between an attraction to blacks and her southern instincts. She advocated racial justice. But she did not want to sit next to blacks. “A colored woman seated herself beside me on the street car. I . . . rose and marched indignantly to another seat. And the first time I went to the theatre and perceived a colored man in the audience I was so irritated that I could not look at the performance.” As she read about the atrocities of lynching and especially the role that white women had played in it, however, she was increasingly tormented by feelings of “shame and guilt.” She had terrible nightmares about white “barbarism”: “white chickens pecking black ones to death; large dogs devouring small ones; buffaloes torn and stampeded by cattle. . . . I suppose this was some kind of inner chastisement.” She knew that there was something very wrong with her “exalted opinion of my superiority.” She’d had a spotty formal education, focused as much on poise and good manners as anything else. To understand how race had threaded its way through her life, she set out to read everything written on the subject (just as her fellow autodidacts Nancy Cunard and Charlotte Osgood Mason were doing at the same moment). She listened to black spirituals, danced the Charleston, collected Negro art and poetry, and “began a novel in which the hero was a Negro boy and the villain was the Ku Klux Klan.” Before long she was making “a point of sitting beside those whom the nice passengers avoid” and seeking out “educated Negroes in classes and studios.”
