Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  Since some black newspapers and magazines were actively seeking antiracist writings by whites and featuring works such as Edna Margaret Johnson’s “A White Girl’s Prayer,” Josephine sent them her work. She was pleasantly surprised to find encouragement for her writing. The Messenger, founded by the socialist labor activists Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph (who would later head the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters), was particularly welcoming. It published her somewhat garbled but passionate overview of American art in 1923, as well as three not very distinguished but heartfelt poems in 1924 and an essay on how Jews and blacks have taken turns as America’s scapegoats in 1925. Josephine knew next to nothing about blacks or Jews, but she was now dead set on becoming a writer. Publishing in one of Harlem’s most important journals fueled her determination. “A swift metamorphosis from Negrophobe to Negrophile is possible,” she decided. “I became a Negrophile.”

  In spite of her interest in individualism, Josephine was uncomfortable alone. In spite of her newfound feminism, she found romance irresistible. Her transition to Negrophile was watched—but not joined—by her lover, the painter John Garth, whom she met in 1921 on a streetcar. John Garth, originally named Wallace Hogarth Pettyjohn, was tall but not traditionally handsome. He was overweight and a poor dresser, with thinning hair and an unpredictable manner—sometimes charming, sometimes dismissive, often narcissistic. But he was talented, romantic, nonjudgmental, and a great storyteller. His effect on women was magnetic. “Everyone was madly in love with him.” He was the son of a well-regarded doctor, who gave him access to dissecting rooms to study anatomy. And he had the sophistication born of his travels in Europe and New York, and his training at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Istanbul and Venice on fellowships. When Josephine met him, he had dropped his original name, reinvented himself as John Garth, had a few successful one-man shows, and was operating the successful John Garth School of Art in San Francisco.

  John Garth, self-portrait.

  Before long, Josephine was modeling for Garth, then living with him. With her allowance from her father, she was able to pay their rent, buy Garth paints and canvases, and help him rent a studio, shared with another painter. She was devoted to Garth, whom she called “Belovedest.” He called her “Baber.” Both were avid journal keepers, and they opened their diaries to each other, committed to confiding all. Although they fought constantly, Garth also encouraged Josephine’s writing and believed she had talent. The stress of their relationship left her with a “melancholy [that] had almost made an epileptic out of me,” but she also felt “devoted, consecrated to him to the point of madness.”

  Josephine Cogdell posing for John Garth in his studio.

  Life with Garth was difficult. Josephine sometimes had to pawn her jewelry to keep them in supplies. Garth kept long hours at his studio, leaving her feeling “monastic” at times, neglected and abandoned. They collaborated on a book. But Garth could also be condescending. He never truly listened, she felt. Josephine was emotional. Garth was contained. She wanted to get married. He was “married” to his work. She had a strong sexual appetite. He believed that men had a finite amount of sexual energy; too much intercourse would sap his strength. “Nonsense,” Josephine called it. They quarreled constantly. “I am not happy,” she wrote in her diary.

  By 1927, they decided to take a break. She would go to New York and try to find publishers for her book about the Negro boy and the Ku Klux Klan. “I know it’s good enough to win [publication] if I can only get the publishers to read it. . . . If it doesn’t get a publisher I shall kill myself.” She would also look for a publisher for the book they had cowritten, described by a family relative as a Gone with the Wind–type romance. She was leaving with the new literary name she’d given herself—Heba Jannath—and a small brown notebook that contained the street addresses of some of the most progressive new modernist and black journals: The Smart Set, The Dial, The Messenger, and others. She had packed her manuscripts, her best clothes, and some of her sister’s best clothing as well, including a Spanish shawl on which her sister had lavished $400.

  On a late spring day in 1927, Josephine lifted the edge of her skirt to board the train that would take her to New York. She expected to feel relieved at the prospect of time off from Garth. Instead she panicked. Throwing her luggage down on the seat, she raced backward through the compartments, jostling other boarding passengers as she went, hoping to get Garth’s attention from the observation car. Spying him on the platform, she gripped the railing with one hand, waving frantically with the other. Garth never looked up. Slowly at first, then picking up speed, Josephine’s train pulled out of the San Francisco station.

  Josephine went from San Francisco to Texas, where she spent two months with her family. “I find everything the same but worse,” she remarked. From there, in early July, she took the train to New York, stopping off in Kansas City to meet Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, the entrepreneurial publisher of the “Little Blue Book” series, which had ushered in the then-sensational phenomenon of paperback books. Haldeman-Julius had placed an essay of hers in his monthly magazine, and she had very high hopes that he’d turn his New York publishing connections in her direction. As she did when she was anxious, she wrote compulsively in her journal, filling more than sixty pages with details of her stopover. Mostly she focused on what a terrible disappointment Haldeman-Julius had turned out to be. The hotel he’d recommended was seedy. They had gone out to dinner and stopped at a roadside cabaret to hear a black woman blues singer. He didn’t understand jazz and had gawked embarrassingly at the black patrons. Worse, he kept pulling his car off the road to grope her. Josephine told him that his drooling kisses were repulsive, pressed herself into the passenger door, and put her hands flat into his chest to push him away. It had only aroused him further. Locking herself into her grim little room later, she felt a huge relief, then rage. No sooner had she succeeded in composing herself in the morning for breakfast than he appeared in the dining room again, ready to give it another go. By the time she escaped the second time, to board the train to New York, Manhattan seemed less intimidating.

  The rest of her train trip was uneventful, if tiring, and she arrived with a large black suitcase, many of her manuscripts (some were in a Fort Worth safe), an enormous album of family photographs and memorabilia from Texas, and letters of recommendation from her family, all addressed to people she did not want to meet. It was late July, stiflingly hot and sticky. Josephine was weary and overwhelmed. She needed to lie down somewhere cool. The only hotel name she had was from her sister Lena: the Shelton. Directing her cabdriver there, Josephine had no idea that it was one of Manhattan’s toniest destinations. The Shelton’s steep nightly rate came to nearly half the cash she had in her purse. But having braved her way through the lobby and up to the registration desk, luggage in hand, she felt too humiliated to admit that she could not afford it. She booked a room for one night. She might have looked out her hotel window at one of the most famous views in the United States: New York City as seen by Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived at the swanky hotel. But she would not have cared. She was thinking about how little cash she had left and how useless her family was proving to be in her new life. She had never felt so alone. First thing the next morning, she hauled herself downtown to Greenwich Village to rent a studio. She was done with advice from the Cogdells and furious at herself for not knowing better.

  She had heard that housing in the Village was good and as cheap as $8 a month for a room, and she was eager to surround herself with the Village’s vaunted tearooms, cheap restaurants, free lectures, small theaters, little magazine offices, colorful bars, and literary salons. She wanted to go to the places she’d heard about, like Mabel Dodge’s, and meet “Socialists, Trade Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, ‘Old Friends,’ Psychoanalysts, IWW’s, Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern Artists, Clubwomen,” and more. She liked the Village’s stress on
personal freedom, sexual freedom, and freedom from strict gender norms and class hierarchies. In Greenwich Village, “if anywhere,” it seemed, “I must find what I wanted.” First, though, she’d need a place to sleep.

  Like so many other young hopefuls arriving in New York, she spent a hot, exhausting day looking for an apartment. The editor Freeman Hubbard, in whose Art and Story Lovers’ Magazine she had published poems alongside John Garth’s photographs of her, escorted her through the Village. It was a frustrating day of fearing (needlessly, she was relieved to find out) a replay of the Haldeman-Julius disaster and walking in tight shoes with paper-thin soles, traipsing into and out of cramped Village apartments that looked onto brick walls, smelled of mold and old cigars, were cockroach- or bedbug-infested, and lacked a full bathroom or a kitchen or worse.

  She finally found a furnished studio on West 19th Street for a steep $70 a month that she could sublet until October. It was almost ten times the amount she’d expected to pay, but fortunately, she still had her father’s allowance to fall back on. It was moldy, dusty, and greasy besides. But it also had a “large airy room with a marble mantle and a hardwood floor” and a good view, and she discovered that she could write easily there. She started another novel. Within days she could report that she had “slept, eaten, and dreamed book,” was doing something “unique and superior to myself,” and felt “full of content that I am a creator.”

  She took full advantage of her new freedom, managing a few brief affairs, including one with a Jewish diamond dealer named Fred Finkelstein, and in spite of feeling that there was hardly a “real man . . . among the Literati” of Greenwich Village. She made casual friends in the neighborhood with writers and artists who also believed in “free love.” “The Committee of the hole,” she called them. One of “the Committee” tried to rape her one night after a party, but, as many hippie women would do four decades later, she made light of it, chalking it up to the “rude” manners that seemed to her pervasive among the “Village Yankees.” If she didn’t complain, she learned, fitting in was easy.

  By then, some felt that the great era of Village bohemia was already over. But Josephine was full of enthusiasm. New York’s bohemia seemed to take women more seriously than had San Francisco’s, and “participation in suffrage was pretty much de rigueur for male intellectuals on the bohemian left” just prior to her arrival. New York’s women artists, journalists, writers, actresses, and activists seemed, as the newspapers said, “half-way through the door into To-morrow.” Not that life was easy for bohemian women like Josephine. The bohemian men who romanticized “living by one’s wits” often had intact family ties and family money, networks of support, and an array of occupations open to them, all typically closed to bohemian women. “Female Bohemians had to be twice as clever to live by their wits.” Josephine had faith in herself. According to one account, by 1900 there were already as many as four thousand women journalists in New York City. She thought she’d join their ranks.

  In the end, Greenwich Village did not have what she wanted after all. The artists she met seemed silly to her, “intellectually sterile” and disconnected from reality. Just as Nancy Cunard would experience across the ocean with the surrealists and their double standards, many of the issues dearest to Josephine were not on the table. Within days of her arrival in the Village, she was already looking for something else. The Village seemed “childish.”

  She began listening to jazz seriously. Then she began going to Harlem, which seemed to her, and to some black intellectuals as well, an even better bohemia than the Village. James Weldon Johnson, as early as 1912, wrote that “Black Bohemia” was a “new world . . . [of] primitive joy in life and living . . . an alluring world, a tempting world, a world of greatly lessened restraints, a world of fascinating perils, but, above all, a world of tremendous artistic potentialities.” Josephine Cogdell couldn’t have agreed more. “In Harlem,” she wrote from her Greenwich Village studio, “life expresses itself because it expresses itself fully.” In Harlem, if anywhere, she thought, she would find what she wanted.

  “The Fall of a Fair Confederate”

  The fact that he was dark and I fair gave an added fillip to our association.

  —Josephine Cogdell Schuyler

  There is a certain affinity between individuals of opposite colors. The fascination of the unknown is so alluring that mutual stimulation is inevitable.

  —George Schuyler

  The year 1927 might not have been the best time to arrive in Greenwich Village, but it was a good year to venture uptown into Harlem, especially with extra spending money and an adventurous spirit. Any tourist with taxi fare could stroll across 125th Street, taking in soapbox speeches about housing, self-improvement, workers’ rights, colonialism, birth control, and social policy or admire the fashion parade: men in wide-legged, cuffed pants and sporty two-tone shoes, women in gathered tunics with belted hips, and strapped shoes, sashaying under felt hats with brims like bird wings or folded, just so, over perfect pin curls. Duke Ellington was playing at the whites-only Cotton Club. At the newly opened Savoy Ballroom, blacks and whites were dancing to the “hot jazz” of Fess Williams and his Royal Flush Orchestra. A little insider knowledge and the price of admission (a steep 15 cents just to check your hat) earned admission to A’Lelia Walker’s “Dark Tower” club in her town house on West 136th Street.

  Some of that “Mecca” was closed to casual tourists: Harlem’s storied rent parties; its most important political meetings; its many social clubs, fraternities, and sororities. Its salons were private, and its jam sessions were by invitation only, as were many of the awards ceremonies, strategy sessions, and drag balls. Many Harlemites resented white “slummers” as fiercely as Greenwich Village bohemians did their own tourist throngs. “Only Negroes belong in Harlem . . . it is a place they can call home,” stated Paul Robeson’s wife, Eslanda. Those who let in whites were often resented. The Dark Tower, for example, “was a place for A’Lelia to show off her blackness to whites,” some gibed. Some whites, such as Charlotte Osgood Mason, who went to Harlem as a tourist in 1927, couldn’t stand being shut out. For them, Harlem’s private face was a personal affront and an individual challenge. Mason responded by refusing to go uptown and creating a Harlem of her own right down on Park Avenue. In her private mini-Harlem, peopled with a handpicked group that she hoped to control through money and psychic energy, she was always welcome, always a queen. Josephine was not looking to reign. She just wanted to drink it in, glad to have her foot in the door. She loved Harlem “at once.”

  Everything about Harlem thrilled me. . . . The octoroon choruses at the Lafayette, the black sheiks at Small’s, the expert amateur dancing to be seen at the Savoy, the Curb Market along the 8th Avenue “L,” with its strange West Indian roots and flare of tropical fruits . . . the displays of chitterlings and pigsnouts in the restaurant windows; Strivers Row where the colored aristocracy lived in stately houses behind stately trees . . . the dirty tenements of 142nd Street with their shrieking swarms of black, brown, and pale ivory children; and the foreign Negroes speaking French, Spanish, and Dutch . . . the rural Southern Negroes so entirely different from the urban Southern Negro and yet more like him than like their Northern rural cousins.

  She was delighted with how much was open to her. There were concerts to go to—by black singers such as tenor Roland Hayes or baritone Jules Bledsoe, Paul Robeson, or the Hall Johnson Choir. If she did not want to join the white and black crowds swarming downtown at Dorothy and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, there were many little theaters nurturing more “authentic” plays, including white writer Annie Nathan Meyer’s promiscegenation Black Souls, hailed as superior “Negro drama.” At the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, “the intellectual pulse of Harlem throbbed,” thanks in part to the efforts of Ernestine Rose, whom many people, including George Schuyler, praised as a model. Like everyone else, Josephine had read Carl Van Vechten’s notorious novel Nigger Heaven. Nothing she saw around h
er seemed true to what she’d read: “The popular idea of Harlem as a Nigger Heaven, half-garish, half-primitive, where everybody drinks gin, does the Black-bottom and cuts up a ‘high yallah’ on Saturday night, is a Harlem which so far I have been unable to discover.” “Intense political debates raged everywhere,” and Josephine gobbled them up after her disappointment with Greenwich Village. “I found the group of intellectual Negroes I met in Harlem more interesting than my Southern friends and relatives who made a midtown hotel their rendezvous. . . . I found them intellectually sterile.”

  For Josephine, the political would always be personal. Her determination to transform herself had to go beyond adopting new ideas. On July 27, an especially steamy Wednesday, she put on her stockings, heavy undergarments, best blue crepe suit, and heels and decided to drop into the offices of The Messenger, which had already published some of her writing and to which she’d been subscribing for years. She planned to introduce herself to its controversial editor, George Schuyler, whom she and John Garth had long considered “terribly clever.” She had been in New York only a few weeks but was determined to waste no more of her time there.