by Carla Kaplan
In 1927, George was on his way to becoming the best-known and most widely published black journalist in the nation, famous for his willingness, in the words of black civil rights activist Ella Baker, to “raise questions that weren’t being raised” by anyone else. He was “a notorious naysayer.” In addition to editing the socialist-identified, prolabor periodical The Messenger, he was associate editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, perhaps the most influential black newspaper in the nation, for which he wrote a syndicated weekly editorial. The year before, he had made a splash in The Nation with an essay called “The Negro-Art Hokum,” which attacked the idea of “‘fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences’ between white and black Americans” with the provocative claim that the so-called “Negro artist” was nothing more than a “lamp-blacked Anglo-Saxon.” It prompted an angry rejoinder from Langston Hughes called “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which charged Schuyler with lacking “race pride,” perhaps the worst insult one black person could offer to another. Alongside Carl Van Vechten’s scandalous Nigger Heaven, the Schuyler-Hughes exchange helped set the terms for Harlem’s debates over the nature of race, the meaning of racial “loyalty,” and whether there was any way to both contest racialist thinking and, at the same time, be “true” to “one’s own” people.
In a radical departure from most Harlem intellectuals, Schuyler took aim at the very idea that there was a black anything, asking “Why are most of us bellowing for NEGRO art, NEGRO literature, NEGRO music, NEGRO dancing, etc!” He sometimes invoked the very sense of collective racial identity to which he was objecting: “We are not,” he insisted, “a separate group, a different group.” But that inconsistency did not keep him from insisting that all forms of racialism were backward-thinking racism. Most Harlemites were profoundly torn about what race was—an essence to be celebrated or a myth to be debunked? But most also felt strongly that blacks owed something to other blacks and that race, whatever it was, entailed some kind of ethics: loyalty, allegiance, identification. Schuyler took the much less common position that if race did not exist, no one could “owe” it anything. That rejection of racial allegiance brought to light contradictions at the core of much of Harlem’s progressive race politics. It questioned whether a race could belong to anyone, whether anyone had his or her “own” people, and suggested that there could be no designated gatekeepers for racial belonging or race loyalty, since there was nothing to protect or be loyal to. Schuyler was becoming one of Harlem’s most controversial thinkers. And he relished the role of finger pointer.
Josephine was preparing to take her racial reeducation into her own hands. Early in the afternoon, she took a taxi to The Messenger’s offices, uptown on Seventh Avenue. In ninety-degree weather, she climbed three flights of stairs, wiping away sweat. Opening the wooden door into George’s office, she saw a “stunning” black man with skin “like satinwood” whose “long and graceful hands” were resting on a pile of paperwork. George was flabbergasted. “My whole life changed” the day she walked in, he later wrote. “She was something very special,” he continued: “beautiful, vivacious, fashionably dressed, sharp, witty, and well-read.”
George was also canny. He might have complimented Josephine’s good looks, which he noted instantly. Instead, he praised her writing, telling her that even though he prided himself on being “something of an expert in the detection of racial identity,” he “could not tell her race from the articles she had submitted to the magazine.” It was the best thing he could have said. They sat for hours in George’s dusty office, chatting amiably about literature, politics, writing, travel, and art. Their rapport was intense. At 6 p.m., exhausted by talk, they headed over to 140th and Lenox for dinner at the Grill Room at Tabb’s, famous for its chicken and ragtime music. After dinner they went dancing at the Savoy. As soon as George took Josephine into his arms to dance, her “flesh burned under his touch.” They were among the last couples on the dance floor when the Savoy finally closed, just before dawn:
How bawdy the music had been at the Savoy. How Fess Williams had waved his magic baton over the dancers, converting them into gaily gliding pans and shepherdesses. So like Pan did Williams look with his dark African face . . . he and George might almost be brothers.
Thinking over the evening later in her Village studio, Josephine added into her diary: “The glance and touch of X [George] thrilled me as no other man’s ever had.”
Josephine had found, quite literally, the man of her dreams. Like many other post-Victorian women, she was fascinated by what dreams could tell about individual desires and social mores. Like them, she believed “the dream is the Superself instructing the active self.” She kept dream journals; studied dreams and the available literature about them, including Freud; and advocated acting on the wishes dreams express. Dreams exist “to help you to make changes in your life,” she felt.
A few years before meeting George, while visiting her family in Texas, she had had a series of dreams that she described as “one of the few absolutely rapturous experiences of my life.” They were signs, she believed, of what should come. The dreams unraveled the “weaknesses” in the race “propaganda” she’d been raised with. They were filled with erotic scenarios of kissing and dancing with dark black men, both irresistible and threatening. She dreamed of taking responsibility for the weight of white racism. In her dream, taking that responsibility liberated her into a state of erotic and emotional bliss. She wrote:
Altho I trembled with fear I said to myself “now I will pay that long due debt which the white race owes the black Race for the centuries of cruel assault which its women have undergone at the hands of male whites”—and the realization that I would pay this debt even to death thrilled me exquisitely—I waited but nothing terrible occurred and instead a great burden seemed to have been lifted from life and the black youth and I clasped hands and joyfully began to dance. Wildly, ecstatically we danced whirling and leaping together with joined hands and arms. And as we each simultaneously lifted one foot high into the air kicking with pointed toe I beheld with one inexpressible sensation the magnificent contrast of my Ivory-white limb to his of gleaming ebon and the sign sent my soul soaring in ineffable heights of bliss—this sensation was not merely sexual in the accepted sense but athletic and philosophical as well. . . . In this dream I rose to heights of the purest most divine joy possible for a human being to experience.
Josephine believed that suppressing what such a dream expressed would lead, inevitably, to “neurotic disease.”
George was the ideal candidate to fulfill Josephine’s fantasies. He was very dark, very sexual, and highly intelligent. Importantly, he was as attracted to whiteness as she was to blackness and as likely as anyone to agree with Josephine that individual actions—race-crossing especially—had world-historical significance. As much a Yankee as she was a southerner and as instantly attracted to her as she was to him, George seemed the perfect dream-lover to help Josephine complete her personal transformation. His studied disengagement and signature skepticism only contributed to his allure, posing the challenge that Josephine, who’d recently found it too easy to get male attention, now needed. George was far more conventional than Josephine. But his irreverence and his race made him seem the most exotic man she’d ever met. Caught up in the drama of breaking the nation’s most cherished taboo, she would take years to notice how ill suited they were. By then she was out of options.
George Schuyler was born February 25, 1895, in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in a decidedly middle-class household. His highly literate parents took pride in being able to trace their heritage “as far back as any of them could or wanted to remember.” The family set “a good table,” with Haviland china and silver. In their household, “order and discipline prevailed.” Feelings were not indulged. George was an only child, the center of attention. His parents told George that he was as good as—or better than—anyone else. They encouraged him to take no guff. “I was always to fight back when c
alled names.” Almost all their neighbors were white.
George joined the army in 1912. Although he stood only five feet, five inches tall, his success as a drill instructor bolstered his masculinity. He felt at home with military discipline and might have made a place for himself had it not been for the army’s ingrained racism. He collected stories from the other blacks he met in the military about the strategies they used to defeat racist whites. One of his favorites came from a young southern black man in his company with the surname “Wright.” Knowing that their child would be called “Boy,” or worse, the Wrights had given their son the first name “Mister.” “What’s your name, boy?” he’d be asked. “Mister,” he’d reply. “Don’t get smart with me, Nigger! What’s your first name?” “Mister.” George Schuyler couldn’t get enough of that story. “Mister (W)right.” Schuyler cracked up every time he told it. He was learning about using humor to subvert and provoke. But racism was rarely amusing. His refusal to accept the status quo was beginning to land him in trouble.
Eventually it landed him in jail. Strolling in his lieutenant’s uniform one day, George was refused service by a Greek shoe-shine man who refused to polish a “nigger’s” shoes. In a rage, George went AWOL. He subsequently spent nine months in a military prison. After his release he found little employment that matched his skills. He worked as a porter, handyman, messenger, dishwasher, hod carrier, taxi driver, clerk, and laborer and briefly owned a housecleaning business. Those jobs exposed him to labor issues and in 1919 he joined the Socialist Party.
Moving to Harlem shortly thereafter deepened his political awareness. George took an apartment near Fifth and 131st with his girlfriend, Myrtle, a young “quadroon” with “wavy hair” and a “full bosom”—“Men turned to admire her,” he wrote, “and that always makes a fellow feel pretty good.” After Myrtle fell short of his expectations, being neither a good housekeeper nor a good conversationalist, he landed at the Phyllis Wheatley Hotel, on 136th Street, which was operated by Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist UNIA. That stay, though brief, proved fateful. The UNIA was in its ascendancy then, and Marcus Garvey, its militant, charismatic Jamaican leader, was ubiquitous throughout Harlem; sporting a self-designed, highly decorated uniform, he preached an ideology of race pride and self-help that drew thousands of supporters to his “back-to-Africa” cause. George admired Garvey’s organizing skills almost as much as he hated Garvey’s endless calls to “race pride,” his bombast, and his willingness to cooperate with organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. George saw that willingness as a natural, maybe inevitable, consequence of racialist thinking, the weakness at the core of the “race pride” idea. “Race pride,” George discerned from watching Garvey in action, had almost limitless power for either good or ill. Race pride hence became the core of his thinking and the constant butt of his increasingly scathing satire (skin whitening and hair straightening were particular targets). There was no such thing as this “so-called race,” in his view, and therefore nothing to be proud of or swear allegiance to. “The words ‘Negro,’ ‘white,’ ‘Caucasian,’ ‘Nordic’ and ‘Aryan’ . . . [should be] permanently taken out of circulation,” he wrote. The belief in “fundamental, eternal, and inescapable differences” between people of different races was just the “last stand” of the “Negrophobists,” just another form of racism. “At best, race is a superstitution [sic],” he asserted.
The day George met Josephine, he was pondering those problems, searching for a way both to be proud of blackness and to debunk it as a dangerous myth. He was also in search of effective ways to fight back. And, along with almost everyone else in Harlem, he was looking only to masculine models of militancy, not necessarily thinking that Garvey could be replaced with something entirely different. When Josephine opened the door to his office, did he see someone who might be able to help him think that through? Perhaps.
Over the next few weeks, George and Josephine saw each other often. He went downtown to the Village to see her once or twice a week. More often, Josephine went uptown to accompany him to the Savoy Ballroom, Lafayette, Small’s Paradise, the Curb Market, or Strivers’ Row. George was “the only gentleman I’ve met in New York,” she said. He was also a fine dancer and an excellent kisser. “His lips are softer and more sensuous than white lips,” she rhapsodized. When they went dancing, as they often did, Josephine’s vaguely sadomasochistic erotic tendencies were gratified: his hands “gave me a sense of much fear and pleasure as if a black whip were playing coyly across my limbs.”
She was attracted but also bewildered. His mix of racial ideas was puzzling. He was the blackest man she’d met. But he professed no interest in race. It seemed, in fact, that she was more interested in blackness than he was. George’s ideas, Josephine wrote, “disappointed me, for I wanted to believe that the Negro was essentially different.” She was concerned that her own love of blackness, her fascination with Harlem, would brand her in George’s eyes as just another “slumming” bohemian. She felt that blacks had a “unique side” and were “more realistic and natural” than whites—forced to be so by society, perhaps, yet “different all the same.” But she also knew that George wanted a white woman who “was liberal on the race question without being mawkish and mushy.” Caution seemed to be called for. “Everything about Harlem thrilled me, but I concealed my enthusiasms.” She probably also concealed the fact that she was “darkening her complexion,” by using a “brunette” face powder. George wanted her to emphasize her whiteness, even to bleach her hair blond. Josephine hated what she called “the moldy cheese look [of] white skin” and often waxed rhapsodic about the beauty of a “glistening” black complexion.
She needn’t have worried. George was only too happy to undertake Josephine’s racial education. Her views tickled rather than annoyed him. “My sentimental views of the Negro greatly amused him,” she was pleased to discover, “and he undertook to emancipate me from my first emancipation,” she reported in her essay “The Fall of a Fair Confederate,” her first published account of becoming a “Negrophile.” Although George opposed race-based ideologies and organizations, she saw that he promoted race pride, black history, greater attention to black achievement, and the importance of blacks being “loyal to OURSELVES.” He wanted to see more biographies of “great men and women in Negro history” and more monuments “commemorating the achievements, sacrifices and tribulations” of great African Americans from history. Josephine’s love of blackness delighted him, especially coming from a white woman. As one of his biographers rightly pointed out, George “would have been hard pressed to find anyone, white or black, who could have loved his blackness like Josephine.” Once Josephine understood that consistency was not a requirement of the ideology George espoused, she quickly adopted his views of race as her own, vacillating, along with much of the rest of Harlem, between celebrations of racial differences and adamant denials that there was any difference at all.
She also learned, to her relief, that George was neither as aloof from or as uninterested in “pork-skinned” people as he claimed. As with most people who cultivate a cool exterior, when he did give way to sentiment, he was very sentimental indeed. His love letters to Josephine were resplendent with purple prose and with “disgust and violent dislike” for everything but her. You are my “oasis” and “ideal,” “superior to everybody,” and the world’s “finest expression of womanhood,” he wrote. “I want to prostrate myself at your feet; to slave for you, and if need be, to die for you,” Harlem’s most renowned antiromantic added.
Josephine did not laugh off such hyperbole. She was also sexually satisfied, for perhaps the first time in her life. The couple had sex on April 17, a Wednesday morning, a little over two weeks after they met, in George’s “spotless and orderly” Harlem room. Josephine carefully recorded in her diary that George was “a marvelous lover and possesses the most gigantic anatomy.” Sitting in her studio in Greenwich Village, she mused over feeling “ennobled” and at peace after her first intimacy with a
black man. As she would continue to do throughout her life, she immediately connected her individual situation to its larger social context, feeling that in taking a black lover she had struck a moral blow against racism and what we would now call “white privilege.” As one critic incisively put it, “Sex across the color line always represents more than just sex.” “Something marvelous has happened” that “ennobles” me, she wrote. It was “unlike all other embraces . . . like a benediction, a purification.” The combination of taboo defiance and “super-sexual” intercourse was intoxicating. “It draws me, undoes me, makes me long to sacrifice for it. . . . I want to say ‘Devour me, Negro, Devour me.’ Aloud I say, ‘I should like you to kill me, Schuyler.’ I feel like a white rabbit caught in the coils of a glistening black snake. . . . I know that I love him. Oh God, how I love him as I’ve never loved before.” George was the first man who’d been willing to play “diabolically” with Josephine and who possessed the “mischievous smile” she needed.
At this time, Josephine was also constructing her own racial ideology—without the benefit of a social movement or a cohort, with none of the analytical tools associated with the academic field now known as whiteness studies, which exposes how whiteness is constructed as an “invisible norm.” She was working out how racism damages whites as well as blacks: “Even worse than what they [prejudices] do to the Negro is the effect they have upon the whites who mouth them. They create in the white a bloated egotism which is both dangerous and disgusting and which has no place in this age.” She saw the personal as political. She also went farther—much farther than most other whites—to see her identity itself as political, something other than a mere accident of birth. In thinking through the ways, as she put it, that “most of America is crazy on the race question” as a problem for whites as much as blacks, she was way ahead of her time.
