by Carla Kaplan
Josephine checking her reflection.
Josephine was enjoying herself immensely. Harlem was a revelation. And through George she could experience it as insiders did. She was no longer a “slummer” from the Village but his lover. She was now an honorary Harlemite. So distanced did she now feel from the slumming whites, entranced with the black “vogue”—precisely what had drawn her just weeks before—that in the August Messenger she published a poem, credited to “an Anonymous White Woman,” poking fun at other white women who came to Harlem to dance with black men:
Temptation
I couldn’t forget
the banjo’s whang
And the piano’s bang
As we strutted the do-do-do’s
in Harlem!
That pansy sea!
A-tossing me
All loose and free
In muscled arms
of Ebony!
I couldn’t forget
That black boy’s eyes
That black boy’s shake
That black boy’s size
I couldn’t forget
O, snow white me!
She was learning the pleasures—and techniques—of satire as well.
Still, she never considered a future with George: “With George there would never be any question of a lasting relationship.” Taking the affair any farther would be too drastic a risk. “I felt that what was good enough for my forefathers was good enough for me. But marriage was a very different matter.”
Then, unexpectedly, in September, John Garth appeared at her door. He had dreamed that someone had come between them. So he had sold an expensive painting and come across the country to “surprise” her. She took him to hear the blues sung by Ethel Waters at the Palace; to Central Park, Hester Street, and Chinatown; and to see many of New York’s out-of-the-way neighborhoods. She insisted that he accompany her to Harlem and meet George. He insisted, in turn, that she not sleep with George as long as he was visiting. She agreed but also refused to have sex with Garth, who grumblingly slept on the sofa in her tiny studio. She pressured both men into double dating. “You must be out of your mind, sister,” George said. But he went along with it anyway, bringing Mary Jane Jones, a light-skinned dental student, along to the Sugar Cane Inn. (Josephine later noted in her journal that her own artificially darkened complexion was two shades darker than Mary Jane’s.) Garth, in turn, pressured Josephine and George to pose for him so that he could paint them as a nymph and satyr, with Josephine naked and George stripped to the waist. George took Josephine aside. What had she ever seen in Garth? he wanted to know: “He’s deplorably middle class . . . like a Rotarian.” Josephine couldn’t disagree. In reality, Garth was no more conventional than George. But in Harlem he seemed to her “offensively harmless,” and that was about the worse thing a man could be in her eyes.
At that moment, comparisons were not working in Garth’s favor. George had prodigious energy; he could make love two to three times a night, work all day, and dance till dawn. Garth was tired, overweight, anxious, and much more moderate sexually. And Garth had foolishly been fighting with Josephine about race, telling her that she “ought to be hobnobbing with the most prominent people in New York” and that she was a “fool” to be “living with a nigger!” Disapproval always steeled Josephine’s determination. But Garth was beyond strategy and erring in all directions. While he was visiting, Josephine’s novel was rejected by the George H. Doran Company, and Garth handled her disappointment badly. He was also unaware that Josephine was now terrified that she might be pregnant. “I hope you are pregnant and have a black baby!” Garth yelled during one of their arguments. “I hope I do, too!” Josephine answered. “You’ll probably end by committing suicide!” Garth retorted. “Undoubtedly,” she agreed.
Until his arrival in New York, she had always expected to return to Garth when her Harlem holiday ended. Seeing him now and comparing him with George, however, she felt that she was “done” with Garth. They parted angrily. But as soon as he was gone, she was once again beset with doubt. “Now that it is too late, I long to be his again,” she wrote of Garth in her journal. She lay down on her bed in despair, feeling resentful of New York, Garth, George—everything. She resolved that she would never see George again and that she was through with men. Then she decided to rededicate herself to Garth. Moments later she was anxiously watching the clock, impatiently waiting for George to phone.
Josephine had another surprise, immediately after Garth’s departure. Her sister Lena and Lena’s husband showed up in New York, sent by D. C. Cogdell. Josephine went briefly with Lena to Park Avenue, where Lena tried to force “the ‘Best’ People” down her throat: “flabby bankers and brokers and the callow sons of the rich . . . like old boys playing at life. . . . The atmosphere of their parties seemed cheap.” Lena aired her own “violently anti-Negro” feelings. She was “flaunting her prejudice . . . churning out Southernisms . . . an ugly, loud-mouthed shrew.” “Niggers can’t marry white people,” Lena’s husband added. It was a “fearful example of what I might become,” Josephine wrote. “I decided that I must learn to be humble or I was lost. . . . I had seen all my family corroded by egotism into miserable and arrogant fools. I decided to marry X [George] if he would have me.” Through George, she felt, she could put behind her not only Garth but whiteness itself. She could step, with George, into blackness. “I decided to . . . become a member of a race which we daily forced to be humble.”
Josephine was scheduled to go back to Granbury and see her family for the Christmas holidays. She and George planned to marry when she returned. Evidently, the pregnancy scare was a false alarm, as her journals ceased to mention it. She recorded an uneventful time with her family and wired George from Texas that she’d meet him in Philadelphia, to marry him there on New Year’s Eve. She boarded a train to Philadelphia that had been cleaned by black Pullman porters and onto which black Pullman porters loaded her luggage; the porters also served her food and coffee and offered to post her letters and telegrams. She may have thought about Schuyler’s stepfather, who had worked as a cook on those trains. Perhaps she watched the porters’ hands, comparing them with George’s elegant, tapered fingers. She may have stared at the porters’ faces longer than a white woman should, perhaps noting their resemblance to her husband-to-be. She may have paused over every small luxury that being a white woman afforded her on the train, aware that she would never again be able to claim them. On December 30, she lay down on the narrow bed of her sleeping compartment, looked out at the dark plains rolling past her window, and felt sure that she was spending the “last pure white night” of her life.
When she disembarked in Philadelphia, George was not there. In a pattern that would become frequent after their marriage—and that would include places as far-flung as Cuba and Haiti—Josephine found herself alone and unable to reach him. Furious and feeling both abandoned and humiliated, she took the next train to New York. There she learned that George had never received her telegram about Philadelphia and was wondering when she was due to arrive. They arranged to meet at Penn Station.
Seeing him again in a soft gray suit and hat, after her time in Texas, she found his appearance thrilling, but she also recoiled from him, feeling “strange and self-conscious to be kissing his dark face and heavy lips” in the public waiting room. She was torn between her desire to marry him and her feeling that it was an impossible course for “the daughter of one of the first families of Texas, a full white whose grandparents had been slave-holders.” They took a taxi up to George’s Harlem apartment, a newer and bigger apartment thanks to his increasing success as a journalist, where they celebrated the New Year. Then they lived through a week of Josephine’s agonizing indecision. At one point, with George out of the apartment on an errand, she ran down to the phone booth on the corner and called every man in her address book, looking for rescue. As it happened, no one picked up the phone. “Experimenting with a Negro lover,” she realized, “was a vastly different matt
er than coming to his house in Harlem to live. . . . Dixie had filled me with cowardice. . . . I shall not marry him.” George was getting ready for a business trip that would keep him away for weeks. Josephine faced a lonely time in his absence. On January 5, he once again urged her to marry him. “Yes, Schuyler,” she said, crying. “Tomorrow.”
“When Black Weds White”
Josephine on her Harlem rooftop.
I have gained the peace of humility and a purpose in life.
—Josephine Cogdell Schuyler
The violent American complex against racial intermarriage seems very puzzling.
—George Schuyler
Looking back on her marriage in the mid-1940s, Josephine avowed that “there was never a happier bride” than she was on her wedding day. It was a nice sentiment but not at all true. Josephine’s wedding day was tortured. “The race barrier, so to speak, is America’s last frontier and it requires all the courage and determination of a pioneer to enter into an interracial marriage,” she later wrote. As she approached her wedding day, she found that she lacked that courage. In the final twenty-four hours, her resolve evaporated.
The night before her wedding, alone in Harlem (George stayed elsewhere for the night), Josephine poured out her doubts in her journal to try to dispel them:
I know up North here the Negro women will all hate me and feel I have taken unfair advantage of them and used my pale color to turn Schuyler. Now it all recurs to me—how I have felt him alone of all the men I’ve known to be my mental and spiritual & sexual [added in margin] equal. Now, I suddenly remember why I am marrying S. I want him to brow beat me. I want him to destroy my superiority complex. I want him to laugh at my white affectations and rationalize my fears. To my mind, the white race, the Anglo Saxon especially, is spiritually depleted. America must mate with the Negro to save herself. Our obnoxious self esteem will utterly destroy us unless we do. We need “shaking down” humanizing as Bhogvan Shing so often said. I need Schuyler. Without him I shall quit growing and solidify. If I am to be saved, S. will save me . . . my last pure white night I shall take calmly serenely, as befitting the future wife of a XXX [illegible] realist of uncompromising courage and color.
Recently, in “Our Greatest Gift to America,” George had argued that the gift of blacks was allowing whites to revel in an unearned sense of superiority, to be “buoyed up” by blacks operating as “the mudsill upon which all white people alike can stand and reach towards the stars.” Josephine did not want a life lived on those terms. She wanted to eschew the baggage of unequal advantages. She was familiar with a 1928 article, published in The Messenger by the black historian Asa H. Gordon, arguing that there were terrible disadvantages to being white. The average white man, he wrote, is an “intellectual Slave” whose immersion in unearned privilege makes it “impossible to be scientific and objective about race,” think straight, or make friends who could help him. His knowledge is “limited,” and his soul is “shriveled.” He lives in fear that his undeserved advantages will be snatched away from him. Josephine, who would soon write convincing poems and essays herself on exactly that theme, had long felt like something of an outcast from white culture. Becoming a critic of whiteness gave her a new perspective.
But on the evening of January 5, 1928, just hours from her own marriage to a black man, she was not thinking about abstract arguments. She was painfully aware that this was a step, once taken, which she could never take back. There was no one, including her husband, with whom she could share her doubts. So she wrote in her journal until an exhausted, restless sleep overtook her.
When she awoke the next morning, the day of her wedding, she found that she could not get out of bed. Neither had she come to a decision. Lying under the covers while George paced in the living room, she fashioned some of her doubts into an imaginary dialogue with John Garth. “Never once did you ask me to marry you,” she scolded her imaginary interlocutor. She worried (presciently, as it turned out) that once the novelty wore off, George might find monogamy too constraining. She was also concerned (rightly again) that for all his professions of feminism George was a domestic traditionalist and that, as a wife, she might stop writing. “I can live with you but I can’t marry you,” she had told George. “I’ve got to wait and see if I can write again. . . . I can’t be the orthodox wife.” Her greatest anxiety, however, had to do with race. Because it loomed so large, it swept her other concerns aside. If she could just resolve the racial question, she determined, she’d marry George, faithfulness and professional ambition be damned. The boldness of their racial move, as a couple, made everything they did, or might do, seem radical.
Her imaginary conversation with John Garth continued. “What about the others,” she had him ask her, “the suave and rich men of your sister’s influential circle? They’d put you on easy street.” “But they’d bore me to extinction” was her reply:
I don’t want to play at life in a living room. The Cogdells were all miserable with their legal mates, their good women and men. . . . Yes, I will marry Schuyler. He is the only straight, honest-to-god real man I’ve ever met.
“Leave me alone now,” she finally told the Garth she had conjured.
By the time she had made up her mind, it was midafternoon. She got up slowly, showered, and began to dress. George had been circumnavigating the living room for hours, by the time Josephine emerged from the bedroom at three o’clock. She was wearing the colors of spring renewal: a green-and-brown silk dress, green-and-brown suede gloves, a green snakeskin handbag, and a dark green felt hat, decorated with tiny green and gray violets. She had on her pearls and her best perfume. It was too late for a taxi. They’d have to take the subway. Josephine blamed George for the ride’s discomfort and and the passengers’ stares. “The crackers are worried,” George whispered. He promised that it would not always be that way. “You and I are going to get some money some way, sweetheart,” he promised her. We will “live like we should!”
They got off the subway and arrived at the marriage license bureau on Broadway just before its 4 p.m. closing time. A gray-haired clerk showed them the papers that would be filled out by his registrar. Josephine felt light-headed. “I lost all sense of sound. People and things seemed to float weightlessly. . . . Events crowded each other swiftly like tumbling cards.” George filled out his side of the paperwork calmly, putting down his age as thirty-two; his occupation as editor; his birthplace as Providence, Rhode Island; and this as his first marriage. When he pushed the papers over to her, Josephine swayed. Caught up in her own indecision, she’d not considered what kinds of questions might be asked.
“What shall I write?” she mouthed to George, pointing to the blank that asked for her name, horrified to imagine the Cogdells discovering her marriage. What if her brothers lynched George? “Use your married name as your maiden name. They’ll never know,” George advised. Shakily, she wrote “Lewis” in place of “Cogdell.” Underneath that, where the “Bride’s Residence” was requested, Josephine gave her old San Francisco address: 847 Diamond Street. She wrote twenty-seven for her age, collecting herself just long enough to lop the customary three years off her age.
The next problem was worse. The forms needed her “color.” Dozens of states at that time had laws prohibiting racial intermarriage in 1928, but New York was not one of them. Josephine understood, nevertheless, that what she and George were doing was criminal, in a larger social sense. States such as New York, which had enacted no intermarriage laws, were not necessarily supporting, or even tolerating, such unions. On the contrary, they typically operated from the position that “interracial marriage was considered so disgusting by whites that it was unlikely to occur on a wide scale.”
Josephine did not want to admit her race. “There’s some colored blood in my family,” she averred, alluding to her father’s and brother’s black mistresses. “Does that make me colored?” she asked the clerk. “Oh, yes, yes!” he replied, clearly delighted that she was not the white woman he’d assu
med. Josephine wrote in “Colored.” No one questioned her claim to blackness. As an article in The Negro Digest noted, “This is by far the easiest of all forms of passing, even if the woman happens to be a golden blonde. Few whites, or Negroes either, for that matter, can imagine her saying she is a Negro if she isn’t.” It was not the only way she passed that day. She wrote “Single” for marital status, rather than “Divorced,” and checked the space indicating that this marriage was her first. She changed her birthplace from Granbury to Dallas and changed her father’s name to Jack, her ex-husband’s name. But for some reason, perhaps because her mother had already died, she left her mother’s name unaltered on the form, writing it down in full: Lucy Norfleet Duke Cogdell.
When the clerk asked them to swear that all the information in their applications was correct, they swore. The required witness signed after their names. With their completed application thrust into their hands, they were hustled out the door and told to hurry upstairs to the justice of the peace. There they waited in line while the “hard-boiled Irish Judge” rushed the couple ahead of them through a perfunctory, unpleasant service. Josephine stared at the judge’s “greasy bald head” and “irritable impatient expression,” feeling ever sorrier for herself. Then it was their turn. A judge with an “amicable though skeptical face” waved them up to the bench. Josephine felt “ridiculous,” she wrote in her diary, “standing up before so many desks and officials, like a child petitioning permission” to do something that no one seemed to have the slightest interest in either granting or withholding. How could marriage—the end for which all women were raised—be such a nonevent? She had feared condemnation. But this disregard was worse. She and George were doing something noble and bold, even heroic, “a progressive deed.” No one seemed to notice. “Their indifference was degrading.”
