Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  “Clasp hands,” the judge told them. Then everything unfolded in “a daze”: “I heard Schuyler saying, ‘I do.’ . . . Next . . . the official uttered an appalling catechism of my future intentions toward the man beside me. . . . I grew very sober and perhaps terrified. . . . I answered ‘Yes.’ The question had to be repeated.” Josephine made herself heard. Then George planted a “stiff kiss” on her lips. It was over. They were married. Josephine Cogdell was now Mrs. George Schuyler.

  They walked down the wide white marble steps of the Municipal Building. The sky was darkening. George was thinking of the wedding scene in All God’s Chillun Got Wings, where the interracial couple come out of the church “and the people are gathered on either side with the hands out pointing at them.” Josephine was even farther away, back in Granbury, Texas, talking to the Cogdell family servants (as she later recorded it in her diary):

  As I stepped down, I thot—“Aniky,” you won. And in the shadows Big Jim strode beside us with his death wound in his black back and now he looked content as if his debt had been repaid, and Ronda nodded, and her mother who had said, “‘Niggahs’ll never have no justice in this earth. No, lil missy, nevah!’” nodded also and the distraught look on her gnarled chocolate face smoothed away, and she smiled. Gaston’s mulatto daughter said, “our blood is yours.” Jo shook hands with me and Mandy took me against her soft yellow bosom, ‘Baby,’ she said “you done right.’ And all the cotton pickers and mill hands stood smiling at me, and all of them shouted—joyously—‘Things is changed!—de ole man’s baby has married a Niggah.’ It’s a good thing S. doesn’t know how sentimental I am, I thot, full of embarresment at these hallucinations. Nothing can justify the pain his race has suffered at our hands, it is silly to harbor such illusions, in fact the Negroes at home would probably disapprove of my action on commonsense grounds—yet, I believe that all these things have somehow influenced me and bound me indissolubly to the Negro.

  Josephine needed to convince herself that what she’d done was right, logical, and even fated. With her family background, she reasoned, what else could anyone have expected?

  You papa, you initiated me so. How about Aniky! and you Gaston, your first love and your only child, my niece. It’s in our blood, the love of Black people. We are savages too. all strong people are savages which means we are too proud to be unreal. we have no place in the pale conventional modern world[.] our kind is with people who frankly, lustily, fight and love and break the soil and sing. . . . Twice I evaded respectability did you think you’d catch me this time! . . . Before this I’ve worn not calico perhaps but torn silk and been happy. . . . How is it I hesitate now that I’ve met my equal! Because he is black. I’ve always loved the night better than the day for the night is primal still and can never be tamed like the day. And I love his blackness. Because I’ll be in exile. From what? Boredome! O, S. no other man can dance, or love or talk or drink like you. From the start I’ve been rushing toward you.

  For both George and Josephine, the marriage was what Freud called “overdetermined”: wrought of overlapping and interlinking, even opposed, forces and causes. As much as they were in love, both were also fiercely committed to ideas that the marriage seemed to embody. Both believed that intermarriage could end racism as the black race lightened and the white race darkened. It was, they reasoned, the only natural and permanent solution. “The future war between the white and colored races . . . may be averted” through interracial sex and marriage, Josephine wrote. George tied the first wave of feminism and the New Woman movement directly to a transracial future. Freedom for women, he felt, would translate into increased interracial relations. “New Women,” he argued, would not “stand” for being deprived of black men. Given the ability to choose sexual partners freely, “they will in increasing numbers cross the color line in search of lovers and husbands.”

  On their way home from the Municipal Building, they stopped at a Greek market for wine and raw oysters to make a celebration dinner. In their apartment, Josephine set an elegant table with linen and silver, green candles, crystal candleholders, and romantic lighting. “My mother left me her choicest silver and linen, little knowing that it would star in our wedding supper,” she told George. “Poetic justice,” he replied.

  Josephine planned to nap while George finished a writing assignment that was due the next morning before he left on another business trip. But they ended up in bed. By the time they got up, it was late, and George’s writing was still undone. Together they went to the desk and worked collaboratively until dawn, when the piece was finally finished. While he went to the office to deliver the essay, Josephine went to the train station for his ticket, came home and packed his clothes, and made him a lunch to eat on the train. “We stand absolutely alone,” he told her, praising her teamwork. “We can’t count on anybody. The whole world is against us. The Negroes against the whites.”

  After he left, an exhausted Josephine cleaned the apartment, then wrote up their wedding day and night in her journal. Those detailed entries constitute the last time, as far as we know, that Josephine ever wrote about herself, in her journals. From a “spoiled” child and a self-centered young woman, Josephine transformed herself into a thoroughly committed wife and devoted mother. Later diaries contain no references to her own feelings or ideas; they detail—with incredible minuteness—the progress of her daughter, Philippa.

  The pattern the Schuylers set on their wedding night would continue—unnoticed by critics and never credited by George—for the rest of their lives: working together, both writing and editing when and as necessary, to meet George’s deadlines. Her job, Josephine decided, was to see that George was “cherished and inflated . . . certain of his superiority.” He would see that she was “pruned” of whiteness. It would be years before Josephine would notice the way in which traditional gender conventions undergirded the Schuylers’ bold racial experiment and how the price of all that courage would be paid by her alone.

  Both George and Josephine idealized and sentimentalized their marriage. They liked to claim that defying the racial taboo had made them stronger as a couple. Writing under a pseudonym in The Crisis, Josephine published this poem in “The Poet’s Corner”:

  Taboo

  He never rails nor threatens

  Nor boasts nor tells a lie

  But often he will harden

  His moon-full lips go wry

  With proud and mocking laughter

  For those who pass him by,

  And then he softly mutters

  In sadness without gall:

  “Because we didn’t falter

  Because we didn’t fall

  For an infamous taboo

  We’re two against them All.”

  When I lose my temper

  Or talk a bit too free

  He will call me to him

  And quietly lecture me:

  “If we act like others

  And ever stoop to brawl

  They will say Mixed Marriage

  Is what has caused it all.”

  In fact, Josephine and George were somewhat mismatched. They had to work carefully at getting along. “My husband is a Yankee,” Josephine summed it up, “and in many respects, I remain a Southerner. George is orderly, objective, disciplined, cautious; I am emotional, reckless, genial, careless, generous, and talkative. I improvise and he works by method.” In spite of feminist protestations, and promising Josephine that “I do not want you to be less of an individual because you have married me,” George was seeking an iconoclastic career but a conventional home. There was not room in his vision of his own ambition, and its demands, for a partnership of equals. “You are entering a new life, Josephine,” he told her. “You must forget your freedom!”

  Henceforth they would be a team, but their goal would be to build a better George Schuyler, ever more productive, quick to take on all comers, and fierce in the defense of the principles they would now share. “I have dropped completely out of sight,” the last p
age of Josephine’s diary reads. “No one in the white world but Mr. H [Freeman Hubbard] knows my whereabouts or will ever know.” The young woman who had come to New York determined to make her way as a writer learned to channel her ambitions in ways that rendered her almost invisible. Her marriage freed her from the constraints she so badly wanted to escape and opened up a range of experiences otherwise unthinkable for a young white heiress from Texas. It also foreclosed any likelihood that she would make a mark, in her own name, on history.

  “Changing All the Time”

  Anything that’s alive is changing all the time.

  —Josephine Cogdell Schuyler

  Except as Mrs. George S. Schuyler, Josephine was mostly out of the public eye in 1928. Her time was spent furnishing and decorating their three-room apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue, creating a family refuge. She did not throw herself into political causes or groups, as she’d done in San Francisco or earlier in New York. Suffrage and feminism seemed not to interest her anymore. Nor did she take to the forms of activist antiracism where she might have found other white women like herself: the antilynching movement, the Communist Party, or labor politics. She developed friendships with white women such as Fania Marinoff and black women such as Ella Baker, women who shared her commitments and interests, but those were personal connections, not political partnerships. In the days and months immediately after her wedding, Josephine appeared to ground herself exclusively in the very “Domesticity!” she’d run from.

  George, on the other hand, was very much in the public eye. His essay “Our White Folks,” which had appeared just days before their marriage in H. L. Mencken’s influential magazine, The American Mercury, attracted national attention. Written while George and Josephine were dating, certainly discussed by them, and very likely edited by her, the essay argues that trust or love between whites and blacks is impossible. “Our White Folks” makes its case for interracial impossibility so sardonically and unapologetically—especially in its treatment of “the average peckerwood” (or white person)—that nothing like it had ever been seen before.

  The “fervent scribbling” and “alarmist gabble” by whites about blacks, Schuyler wrote, creates a situation in which the “real feelings” blacks have about “the cracker” can only be distrust and dislike:

  There are Negroes, of course, who publicly claim to love the white folks, but privately the great majority of them sing another tune. Even the most liberal blacks are always suspicious, and have to be on the alert not to do or say anything that will offend the superior race. Such an atmosphere is not conducive to great affection, except perhaps on the part of halfwits.

  Forced to live under white rule, the average black person cannot escape having the ugly “inside information on the cracker”:

  Knowing him so intimately, the black brother has no illusions about either his intelligence, his industry, his efficiency, his honor, or his morals. . . . The Negroes know the Nordics intimately. Practically every member of the Negro aristocracy of physicians, dentists, lawyers, undertakers and insurance men has worked at one time or another for white folks as a domestic, and observed with cynical detachment their orgies, obsessions and imbecilities, while contact with the white proletariat has acquainted him thoroughly with their gross stupidity and often very evident inferiority. . . . The efforts of the Nordics to be carefree are grotesque; the so-called emancipated whites being the worst of the lot. . . . Look, for example, at their antics in Greenwich Village. It is not without reason that those white folks who want to enjoy themselves while in New York hustle for Harlem.

  What he called “the moony scions of Southern slaveholders” with their “sloppy sentimentalities” about blacks (inescapably a reference to his wife, if only by implied contrast between her first and her later forays into Harlem), come in for special derision. These “pork-skinned friends of Southern derivation,” he wrote, smother blacks with a love that is as racist and self-serving—and as demeaning—as hate would be. In short, the essay concluded, “the Negro is a sort of black Gulliver chained by white Lilliputians. . . . The fact is that in America conditions have made the average Negro more alert, more resourceful, more intelligent, and hence more interesting than the average Nordic.” Everyone who knew the Schuylers, and quite a few who’d only heard about them, knew that Josephine was a southerner who’d made her way to Harlem from Greenwich Village. Was she in on the attack, or was she its target?

  Josephine left no record of feeling offended by “Our White Folks.” That in itself is suggestive. It appears that as the coproducer of the literary persona known as George S. Schuyler, she could take it for granted that when whites were attacked, it was “present company excepted.” In fact, in an act of psychological distancing from other whites, Josephine joined in such attacks. She was not, in other words, the pathetic, abject, apologetic, and self-hating Edna Margaret Johnson of “A White Girl’s Prayer” but instead part of the critique. Not taking offense could be a mechanism of racial reidentification. In a culture where racism saturates every feature of social life and is just as ubiquitously denied, Schuyler’s inclusion of whites like his wife, and Josephine’s apparent refusal to be offended by that inclusion, carried symbolic weight. Thus they demonstrated their exceptional commitment to political principle. And thus Josephine also passed, yet again, this time as something other than the white woman her husband was vilifying across the nation.

  “Our White Folks” generated such a sense of racial victory that it was honored with its own testimonial dinner a few weeks after George and Josephine married. Hosted by the well-known society editor and publicist Geraldyn Dismond, the dinner, at the Venetian Tea Room on 135th Street, was attended by more than seventy guests, including such Harlem notables as the scholar William Pickens, A. Philip Randolph, Charles S. Johnson, and others. “Copious praise” was heaped on Schuyler. It was a major turning point. George’s autobiography devotes considerably more space to recollecting that dinner than to describing his marriage. “Our White Folks” helped make George “the most recognizable name in black journalism.” It also made him much in demand as a speaker. Just days after his return from his January 7 trip, he embarked on what became the first of an extensive annual lecture tour. That one took him to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, Pasadena, San Diego, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. Josephine stayed home.

  Harlem did not warm to Josephine right away. She was lonely. While there were mixed marriage clubs across the nation, the Schuylers appear not to have joined one. She was also convinced that the black women of Harlem hated her for marrying George and competing with them for “their” man. According to a story that Josephine’s father told her and that she believed, some of the early Klan activity in the South was the product of black women wanting to break up liaisons between white women and black men. That charge infuriated Nancy Cunard, who wrote an angry rejoinder about the “particular kind of lie the white Southern gentlemen put out” when she published Josephine’s essay about “the color line.” But Josephine was not entirely wrong. While black women rarely aired their views about white women in Harlem, one angry article, published in the same newspaper George was then editing, contended that white women in Harlem were not merely “brazen,” but worse. “There is no creature more abandoned, depraved” than the white woman who takes a black mate, the article argued. The weaknesses of white men leave the white woman “sex starved” and she flees them to black men, from whom she will “always stand more abuse than her darker sister.” No wonder, then, that Josephine felt put off not only by other white women but also by many of George’s friends. She had “dignified, friendly” relationships with her neighbors. She was “cordially received by my husband’s literary associates.” But she was not treated as an insider. Ella Baker recalled that “the wives of many of Schuyler’s black colleagues disapproved of his interracial marriage, which was quite uncommon in those days, and did not welcome Josephine into their social circle.” Josephine looked down on most other white women in Harlem, s
eeing them as slummers, exploiters, or uncommitted adventurers. She associated with almost none of them. In March, the New York News printed an article called “Schuyler Marriage Shocks Elite,” which criticized what it called George’s “irretrievable fall to a lighter hue” as a rejection of black women. Black society was disappointed with him, the article noted, “to the point of frigidity.” Such articles did little to encourage Josephine to put herself forward more forcefully.

  Josephine was reconstructing herself in Harlem on the basis of both the New Woman and the radical race ideas of her husband. George always pointed to breaking the taboo on interracial sex as the boldest and most important gesture an antiracist activist could make. He praised—especially in private letters to her—his wife’s willingness to endure public scrutiny for doing so. But in his autobiography, the two white women he singled out for praise—Ernestine Rose for fomenting “intellectual ferment” and Annie Nathan Meyer for being “a militant feminist, a fine writer, and an outspoken Negrophile”—were both women who respected gender norms, avoided scandal, and were rarely in the limelight, certainly never because of sex.

  In July, The Messenger folded. George was in New York, giving another lecture, that Robert Vann, The Pittsburgh Courier’s editor, happened to attend. Vann offered George the editorship of a weekly newspaper insert to be published out of Chicago for national distribution to the nation’s black papers. The circulation would be 250,000, the largest platform any black writer had achieved in America. The editorial offices of the weekly, however, were in Chicago. George accepted Vann’s offer on the spot. “Leaving Josephine to send the new furnishings we had in our three room apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue, I departed for Chicago and a new adventure.”