by Carla Kaplan
Josephine followed him to Chicago and set up housekeeping in the fall in “a very nice four room apartment in a South Side neighborhood which had just been infiltrated by blacks.” George worked long days, nights, and weekends. Josephine, he noted, was “delighted” with their “lovely nest . . . and with furnishing it and decorating it” and hosting dinner parties for new friends who came to eat and listen to jazz on the phonograph. But the new venture, which demanded long hours and had difficult finances, took its toll on George; in early winter he gave notice to Vann. “Leaving Josephine behind to pack up in Chicago,” he wrote, “I returned to New York City and rented a three room apartment in a brand new [apartment] house on Edgecombe Avenue on what was facetiously called Sugar Hill because so many high-income Negroes lived up there.” Josephine followed and took up the task of setting up, furnishing, and decorating their third home in a year. If she minded the responsibility, she did not say so.
Miss Anne was often raised to be a proper lady; Ernestine Rose in her youth.
Sugar Hill afforded exciting opportunities. It was renowned as Harlem’s most elegant area, with doorman buildings and well-tended parks. A Sugar Hill address was a mark of arrival—and 321 Edgecombe, next door to the buildings where W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Count Basie, and Aaron Douglas lived, was a very good address indeed. The Schuylers’ neighbors at 321 included Marvel Jackson Cooke, Du Bois’s secretary; the journalist Ted Poston; and both Walter White and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. Perched on a high hill, 321 Edgecombe was a six-story elevator building overlooking Colonial Park, with panoramic views of Manhattan. Its apartments had parquet floors, wood paneling, large rooms, modern kitchens, intercoms, and laundry facilities. The Schuylers’ third-floor apartment had good light, comfortable furniture, African art, many paintings—including quite a few canvases by Garth—and hundreds of books and phonograph records. Josephine painted the walls (and later Philippa’s piano) a cheerful apple green; the chairs were green and orange, upholstered in bright Hawaiian fabrics; and the bookcases were multicolored. Everything about the apartment suggested both culture and good cheer.
Without diaries or letters—Josephine now had no one to write to—we must rely on the descriptions of others for a sense of the Schuylers’ home in the early days of their marriage. Ella Baker, who worked with George on the creation of the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League and spent a lot of time with the family in those years, remembered their home as a lively center for “animated discourse that helped define African American public life,” with a salon atmosphere that welcomed artists, writers, intellectuals and politicians: “stimulating company, provocative conversations, and elegant hospitality”—everything that Josephine had come to New York to find.
The Schuylers at home, reading.
Being public models of progressive, interracial relations came easily to Josephine and George. Both contributed enthusiastically to the myth-making that goes into being a celebrity couple. They continued to keep their marriage a secret from the Cogdells. But they “fed off their importance to others.” Each eventually took advantage of the podium their marriage provided to publish essays about interracial marriage. Their celebrity status translated into invitations for George to speak on topics as far-ranging as feminism and psychoanalysis. There were interviews and, most enjoyably, the occasional published homage, such as the following bit of doggerel published in the Cincinnati Union by its editor, their friend W. P. Dabney:
George and Josie jogged along
The path of domestic life;
The world for them seemed one glad song,
So free was it from strife
But thus it had not always been,
The past had taught them well,
So when they met they did begin
To make paradise out of Hell.
Letters between Josephine and George, especially in the first years of their marriage, reveal that they remained passionate about each other. Josephine expressed her gratification in having both a lover and a friend and praised George’s character, work, and looks. George, in turn, though traveling almost constantly, wrote romantic paeans to Josephine’s bravery and her faith in him—telling her that the strength she’d given him had made her into his “God.”
If so, his form of “worship” strained the marriage almost from the start. Josephine was no sexual puritan. But she was convinced that “love must be monogamous.” George held no such view. Some of his friends were hard pressed to keep up with the stories he wanted them to tell his wife to cover his tracks. In addition to his infidelity, there was the strain of constant separation. George was on the road more often than he was home, and Josephine was left in Harlem to take care of business. All of George’s articles were sent to her before they went to their editors. There was no reason for George, pressed by deadlines and time pressures, to send his articles to Josephine first, unless she was also editing, fact checking, finishing, and making copies, just as she had done on their wedding night.
Less than two years into their marriage, the financial markets fell. Josephine and George watched with alarm as one after another of the restaurants, nightclubs, and periodicals that made up their cultural world closed down. They read in their daily newspapers about food that Americans could not afford rotting in the fields; war veterans marching in Washington; and riots breaking out in Seattle, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Almost daily they passed evicted families with their belongings on the street or Harlem’s “slave markets,” where increasing numbers of black women—many of them former clerical workers or educators—waited for day work as maids to white women. By the early 1930s, almost a fourth of Harlem residents were jobless and scores of homeless families were sleeping in nearby St. Nicholas Park, alongside City College. The Harlem Hospital, already notoriously understaffed, fired almost all of its black doctors. Many of their friends, including Zora Neale Hurston, accepted positions with the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers Project at a small fraction of what whites were receiving. Harlem YWCA staff member Anna Arnold Hedgeman remembered, “Women and children searched in garbage cans for food, foraging with dogs and cats. Many families had been reduced to living below street level . . . in cellars and basements that had been converted into makeshift flats. Packed in damp, rat-ridden dungeons, they existed in squalor.”
The Schuylers were in no danger of eviction. Josephine was certainly not going to find herself cleaning other white women’s bathrooms. But George’s position was precarious. The Pittsburgh Courier, now his financial mainstay, reduced his salary by 40 percent. He knew that, as a black journalist, he was vulnerable to “last hired, first fired” standards. In the winter of 1930, just as the Depression was deepening in Harlem, George was offered the opportunity to investigate claims of modern slavery in Liberia for the New-York Evening Post. The trip would mean months away from home with scant means of communicating with Josephine, who was pregnant. But he was in no position to turn down the assignment, although he was already overcommitted to other writing and in the middle of his organizing effort to form black consumer cooperatives with Ella Baker. Departing from the practices of other Harlem organizations, the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League was radically democratic, intent on putting power into the hands of its members. It was an exciting vision but, like so many of George’s activities, not one that included a significant role for Josephine. While George was in Liberia, Josephine found evidence of his affair with another woman. She cabled that she was going to leave him. George’s pleading telegrams, probably combined with Josephine’s knowledge of how few places would welcome a single woman bearing a biracial child, kept the marriage going, if not altogether intact.
Philippa was born on a steamy Sunday morning, August 2, 1931, at home (the Harlem Hospital had a death rate twice that of other hospitals in New York, earning it the nickname “Butcher Shop,” and Josephine refused to go there). George had come home but was gone before nightfall on another trip. Ella Baker and other women friends sta
yed with Josephine for her first few stressful days, then left her alone with her newborn daughter.
“Gargoyles of Color”
Whites sometimes . . . pass for Negroes.
—Josephine Cogdell Schuyler
George traveled so constantly during the early years of their marriage, and wrote for so many different venues at once, under so many various names and pseudonyms, that scholars have always been at a loss to explain his productivity. He is credited with as many as seventy stories in the early 1930s, in addition to his journalistic and editorial work, some pieces under his name, some anonymous, and some under a plethora of other men’s and women’s names, including Samuel I. Brooks, Rachel Call, Edgecomb Wright, William Stockton, Verne Caldwell, Rachel Love, John Kitchen, and D. Johnson. Many of the pieces use a mix of styles and voices. All of George’s biographers have noted how “extraordinarily productive” he was in the immediate aftermath of his marriage to Josephine, his period of greatest, even “inexplicable,” output. Many have noted a change in his style during that time, some saying that his work seemed to “mature” overnight. None have noticed how much some of these writings sound like Josephine. From his long travels in Liberia, especially, many unanswered questions remain about the authorship of articles that appeared weekly under George’s byline. Often he was in areas so remote—“not a hundred miles of road in the country” and with no airports, let alone telephones or telegraph offices—that Josephine sometimes did not know, for weeks at a time, if he was living or dead. Yet the pace of his publication hardly slackened. In spite of their collaborations, their shared use of pseudonyms, and the near impossibility that George was working without help, no critic or biographer has ever suggested that the explanation for George’s “inexplicable” output was probably the active participation of his wife. It is another instance in which Josephine seems to have gotten away with hiding in plain sight.
George certainly would not have showcased his wife’s collaboration. His reputation increasingly rested on both his willingness to attack anyone and his renown as the hardest-working writer in Harlem. If some of the writings long credited to him were Josephine’s work, it would not have been to George’s advantage to draw attention to that.
Indeed, it might not have been entirely to Josephine’s advantage to reveal such a practice either. She was fascinated with the phenomenon of “passing” and had played at fooling others with her various personae going back to her early childhood. George had thrilled her in their very first meeting by confessing that he’d been unable to detect her race definitely from her writing. She was particularly entranced with the idea that one need not be stuck in the racial (or gender) identity into which he or she had been born. Her idea of freedom was the freedom to be whoever she wanted and to change identities at will.
As Heba Jannath, the pen name she used most often, Josephine published in Nancy Cunard’s Negro “America’s Changing Color Line,” a long article on passing, intermarriage, and race. The essay is wistful, even envious, of those who move from one race to another: “I know or have heard of dozens of people who have passed successfully. . . . The octoroons who ‘pass’ are usually past masters at detecting the slightest change in the thoughts and emotions of the people around. They obtain a view of both races denied most of us, and, full of ambition as they usually are, they emulate the best points of both groups.”
“America’s Changing Color Line” considers passing’s ability to prove contradictory things. It shows that someone can cross from one race to another because race is merely learned behavior. But it also suggests that there are different racialized states to pass between, that one is crossing from something to something else. Blacks can pass for white, she wrote, because whiteness is a cultural creation that can be mimicked. But whites can never truly pass for black. Although “whites sometimes find it convenient to pass for Negroes . . . Negroes, being shrewder in such matters, are not easily taken in.” Passing works only from black to white, because whiteness and blackness are fundamentally different things: one a construction and the other a property. In its conclusion, the essay took a position that goes something like this: white identity is nothing, a negative, and open to all; black identity might actually be something, but whites can’t have it. If Josephine was right that whiteness was emptiness and blackness had substance, it’s no wonder that some white women, such as Edna Margaret Johnson, pined for a blackness that seemed more authentic than the whiteness to which they’d been born.
From girlhood on, Josephine had played with personae. Whenever she was with someone who seemed ill at ease, she’d invent shocking stories about herself, “bits of scandal.” It was “entertaining” for everyone, she found, to play with different identities. And even as she wrote about passing and its limits, she was continuing to both pass and test identity. She had been experimenting with being Heba Jannath for years, well before she met George (he probably learned the pleasures of pen names and pseudonyms from her). Whereas Josephine was cautious, Heba Jannath was fearless: a guilt-free New Woman, a confident authority on everything from modernism to race to nutrition. She was more radical than Josephine and far less sentimental. Heba did things other women only dreamed of. As Heba Jannath, Josephine not only wrote essays and a small mountain of unpublished novels—including The Last Born, or Rebel Lady, Southwest, Husbands and Lovers, and others—she also wrote movie scripts, including one called The King of Africa. And although Josephine did not consider herself especially musical, Heba was a jazz artist. In 1930, she wrote a song called “The Penalty of Love,” which was featured first in the revue Hot Chocolates at Connie’s Inn and then at the Times Square Theatre in the play Hot Rhythm, which starred Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham, a former black minstrel performer who had become one of Harlem’s biggest—and raunchiest—stars. The well-known singer Edith Wilson performed the song—“The penalty of love is closing your eyes/Hiding your sighs, feelings and the lies”—which was recorded that year by Bubber Miley and His Mileage Makers for Victor Records. As Heba Jannath, Josephine also published a long verse story about the dark side of the South called “Deep Dixie,” which turns attention away from the “moonlight” and “honeysuckles” of the South to focus attention on a “rotten” land. There, oppressed white workers, frustrated in competition with blacks, are bought off with the myth of “pure white womanhood,” blacks are lynched for the sins of white men, and a white woman who crosses the color line by so much as an inch is doomed. William Pickens, evidently unaware of who Heba Jannath was, wrote her a fan letter to say that “Deep Dixie” was a “Damned Good Story. It is the best thing of the kind I have read in many a moon. . . . You are Southern & Human,” he added.
Another of Josephine’s more interesting personae was Laura Tanne (or tan allure), whose view of interraciality was much darker than either Josephine’s or Heba’s. Whereas Josephine saw interraciality as a solution to the race problem, Laura Tanne was not convinced. As Tanne, Josephine published “To a Dark Poem,” a very grim rendition of interracial love in which the white female speaker binds her black lover in a “white fortress” (a phrase Josephine had used to describe her family home in Granbury), refusing him freedom and offering, instead, just the “pallid loom of my breasts.” This needy, pallid, monstrous woman would show up as the death-dealing widow of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man. She is the terrible ashen specter of Jean Toomer’s “Portrait in Georgia” and the hideously well-meaning but lethal Mary Dalton of Richard Wright’s chilling novel Native Son. As Laura Tanne, Josephine joined with Lillian Wood to create a white woman character who represented the most devastating critiques blacks made of whites, critiques far bleaker than anything ever published by her husband. As Laura Tanne, Josephine could also out-Schuyler Schuyler by ridiculing the racism of her white friends. In 1930, Tanne’s “Now I Know the Truth” exposed “gross” whites, who sexualize all interracial relations and find blacks “strange and fascinating.”
Writing under different personal
ities allowed Josephine to experience social positions otherwise unavailable to her and to write in ways that were otherwise foreclosed, including satire, usually a masculine form. Through her pseudonyms, she could articulate a range of views—from the most sentimental kinds of primitivism to a radical version of antiessentialism—without worrying about reconciling their contradictions. Issues that caused problems in her home life were given free rein on the page. She could depict interracial love as a playful erotics of difference, then turn around and present it as doomed precisely because people insist on a difference that does not exist.
Publishing under various names also allowed her to publish much more than she would have otherwise. In the April 1928 issue of The Messenger, she published at least four separate pieces: a long article on diet and nutrition as Heba Jannath and three different poems as Laura Tanne. In the next issue she published at least three pieces: two as Heba Jannath and one as Laura Tanne. George could not afford evidence that the editor’s wife was filling out issues of his magazine. By publishing under different names and at times anonymously, Josephine was able to create the appearance that there were many more white women circumstanced as she was and writing about it. In that way, she was able to create an imaginary community of like-minded white women that she needed but did not have. Her strategy worked, almost too well. Hence, anyone paying attention to a long-running series such as “The Poet’s Page” would have assumed, wrongly, that there were many more progressive white women writing antiracist poetry than ever, in fact, existed. Until now, most of Josephine’s writings have been unknown, unremarked, and never traced back to her authorship. And if her marriage had made her uncomfortable writing about herself in her own voice—as the cessation of her diaries suggests—her pseudonymous publications allowed her to keep writing, regardless.
