by Carla Kaplan
As Mrs. George Schuyler, Josephine must have keenly missed the company of other women. Her family had been contentious but also intimate, and, as the youngest Cogdell child, she’d been especially doted on by servants and siblings. For the first three years of her marriage, until her daughter Philippa was born, she was largely alone in Harlem. None of the other white women she met—not Fania Marinoff, Mary White Ovington, Annie Nathan Meyer, or Nancy Cunard—shared her goal of trying to assimilate into the black middle class. Her most interesting, and peculiar, persona was Julia Jerome, Harlem’s black Ann Landers. As Julia Jerome, black advice columnist, Josephine could experience the intimacy with women she was, in fact, often without. Julia Jerome’s calling card was girl talk. As the leading black female advice columnist in The Pittsburgh Courier, the nation’s most widely circulated black paper (200,000 to 250,000 copies were distributed at its peak), Josephine had the ear of (other) black women. Speaking to them, advising them, communicating with them about the most intimate and vexing parts of their personal lives helped her go from having almost no one to speak with to presiding over a huge and public conversation about private, domestic life.
“Julia Jerome” was an ardent feminist and a more consistent defender of modern women than Josephine ever was. She cautioned lovelorn women that love is “always changing,” not something they can expect to be the same year after year or even day after day. “Believe me, I know a thing or two about this love game,” she told her readers. She advised her black women readers not to accept their first chance at marriage but to assume that they would have multiple opportunities. Since “money is necessary,” she warned, be very shrewd in choosing a husband who is both a good provider and a competent lover, a man with both “love-making and home-making qualities.” Do not to be afraid to teach a man how to give sensual and sexual pleasure. Think of marriage as a partnership, an “ideal” that is also a “deal.” Understand virtue not as sexual abstinence, but as self-development and improvement. Appreciate that “your first duty is to yourself and your own happiness.” Remember that the world is full of men and that “there will be others just as good” if one does not pan out. Women “for thousands of years have been literally bought and sold” and now need a “square deal,” she advised male readers. A “mercenary” and “calculating” framework is good for women until such time as “the state provides for the support of every prospective mother” and also “takes the ban off of contraceptive knowledge,” she added. “Couples should be pals,” she wrote to her male readers; “treat [your] wives as comrades.” In her combination of New Woman ideology and New Negro militancy, Julia Jerome was a fantastical—and fantastic—creation, unique in the Harlem Renaissance.
The Pittsburgh Courier’s marketing of Julia Jerome was odd. Accompanying the columns was a Victorian-style silhouette of a stereotypically bushy-haired and large-lipped female profile. Long out of fashion by the 1930s, replaced by the camera and too closely associated with whites, such a silhouette was an unusual marketing choice. It created a hall of mirrors effect of masks upon masks for those who knew—as the paper’s editors must have known—that black Julia Jerome was white Josephine Cogdell Schuyler. It verified Jerome’s pretended blackness with antiquated, even offensive, racial markers.
In both her life and her writing, Josephine sought “emancipation” through remaking herself over and over again. But making yourself invisible is a tricky business. Even when it works—or especially when it works—there is an irony to escape by self-erasure. Or, as Josephine put it once in her diary, “sad are beautiful revenges.”
“An Adventure in Bitterness”
Generally speaking, my life in Harlem has been most satisfactory.
—Josephine Cogdell Schuyler
Motherhood is an adventure in bitterness.
—Josephine Cogdell Schuyler
Philippa’s birth in 1931 changed everything for Josephine. Once it became clear that Philippa was a genius and a piano prodigy skilled enough to achieve international renown, Josephine became ambitious for her daughter, not for herself. She continued to call herself a writer until Philippa was four years old, and then, despite the fact that she had never stopped writing, began referring to herself as a housewife.
Josephine documented every detail of Philippa’s development: weight, size, first crawl, first unassisted sit, first stomach pat, first head rub, first stand, first steps, first laugh, first words (“Mama,” followed by “Daddy,” “God damn,” and “How do”). Nothing was too minor for Josephine’s attention: what Philippa thought of dried leaves, what her favorite sounds were, how she looked at the cat. By the time Philippa was an adolescent, there were more than a dozen heavy, oversize scrapbooks filled with notes, photos, and clippings about her. There were photos of Philippa on the roof with her mother, Philippa playing with dolls, Philippa in the park, Philippa playing dominoes, and Philippa composing music—and, of course, many photographs of Philippa playing the piano, since she sometimes rehearsed for eight hours a day. The scrapbooks were also filled with newspaper clippings. Reporters were magnetized by the toddler who played Mozart, could spell the longest word in English, was a mathematical wizard, ate raw food, spoke in complex sentences, and called her parents by their first names. Kept to be read by Philippa as soon as she was old enough to do so, the scrapbooks also contained early history, from George’s side of the family, to encourage Philippa’s pride in her black ancestors. The first scrapbook opened with a picture of Colonel Schuyler, George’s ancestor, and a map of New Amsterdam, so that Philippa would see “the city, the forts, and the defenses” that blacks had helped to build.
Josephine’s scrapbook, with a message for her daughter: “Your ‘illustrious father and mother’ during the critical period” (that is, of Josephine’s pregnancy with Philippa).
Philippa was the Schuylers’ project. She could read at the age of two, play music at four, compose and give concerts at five. Those extraordinary accomplishments, combined with uncanny poise and maturity, would allow her, both parents believed, to “topple America’s race barriers.” Both wanted Philippa’s story to defeat the old tragic mulatto narratives—stories of mixed-race people who cannot find their place in the world and die unhappily. Philippa could upend racism by demonstrating the superior benefits of “hybrid vigor.” “What glory she will reflect upon us. . . . We must do everything to preserve her, like a hothouse flower,” George wrote to Josephine when Philippa was four years old. To some people, “Jody’s desire to prove the success of her marriage, through her daughter” seemed excessive, even “an obsession.” But Josephine had never given up her determination that life should be lived toward greatness, not mediocrity. “As I look back, I see how I longed to be important, to be taken seriously, to be given a way of life, pointed a road that was interesting. Instead, I was given money, social position and treated like a baby. I loathed it.” She believed that Philippa could be a “great personality in the world.”
Philippa was exposed to literature and music, invited to listen to the debates of her parents’ friends, taken to movies, and taught the values of discipline, hard work, and self-control. Both parents were followers of the child-rearing techniques of John Broadus Watson, “the Dr. Spock of his time,” who recommended treating children as young adults. Watson was a proponent of spanking, and Philippa was spanked. (Hard, sometimes.) She was fed Josephine’s raw-food diet with no processed food or sugar, lots of fruits and vegetables, raw meat, cod liver oil, large amounts of Vitamin C, wheat germ, lots of milk and dairy products, and as much fresh air and sunshine as Josephine could devise for her—often on the roof of their apartment building. Special treats included homemade ice cream made from fresh fruit, unpasteurized cream, ice, and honey; and cakes made of ground dates, nuts, and raisins.
George was absent for so much of Philippa’s childhood that Josephine referred to herself and her daughter as “widows.” In one letter to Josephine, George acknowledged that he’d done “somewhat less” than his best.
When he was home, though, he played with his daughter, read to her, and made up little poems for her, sometimes about her background and biraciality:
Ride a horse to Granbury town
One foot is white, the other is brown.
Go in the morning, come back at night.
One foot is brown, the other is white.
But in a marriage where most of the successes were put onto George’s ledger, Philippa was Josephine’s success. George always gave his wife credit for being a brilliant, responsible mother. “Jody was Philippa’s whole world, and vice versa.” Whatever ambitions she had once had for herself, Josephine now focused instead on her daughter’s future.
Managing Philippa’s development and professional career—which commenced before she was ten—became Josephine’s full-time job. Some have criticized her for being a classic “stage mother” with an “obsessive need to control her daughter.” But for others, Philippa’s problems—she was clingy, depressed, dependent, often suicidal (beginning as early as nine or ten years old), and emotionally immature—left Josephine little choice. Josephine was “ruled by Philippa,” not the other way around, one of Josephine’s relatives said. Josephine never denied that she and her daughter had an unusual, possibly dangerous, symbiosis. In a letter to George, Josephine expressed her worry that “she has no other influence but me; and if my influence fails her, she fails: like a certain kind of bird that lives just in one kind of tree and if that tree is chopped down, it flies and flies until it dies of exhaustion because there is no other tree.”
George’s life changed very little after the birth of his daughter. In fact, the novel that many consider his “greatest literary effort” and for which he remains known to this day, Black No More, came out in January 1931, just months before Philippa’s birth. It launched another major chapter in George’s literary career. Devastatingly funny, Black No More is the best thing George ever wrote. And it is probably the last piece of his writing on which Josephine collaborated or to which she contributed substantially (it bears her unmistakable editorial stamp). Black No More was also a turning point: the novel expresses—and reverses—the values the couple had always held most dear.
The plot of this Swiftian satire turns on Dr. Junius Crookman, who discovers a chemical process to turn blacks white. The wildly popular process results in “crazy” race behavior on both sides of the color line, with blacks rushing to undergo “chromatic perfection” and become white and whites increasingly hysterical about how to tell passers from “true” whites. As it turns out, Crookman’s process makes new whites even lighter in color than “true” whites. Before long, all color values are reversed, with “true,” or original, whites scrambling for skin-darkening solutions and tanning parlors to darken their complexions and thereby prove their claim to essential whiteness. The novel’s protagonist—and the character closest to Schuyler—is black Max Disher, a Harlem dandy who becomes white Matthew Fisher, marries the white daughter of a leading Klan official, and becomes the Grand Exalted Giraw of the Knights of Nordica. By the end of the novel, Max/Matthew is financially comfortable and socially secure but longs for the black world he’s left behind. He finds himself increasingly unhappy with Helen, his shapely, white southern wife. Along the way, the novel manages to lampoon every major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, from Du Bois (Dr. Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard) to Madam C. J. Walker (Mme. Blandish) to Marcus Garvey (Santop Licorice) and others.
Given Schuyler’s staunch antiessentialist conviction that race is a superstition, all the passing in the novel should prove the absurdity of claims to racial difference. We should learn, from all the “crazy” race-crossing in the novel, that there is no reason to cross from one side to another (since the two sides are identical) and nothing to protect or hold on to, nothing to feel “pride” in, on either side of the color line.
But that is not what happens. It turns out that blacks can become white only on the outside. They remain, in some fundamental way, different. The race-crossings in the novel are absurd not so much because they are from nothing to nothing but instead because no one can leave behind his or her “true” self. Even more surprisingly, the novel makes use of a trope that I call the “moment of regret.” The “moment of regret” anchors almost every black passing novel, from emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance, around a highly charged moment when the passing character second-guesses his or her decision to pass. Finding white society lacking—in some fundamental decency, ability to love, appreciation of music and dance, or capacity for humor—the passer longs for the black world he or she has left. At this moment the passer realizes that whiteness is empty, a bad bargain, in spite of the material gain it can offer: it is what James Weldon Johnson’s passing narrator calls a “mess of pottage.” Max’s “moment of regret” is standard issue: “There was something lacking [in the white world.] . . . The joy and abandon here was obviously forced. . . . The Negroes were much gayer, enjoyed themselves more deeply and yet they were more restrained, actually more refined.”
Black No More was very successful, (even in a depressed publishing market) and Schuyler received lavish praise from a diverse cross section of the Harlem intelligentsia, including journalist Eugene Gordon, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Mary Church Terrell, J. A. Rogers, Mary White Ovington, and Carl Van Vechten. Even Du Bois gave Black No More a thumbs-up as “significant” and brave and signed the review “Agememnon Shakespeare Beard,” all of which Josephine especially appreciated. “You are indeed a sporting gentleman,” she wrote to him gratefully. When white writer Dorothy Van Doren gave the novel a negative review in The Nation, calling it “white literature,” Josephine rushed to its defense, arguing that there is no such thing as “racial” literature (Schuyler’s argument in “The Negro-Art Hokum” and elsewhere) and that it is foolish to expect a racial aesthetic from blacks. But George’s novel was “racial” literature of a type unexpected for him: a black defense of essential blackness as different from and superior to whiteness, a novel which only seemed to argue that race was constructed.
However much she defended the novel—and regardless of what her own contributions to it may have been—Black No More must have been hurtful to Josephine. It was not only that Helen, the white wife, is tiresome, dull, an intellectual lightweight, and sexually uninspiring. But the novel’s perverse racial logic must have affected her. She had staked everything on the idea that race differences could be breached. An intensely emotional woman, she had “consecrated” her life to a spiritual union with her husband that would prove that what everyone said about identity was wrong. If race, finally, was a fissure that could never be closed, perhaps she’d been wrong all along. Perhaps her greatest experiment was a failure.
By the time Philippa was born, only a few months after the novel appeared, the couple were beginning not only to live in separate bedrooms—which they maintained until the end of their lives—but also to keep their writing lives, as well as their personal lives, increasingly separate. Many strains were stretching their marriage to the breaking point.
One of those strains was George’s changing politics. Soon after Black No More appeared in the early 1930s, he began an inexorable political slide from left-wing socialist to far-right conservative, “further right than Barry Goldwater,” one of his friends later said. He came out against the 1932 Scottsboro case as a “Communist plot.” When Angelo Herndon, a black Communist Party organizer, was arrested on political charges in Atlanta and found guilty by an all-white jury, Schuyler attacked him, instigating a vitriolic public exchange with Nancy Cunard’s friend Eugene Gordon. Over the next two decades George opposed black boycotts; attacked black nationalism; argued for self-help rather than protest; championed American progress; supported Joseph McCarthy; eventually opposed the civil rights movement, attacking both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; supported Barry Goldwater; and finally joined the John Birch Society and became a journalist for the notoriously reactionary Manchester Union Leader. Much of Harlem was disgusted with
George. Twenty-four people, including Langston Hughes, signed a petition to the staff of The Pittsburgh Courier asking that he be fired. Schuyler lost many friends (though, oddly, not Nancy Cunard). It is very unlikely that Josephine shared his politics. Though she also became an anti-Communist (as did many Harlemites; the Party did not behave admirably in Harlem), she left no record of agreeing with any of George’s other conservative views. Josephine was nothing if not loyal. She never disagreed in print with any of his increasingly alarming views. What must it have been like for her, who had married one of Harlem’s most sparkling and radical thinkers, to now be saddled with a figure she had come to see as emotionally withholding, constantly absent, and shunned by most of their former friends, notorious where he had once been famous, and increasingly a laughingstock in the Harlem intellectual circles she had long respected and tried so hard to enter?
Josephine suffered from increasingly severe bouts of depression and feelings of abandonment. She did not address the widening political rift. Instead she pleaded with George to be more loving:
I felt you had long ago stopped loving me. That you had long ago become very hard boiled and callous and did not care about anything much . . . that you did not love us or understand us at all . . . that you lived a life away from us and only wanted to be away from us and that we were doomed. That it was only a question of time when we would have to die by suicide. . . . First me, then Philippa, for she will imitate anything I do. . . . I cannot live without you—and you fail me when you leave me and meet others. That I can’t accept . . . though I try to I can’t. It kills me.
