Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  19 The novel’s title: Van Vechten blamed this on a lack of a sense of humor in the black community. “Irony is not anything that most Negroes understand,” he claimed. George S. Schuyler, “Reminiscences,” Columbia Oral History Project, 1960.

  20 Du Bois spoke for many: Countée Cullen, for example, did not speak to Van Vechten for more than a dozen years after the publication of Nigger Heaven.

  20 “exceptionally bad manners”: Bernard, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance, 126.

  20 “cheap melodrama . . . “affront” . . . “blow in the face.”: Du Bois, “Books,” 31–32.

  20 And The Pittsburgh Courier: Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 181.

  20 “rich” life: Verdelle, foreword to Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary, xxviii.

  20 “I have lived among the Negroes”: Julia Peterkin to H. L. Mencken in 1921. Quoted in Verdelle, foreword to Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary, xxvii.

  20 “uncanny insight”: Brown, “The New Secession—A Review,” 147–48. See also Brown, “Our Literary Audience,” 42–46, 61.

  20 When Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary: Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 202. My discussion of Peterkin’s status draws in part on Hutchinson’s account; see 199–203.

  21 New Negro stalwart: Locke, review of Scarlet Sister Mary. See also Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 203.

  21 “Tell me, frankly”: Harold Jackman, letter to Claude McKay (April 22, 1928), James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. (hereafter abbreviated Beinecke). Quoted in Wintz, Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance,183.

  21 “Damn it, man”: Sherwood Anderson to H. L. Mencken, June 25, 1922, H. L. Mencken Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, quoted in Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 99.

  22 “Negro theater . . . must come”: Gregory, “The Drama of Negro Life,” in The New Negro, 159.

  22 “silly songs and leg shows”: Du Bois, “The New Negro Theater.”

  22 had value as an authentic “Negro drama”: Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 208.

  22 “held out as inspiration”: Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 189.

  22 “acclaimed by critics”: Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 213. Alain Locke put it in market terms in 1927, arguing that “if the expectations of the Negro drama as a fruitful phase of American drama are to be realized, the field . . . must be a freeman’s estate, with that reciprocity and universality of spirit which truly great art requires. . . . Vital as the Negro actor and dramatist are to this development, theirs is [sic] and can be no monopoly of the field.” Locke, “Introduction,” in Plays of Negro Life, ed. Locke and Gregory, 3–4.

  22 “an ideal means”: Scott, “Negroes as Actors in Serious Plays,” 20; Spence, “A Criticism of the Negro Drama,” 192–93, both cited in Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 190.

  22 “About us . . . By us . . . For us”: Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 214.

  22 But he also called O’Neill a “genius”: Pfister, Staging Depth, 121, 135. Locke, “Introduction,” in Plays of Negro Life, ed. Locke and Gregory, 1.

  22 Theophilus Lewis: Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant, 208.

  23 “the crying need”: Julia Peterkin, response to symposium, “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?,” 238–39.

  23 “It makes me sick”: Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes, September 20, 1928, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 126. All Hurston letters are from this collection unless otherwise indicated.

  23 “take all the life”: Zora Neale Hurston to Charlotte Osgood Mason, in Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston, 224.

  24 “Negroes are practically never rude”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 225.

  24 “the homeliest woman” . . . “primitive people”: Fisher, The Walls of Jericho, 59ff.

  25 “Jewish girl who”: Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 97.

  25 “the ex-wife of a noted”: Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 178–79.

  26 “people who went in for Negroes”: Hughes, “Slave on the Block,” in The Ways of White Folks, 19–20.

  26 “surly, black despot”: Johnson, Autobiography, 89.

  26 “insane white shameless wench”: Toomer, Cane, 3.

  26 “Hair—braided chestnut”: Toomer, “Portrait in Georgia,” 81. Claude McKay’s “The Barrier,” published at almost the same time, carries the same message:

  I MUST not gaze at them although

  Your eyes are dawning day;

  I must not watch you as you go

  Your sun-illumined way;

  . . .

  I must not see upon your face

  Love’s softly glowing spark;

  For there’s the barrier of race,

  You’re fair and I am dark.

  McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York: Harcourt, 1922) (Joel Spingarn was a founder of Harcourt). Probably the best-known of such portrayals would come later in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son. One of the earliest images in Ellison’s novel is of the adolescent narrator, thrown onto a small stage for a battle royal, suddenly faced with “a magnificent blonde—stark naked.” Nothing could be more terrifying than this stripper’s presence. The narrator knows that to look at her, even by mistake, is to risk lynching from the white male audience: “my teeth chattered, my skin turned to goose flesh, my knees knocked.” As he matures, white women pose less of an immediate danger to him but they invariably figure as foolish characters with misplaced, stereotypical interest in black men. They want him to release their latent sexuality with “brutal” and “savage” force: “Look at me just like that; just like you want to tear me apart. . . . I feel so free with you. You’ve no idea. . . . You’re not like other men.” Ellison, Invisible Man.

  27 “We know so little about each other”: Wright, Native Son.

  27 “the sincerity of my [interracial] friendship”: Ovington, Black and White, 134.

  27 “oughta stay outa Harlem”: Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 137.

  Chapter 2: An Erotics of Race

  29 “Harlem seemed a cultural enclave”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 89, 11.

  29 “What a crowd!”: Quoted in Ottley, The Negro in New York, 174.

  29 “real kick”: “New York Life,” 26.

  29 “New York’s Playground”: Shaw, Nightlife, 73. I have not been able to locate any guidebooks to Harlem written for blacks. Most of that information—where to eat, where to hear good music, and so on—was conveyed by the hundreds of newspapers catering to black readers.

  29 “place of exotic gaiety”: Morand, New York, 270, 274, 268.

  30 “Negro vogue”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 228.

  30 “the great Mecca”: Johnson, “Harlem: The Culture Capital,” in The New Negro, ed. Locke, 301.

  30 “surpasses Broadway”: “Black Belt’s Night Life,” 1, 12.

  30 “Here is the Montmartre”: James, All About New York, 248–49.

  31 “the symbol of liberty”: Quoted in Anderson, This Was Harlem, 61.

  32 “a rare and intriguing moment”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 3.

  32 “a large scale laboratory experiment”: Johnson, Black Manhattan, xvii, 281.

  32 The “Negro renaissance”: Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 115.

  32 “in droves”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 224.

  32 “It is the zest”: Cunard, “Harlem Reviewed,” in Negro, ed. Cunard, 69.

  32 “White America has”: Johnson, “The Dilemma of the Negro Author,” 479.

  32 “cheap trip”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 90.

  33 “At almost every Harlem upper-crust dance”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 227–28.

  34 Libby Holman made Connie’s Inn: Machlin, Libby, 68–70.

  34 “crowded with people”: Thurman, Infants of the Spring, 109–13.

  35 “great party giver”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 244.

  35 town house: Bundles, On Her Own Ground,
171–72.

  35 “Negro poets and Negro number bankers”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 244.

  35 “a season’s whim”: Fisher, “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” 395–96, 398.

  36 “Ordinary Negroes”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 225.

  36 “a most disgusting thing”: Williams, “Writer Scores Best Girls,” section 2, 1.

  36 “The majority of Harlem Negroes”: “The Slumming Hostess,” 4.

  36 “few white people ever see”: Thurman, “Harlem Facets,” The World Tomorrow, November 1927. Reprinted in The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman, eds. Singh and Scott, 35, 37. Miguel Covarrubias was one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance. His cartoons and drawings appeared often; he illustrated many Harlem Renaissance books.

  36 “write some poetry, or something”: Nella Larsen to Dorothy Peterson, Thursday the 21st [1927], James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke.

  36 “Here in the world’s greatest city”: “The Slumming Hostess,” 4.

  37 “America’s most democratic institution”: Owen, “The Black and Tan Cabaret,” 97–98.

  38 “Midtown office”: Kellner, Kiss Me Again, 187. Kellner’s chapter on Marinoff in this group biography remains the only sustained biography of Fania Marinoff to this day.

  38 “so Negro that they were reported”: Hughes, The Big Sea, 251.

  38 They leaned heavily on the advice: See Van Vechten, Splendid Drunken Twenties; Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston; Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen; Davis, Nella Larsen; Hughes and Van Vechten, Remember Me to Harlem, ed. Bernard; and Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White.

  40 In spite of her extraordinary talent: Passing was dedicated to Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff, in testament to the crucial—not frivolous—function their interracial parties served.

  40 $500: Walter White to the New York Women’s Committee, memorandum, November 9, 1929, Papers of the NAACP, Part 11: Special Subject Files, 1912–1939, Series A: Africa; Through Garvey, Marcus [Benefits]. Inflation conversion per the Consumer Price Index, Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://data.bls.gov/search/query/results?q=inflation+converter.

  41 Shuffle Along: Shuffle Along, a musical comedy with an all-black cast, is sometimes credited with kicking off the Harlem Renaissance. Interest in the production was so strong that “the street on which it was playing had to be designated for one-way traffic only.” Kellner, The Harlem Renaissance, 323. The midnight show took place on October 17, 1921, early in the Harlem Renaissance. Decker, “The NAACP ‘Follies’ of 1929,” unpublished paper, delivered at the American Musicological Society, Seattle, Washington, November 2004. I am grateful to Professor Decker for generously sharing this unpublished work in progress with me.

  41 “extravaganza,” the “biggest benefit”: Walter White to Bill Robinson, October 7, 1929, Papers of the NAACP, Part 11, Series A, Reel 8, frame 438. Microfiche. Harvard University.

  42 “childlike . . . comic”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 251, 248.

  42 Although black newspapers: David Krasner provides the example of a 1915 editorial from the Baltimore Afro-American urging an end to blackface. See Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant. It is important, Krasner reminds us, not to ignore the fact that “blackface appealed to black audiences at least to some degree,” 279.

  42 “standard material for stage comedy”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 268.

  42 The man or woman in blackface was a “surrogate”: Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 255. Critic Eric Lott hypothesizes that blackface performances lent themselves particularly well to “symbolic crossings” of meaning, allowing derogation to morph into homage and create a both-and hybrid of contradictory feelings he calls “derisive celebration.” Lott, Love and Theft, 29.

  42 Blackface could still be found: On blackface in “high culture” such as ballet, see Oja, Making Music Modern, 337.

  42 runaway hit: NAACP Papers, Program; Machlin, Libby, 59–60.

  42 “We would want by all means”: Walter White to Libby Holman, November 8, 1929, NAACP Papers. The only advertised performers not to appear were ballroom dancers Fredi Washington and Al Moore and composer George Gershwin, who forgot which theater had been rented for the benefit and looked, in vain, for ads in white newspapers. White had decided that advertising in mainstream papers was a waste of time, presumably since whites likely to attend subscribed to the black papers. Gershwin telegraphed White the next morning to apologize, saying that he “felt terrible about not appearing.” December 9, 1929, telegram. NAACP papers.

  42 “fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty”: Larsen, “Moving Mosaic or the NAACP Dance, 1929,” Program. Larsen repeats this passage, virtually verbatim, in Passing.

  42 “mother”: caption, Ovington photo, program brochure, NAACP papers.

  42 Alfred and Blanche Knopf also: Van Vechten, Splendid Drunken Twenties, 268.

  43 checked off: Only some of their names, and sometimes mistyped—for example, Charlotte Osgood Nathan—appear on the final patron rosters, which were evidently assembled at the last minute and in great haste; others appear on draft copies. NAACP Papers.

  43 “afraid to purchase orchestra seats”: Duberman, Paul Robeson, 125.

  43 “extremely difficult, if not impossible”: This interraciality makes the benefit, Decker argues, equal in cultural significance to “Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial,” also organized by White. Decker, “NAACP ‘Follies’ of 1929,” 11.

  43 “The Aframerican”: Johnson, “The Dilemma of the Negro Author,” 477, 480.

  44 Those were the very stereotypes: “The Slumming Hostess,” 4.

  44 “My sweet man”: Machlin, Libby, 61.

  44 “well pleased”: “NAACP Sponsors First Sunday Night Benefit at Downtown Theatre,” 5.

  44 “onerous ownership”: Dreisinger, Near Black, 148.

  44 “ready-mades”: See Butler, Gender Trouble.

  44 “a birthright”: Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, 89–90.

  44 one of the most taboo issues: Interestingly, the NAACP, and White, had often been accused of playing things too safely. Nancy Cunard was a particularly vociferous critic of the NAACP. See her “A Reactionary Negro Organization,” in Negro, ed. Cunard.

  45 someone who had chosen: Johnson, Autobiography, 105.

  46 “I am possessed by a strange longing”: Johnson, Autobiography, 153.

  46 “not going to be a Negro” . . . “forehead”: Johnson, Autobiography, 141, 139.

  46 “supremely happy”: Johnson, Autobiography, 153.

  46 “a coward”: Johnson, Autobiography, 153.

  46 “strange longing”: Johnson, Autobiography, 153.

  47 “gay, grotesque, and a little weird”: Larsen, Quicksand, 53–54.

  47 “brown laughing”: Larsen, Quicksand, 87, 86.

  47 “wild desire . . . to hear them laugh”: Larsen, Passing, ed. Kaplan, 7, 51.

  47 “a refusal to pass”: Mills, “‘Passing’: The Ethics of Pretending,” 48.

  47 The longing to “come back”: Larsen, Passing, 38.

  47 “A good many colored folks”: Booker T. Washington, quoted in Johnson, “Crossing the Color Line,” 528.

  48 They wanted to qualify: On the difficulty of labeling such cross-identifications as either pure appropriations or pure forms of resistance to the status quo, see Kobena Mercer’s reconsideration of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men, “‘Skin Head Sex Thing.’”

  48 paradoxical persistence . . . “hidden longing”: Fauset, “The Sleeper Wakes,” reprinted in The Sleeper Wakes, ed. Knopf, 23. In an essay that precedes Fauset’s story by quite a few years, George Schuyler imagines two gossips chatting at a charity ball about “white women who were passing for Negroes” and haunting the clubs and cabarets. It’s a problem, the gossips agree. But not as much as it seems. Those passing white women, it turns out, are actually black. And “once they decide to admit the possession of the magic drop, however, all is well.” Schuyler, “At the Darktown Cha
rity Ball,” 377.

  49 “creative impulse throbbing”: Mason to Locke, May 1, 1932, Alain Locke Papers, MSRC.

  49 “I am Africa”: Hawkins, “I Am Africa,” 232.

  49 “speak as if I were a Negro myself”: Nancy Cunard to Mrs. Davies, March 20 [1931], Nancy Cunard Papers, HRC.

  49 “rooted identity . . . that most precious commodity”: Gilroy, Against Race, 105.

  49 well-heeled: Although her family’s wealth was paltry in comparison with the Cunards’, the Ovington Brothers Department Store on Fulton Street in Brooklyn was nonetheless a high-end establishment, nearly as well known at the time as Macy’s, and it provided a very comfortable lifestyle for Ovington’s family.

  50 “To live on in an eternal round”: Mary White Ovington to Corrine [Bacon], July 4 [n.y.], Mary White Ovington Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit (hereafter abbreviated Reuther).

  50 “Do stand by me if you can”: Mary White Ovington to Louise Ketcham Ovington, n.d., Mary White Ovington Papers, Reuther.

  50 Hyperconscious of the “need for caution”: Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit, 99.

  51 she founded: Debate continues over whether Ovington is “the” founder or one of the few founders.

  51 Yet the press: This account draws on Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit, 96–99.

  52 “one of the five”: Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, 56.

  52 badly beaten by an intruder: “Burglar Hits Actress,” 20; “Film Beauty, Patient of Race Physician, Brutally Attacked by ‘Mystery Assailant,’” 13.

  52 “We didn’t intend”: “Prominent Physician Weds Movie Star,” 2.

  52 “We all have the blood”: “Actress Returns to California Doctor,” 2.

  53 Worthing and Nelson challenged Hollywood: “Carry Mixed Marriage,” 3.

  53 “losing game”: Quotes are from an article published posthumously in Ebony in February 1952 and said to be Worthing’s autobiography, written shortly before her suicide. The entire article can be read at http://illkeepyouposted.typepad.com/ill_keep_you_posted/2008/07/i-first-heard-of-helen-lee-worthing-one-of-the-it-girls-of-the-silent-screen-era-in-the-book-bright-boulevards-bold-dre.html, under the title “Helen Lee Worthing: A Tragedy in Glorious Black and White,” in three installments.