Heat Wave

by Donald Bogle

  Still, she lamented that she didn’t have much of a stable, loving childhood. “I began to grow17 up fast and big. Why, when I was fourteen years old, I was as tall and heavy as I am now. Five feet nine and one-half inches and 155 pounds. That’s a whole lot of girl for fourteen years, and I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t pitch in and help get that rent and eating money for Grandma Sally and me. I hired out for day work, and I really worked. Laundry, cooking, dishes, and taking care of babies. And $1.35 a day they paid me. That money looked good to Sally and me. It helped a lot.”

  But the real loss of her childhood occurred when a young man named Merritt Purnsley came into her life. Born in 1890, Buddy, as he was called, was six years older than Ethel, lived with an uncle and his family, and worked for the Pennsylvania Steel Casting Company. Ethel met him at a dance but had no interest in him. Still, before she knew it, Purnsley wanted to marry her. Because Ethel was then thirteen and in the sixth grade, he couldn’t marry her unless Momweeze agreed to the match, which she did. “I felt betrayed18,” said Ethel, “and thought she’d agreed only because marrying me off to Buddy was an easy way of eliminating me as a problem.” Momweeze also left Chester to live for a time in Atlantic City.

  A local minister performed the ceremony. Their wedding night, said Ethel, was unpleasant, really a disaster from her vantage point. She was repelled by having sex with her new husband. Now there was no turning back. The two set up a home together, and his Aunt Martha, whom Ethel liked, moved in with them. She tried to be the model wife, which meant she was to cook, clean, do the laundry, and basically keep her mouth shut. She also still had to go to school until the term ended in June. But from the beginning, life with Buddy was a mess. He was jealous, possessive, domineering. One thing Ethel never was able to do, then or later, was take a back seat to anybody. It didn’t matter that it was supposed to be a man’s world and that a woman, or a wife, should be grateful to be in it. By now, having taken care of herself for so long, she had too strong an independent streak to be a meek and submissive wife.

  During this time, she had her greatest heartache. Her grandmother took ill and was living in the home of her sister Ida in Chester. Ethel believed that her beloved Mom was just worn down, exhausted inside and out. At her home with Buddy, Ethel hadn’t been close enough to visit, but she knew she had to see her. On the day that she arrived at her Aunt Ida’s, she found her grandmother frail and desperately ill. She asked Ethel to sing her favorite song, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” which the girl performed. As Ethel soon learned, Sally was dying of cancer. A few days later, she heard Sally had taken a turn for the worse. She rushed back to Ida’s home to hold her grandmother in her arms, but it was too late. Sally Anderson had died.

  At the funeral, the entire family was heartbroken. Curiously, Ching—who Ethel always believed was Sally’s favorite child—did not attend. She had been too drunk to show up. But as they moved the casket out of the house into the alley to head for the cemetery, Ching sat in her window looking out and sang a song Sally had always loved: “Flee as a Bird.” The next day, Ethel visited Ching. Though not much was said, she understood Ching’s remorse and regrets. Several months later, Ching died.

  As Ethel resumed her life with the jealous Buddy, she knew nothing would ever be the same. Buddy threatened, cursed, and argued with her, and also struck her. Still, she tried to hold the marriage together, until she discovered that Buddy, who accused her of being unfaithful, was actually involved with another woman. After she left him to stay with Momweeze, he begged her to return. She did, briefly, but finally she walked out the door of their home and their life together. The marriage had lasted a year.

  Her school days ended and she was back at work. Cooking. Cleaning. Dusting. Mopping. Washing. Ironing. Fortunately, she never disliked hard work. In fact, she seemed to thrive on it. “I had done practically19 every type of work there is to do,” she remembered. Years later, when a young college interviewer asked about her education, Waters said she had gone through Swarthmore College, not far from Chester, in two weeks—“on my knees, as20 a cleaning woman.” The hard work just meant she didn’t have time to think. That same relentless pursuit of jobs and activities, to ward off too much self-reflection and possibly her despair, continued the rest of her life. Once she began her professional career as an entertainer, her schedule—the tours, the personal appearances, the charity benefits, the social gatherings, even the horseback riding she would come to love as a form of exercise and relaxation—would be altogether astounding. Not a minute of her day would be left unoccupied; there was no time to sit and mope.

  Perhaps because she was now free of Buddy, able to support herself and live on her own, she was even more outgoing, more social, eager to play as hard as she worked. Both Philadelphia and Chester were full of clubs, taverns, after-hours joints, and dance halls where the young could gather, let off steam, and have a good time. She also went to see vaudeville shows. At the major theaters in Philadelphia, Blacks were sometimes relegated to the balconies or barred altogether. But a showplace like the Standard Theatre eventually featured great Negro acts. In time, Ethel got to see performers like the Whitman Sisters, the comedy duo Butterbeans and Susie, dancer Alice Ramsey, the ventriloquist Johnny Woods, and the great blues singer Ma Rainey.

  She hit the rummage sales and welfare shops, scavenging for colorful clothes that enabled her to dress in a more theatrical way; that set her apart from the other girls in town and, in essence, helped give her a new identity. One of Ethel’s great pleasures, her form of relaxation then and in the future, would be hopping off to a dance club like Pop Grey’s, where—all dolled up in her rummage-sale clothes—she shook, shimmied, and kicked up her long legs. Local people in those clubs and dance halls got to know who she was. She loved it when they asked if she was in the theater. People remembered her. Even then, she must have had that big personality and that big gap-toothed smile that would later be known to audiences everywhere. The energy, the glamour, the crowds themselves at such places excited her. Though she fantasized about being up there on the stage herself, never did she consciously think about a career. The most she hoped for in her life was to become the maid to a rich white woman who liked to travel. Maybe that would be a way of seeing the world.

  During this time, no special boyfriend came into her life, though many a guy flirted and laughed with her. And although she liked the attention and flirted back with them, she didn’t let them get too close. One bellhop at a place where she worked made advances, but she cursed him out and he backed off. She also had friendships with girls her age. Perhaps she felt more comfortable with them—less threatened. Perhaps they answered her need for womanly companionship or approval. It’s not known, but Ethel may have had some lesbian relationships, either at this time or earlier, when she hung out with the neighborhood kids and admitted she knew so much about sex.

  Then came a job at the Harrod Apartments in Philadelphia. Ethel told different stories about the way she got the job. One was that a friend recommended her. The other was that her mother, Louise, was working as a scullion but took ill and Ethel replaced her for a time, then landed a job there as a chambermaid. “I got $3.0021 a week steady with tips, and room and board free.” She picked up an extra $1.25 by doing laundry at home for guests. “ ‘Well, Ethel,’ I said to myself, ‘You’re on Easy Street now.’ Nicest thing about that hotel were the big mirrors in the bedroom doors. I posed and acted in front of them until I found myself thinking I really was an actress. Grand ideas,” she recalled. “Lord knows, I had no thought how much trouble and work it takes to be a success on the stage.”

  During the hot, humid Philadelphia summers, many residents fled to cooler places on the New Jersey shore, which were packed with vacationers who wanted to be near the beach or amusement parks. Atlantic City, Asbury Park, Ocean City, and Wildwood were favorite summertime resort destinations, full of hotels—some upscale, others distinctly low—as well as boardinghouses, amusement arenas, saloons, danc
e halls, restaurants, and cafés that catered to folks with their families or friends. Each summer a whole new crop of workers also came to town. The pay was all right, but the tips were better. People spent freely. So festive and lively was the atmosphere in such resort towns that the workers felt like they were on holiday too. They strolled along the boardwalks, ate hot dogs, played in the arcades. Usually, there was a colored part of town where they could hang out together. With all that in mind, no doubt, Ethel went with friends to Wildwood—considered something of a poor man’s Atlantic City—to work as a waitress in one of the big hotels.

  “Each Saturday and Sunday22 evening all of us hotel workers went to a little saloon where there was a piano. I sang and danced for the cooks, busboys, cleaning women, and other waitresses.”

  When she learned that her father’s mother, Lydia Waters, had a home in Wildwood, she was persuaded to visit her, but Ethel could never feel warmly toward her. Still, she believed she had inherited from the white-looking grande dame “poise, dignity, and whatever23 intelligence I have.”

  When she returned from Wildwood after the summer of 1917, her life underwent another great change that lifted her out of a seemingly aimless existence, full of fun and dreams, to one that gave her direction, purpose, and goals. It started out as simply a night on the town with friends at a place called Jack’s Rathskeller on Juniper and South streets. It was October 31. Halloween. It was also Ethel’s birthday.

  “They let me go24 into a little nightclub to do my shake-dance and to sing a couple of songs,” she said. It was amateur night. A prize would be given to whichever singer won first place. “They just shoved me out on the stage.” On nights like this one, the crowd was accustomed to hearing singers good and bad, and no one would have much time or sympathy for the bad ones. Ethel, however, would always be a confident woman. That didn’t mean she had no doubts or fears about herself or an audience, but once the moment came to open her mouth, she was ready to go. “The song I sang I remember was ‘When You’re a Long, Long Way from Home.’ Of course I lived right around the corner from the nightclub . . . but if I told anybody about that, they’d all be chasin’ me home.”

  Her voice was then high and girlish with a bell-like clarity. Every word could be understood. She also obviously enjoyed herself. Her eyes seemed to be dancing. Her face was lit up with a broad smile. That gap between her front teeth somehow added to her charm and her authenticity. Her sexually charged sound and movements must have also drawn the audience in. When she finished singing, the crowd called out for encores. She won first prize. Her friends were impressed, as were two men in the tavern that night, the theatrical agents known simply as Braxton and Nugent. The pair supplied entertainment for the chitlin’ circuit, that network of Black theaters and clubs around the country, theaters like the Lincoln in Baltimore, the Howard in Washington, the Regal in Chicago, but also tiny places in the South and Midwest that no one had ever heard of. Braxton and Nugent looked her over and made their pitch. If she would let them handle her, they would guarantee her work at $10 a week, more than twice the amount she made at the Harrod Apartments. The first stop would be two weeks at Baltimore’s Lincoln Theatre. Not that far away. Not much of a loss if things didn’t pan out.

  Though Ethel wouldn’t tell the truth about her age for decades, shaving off four years, saying she was born in 1900, she actually had just turned twenty-one. It was a crucial year. No longer a girl, she considered herself a woman now. If her life was ever to change, if she was ever to pull herself out of the slums of Philadelphia and Chester, if she was ever to make something of herself, as Sally had hoped, then now clearly was the time. Braxton and Nugent insisted she have her mother’s permission. Momweeze had no problem granting it; in fact, Ethel believed her mother was glad to get rid of her. Besides, what could really come of this engagement?

  But the girl who had never been coddled or wanted or appreciated was about to begin her professional career. Ultimately, it would be the kind of career few in the United States would ever have, and the kind no one in a million years could ever have conceived for Ethel. As she set off for Baltimore, she was leaving her childhood and her past behind her—or so it seemed. In truth, that troubled childhood would always be a part of who she was. Her fears, her moods, her suspiciousness, her hunger for love, her fierce temper, her attitudes about sex and religion, her reactions to men and women—all had taken root in Chester and Philadelphia. Few would get close to her. And almost no one would be able to keep her content. Many who later met her believed the early wounds never healed. “She had a tough25 childhood,” said actress Maude Russell, “and she went through life fighting that, which was unnecessary. But she did.” “She had a very26 hard time coming up,” said Lena Horne, “and that leaves a blot on you. I don’t care how strong you appear to be.” She never asked anyone for anything, writer Carl Van Vechten later told her, and she never thanked anybody either. Much as Ethel Waters wanted to close the door on the past, even she knew she never really escaped it.

  Chapter 2

  On the Road

  AND SO JUST LIKE THAT, she left Philadelphia to begin life on the road—the kind of constant traveling that, unknown to her then, would be a part of her life, her very existence, almost to the end of her life.

  In 1917, she was also something of a pioneer. When Ethel arrived at the Lincoln in Baltimore, there wasn’t a long history of Blacks in a structured entertainment setting, but there was a history nonetheless, which she knew a little about. Black performers had first cracked the world of popular entertainment by way of the minstrel show. Originally, the traveling minstrel companies of the mid-1800s had been all-white, all-male productions. Audiences saw a lineup of singing, dancing, prancing, grinning, grimacing figures with large gaping mouths, thick lips, and dark faces—dark only because of the burnt cork that the white male performers had smeared onto themselves. Thus made up, the performers strutted and strolled across the stage and parodied the language, the music, the humor, the attitudes, and the antics of African Americans. In some respects, not only were they answering a mass audience’s need for entertainment; they were also satisfying a certain curiosity that audiences had about race. In the North and the East, the Negro was something of a mysterious other, an incomprehensible figure who was at the center of an ongoing debate about slavery. By portraying these “darky” figures as wildly funny, childlike souls with thick dialects and without much sense, the minstrel shows made the Negro seem safe and relatively acceptable and alleviated any threat or fear that the colored population might elicit. Comic coons who mangled the English language and didn’t seem capable of putting two and two together to come up with four. Docile dimwitted Toms. Some might argue that the routines and jokes and banter offered simple truths that the audience could apply to everyday life. But such insights came only from the Negro who was presented as a dolt or a clown. At the same time, the minstrel shows, while emphasizing Black inferiority, also reassured the white audience of its own superiority.

  When Negroes in significant numbers began to appear in professional entertainment, they did so, more often than not, in Black minstrel companies, which had sprung up after the Civil War. Two decades later—in the census of 1890—of the 1,490 Negro performers listed, most were in minstrel companies, which continued into the early years of the twentieth century.

  “Minstrel shows were in27 one big tent,” recalled the great drummer Lee Young. Coming from a showbiz family, Lee, along with his future saxophonist brother Lester and his sister Irma, began his career as a kid working on the old Black vaudeville circuit. “They were tent shows,” said Young. “There was a large tent, not as big as the Big Top with the circus, but [it] was a big tent.” The shows had “maybe ten or twelve acts, and they would put on a two- or three-hour show, with intermission. And they used to sell the programs and they would sell photographs. That’s really the thing you do. You sell your act. . . . You wouldn’t sell too many when the show would start, but at the end of the show, the acts tha
t they really loved, they really would buy the photographs.”

  The Black minstrels also put on blackface and performed heavily caricatured songs and comedy. Coming out of the minstrel tradition, Billy Kersands rose to stardom in the 1870s, formed his own company in 1885, and during his forty-year career repeatedly had audiences laughing uproariously over his songs, his dances, and mainly his comedy. He sang songs like “Mary’s Gone with a Coon” and “Old Aunt Jemima” and helped popularize such dances as the Essence of Old Virginia and the Buck and Wing. His comic persona was that of a slow-moving, slow-thinking, yet sometimes crafty roustabout. With large, bulging eyes, Kersands made use of his enormous mouth, into which he could stuff billiard balls or an entire cup and saucer. His career carried him far and wide. He performed in England for Queen Victoria and, still in character, he told her if his mouth were any larger, they’d have to move his ears. Also popular was the team of Bert Williams and George Walker, who billed themselves as the “Two Real Coons” and strutted about in blackface. Despite the coonery, the two were immensely talented, especially Williams, and eventually appeared in their own shows on Broadway. The minstrel companies, along with the medicine shows, the circuses, the carnivals, and the Wild West cavalcades, all led to the rise of vaudeville. Those stereotyped images of Negroes also moved on to vaudeville and later movies. Black audiences might complain, but they also laughed and applauded among themselves in Black theaters and venues, sifting through the minstrelsy to detect covert messages on African life and culture, and on race as well. The Black audiences also always responded to the sheer vitality, the talent, and the timing of the entertainers.

  For a time, no significant place existed for Black women in popular entertainment, either as major stars in front of the lights or behind the scenes. Those women who chose careers as entertainers were viewed by the church and society at large as little more than floozies, ladies of easy virtue not much better than streetwalkers who plied their trade in gaudy makeup and tight dresses. Women belonged at home with their husbands and children. But some women broke through the barriers fairly early. By 1851, a poised, dignified operatic singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, known as the Black Swan, performed concerts in New York and, later, at Buckingham Palace. By 1892, another operatic diva, Sissieretta Jones, sang at the Jubilee Spectacle and Cakewalk in Madison Square Garden. Later she performed at the White House for President Harrison. Then a show was created around her troupe, which was known as the Black Patti Troubadours. Amid the acts that came and went, Madame Jones—Black Patti herself—performed her arias, always maintaining her dignity and composure. In the early twentieth century, Aida (Ada) Overton Walker performed on Broadway with her husband George Walker and his comedy partner Bert Williams in their highly successful shows. For almost two decades, she was considered the greatest Negro female entertainer. By then, there were Black chorus girls, comediennes, singers, and dancers. Then came Ma Rainey.