It is important to note the distinction between the Baby Doll practices in Trinidad and in New Orleans. In New Orleans, Baby Dolls are in no way asking for money for their children. The shaming of men because of their neglect of children is solely a Trinidad custom. Baby Dolls in New Orleans traditionally either engaged in showy displays of their own money, tucking it in their garters and bloomers, or in some instances, those who were prostitutes might, if so inclined, turn tricks during their processions. Hence Harnett Kane’s euphemistic description of Baby Dolls as “dark girls of more than goodwill.” From its inception, the New Orleans tradition had nothing to do with women’s domesticity and maternalism but was all about the woman herself, as beautiful, sexy, powerful, dominant, proud, and tough.
“MIGHTY PROUD”: WOMEN RETURN TO THE STREETS ON MARDI GRAS IN NEW ORLEANS
In the waning days of the nineteenth century, the women of New Orleans began returning to the streets as masked participants after having been ousted through the emergence of organized parades by upper-class White men who formed krewes in the mid-1850s. The original Creole practice of Carnival, which was inclusive, random, and informal, had changed so that class and race came to define who could participate in the public square. Women who masked became stigmatized, and the association between masking on Carnival in public and being a prostitute would be the ruling view until women re-appropriated the streets by acting out a stigmatized identity and by forming their own krewes.
One of the earliest women’s krewes, Les Mysterieuses (1896–1900), was formed by an upper-class group. While they did not parade, they held a ball and reversed the gender roles. Male krewes had been giving balls and requiring women to come in evening attire while the men would mask and behave in ways that suited themselves. Les Mysterieuses required women to mask at their ball but did not allow men to enter if they were in costume. Subsequent groups were the Mittens (1901), Les Inconnues (1901), the Mystic Maids (1906), the Krewe of Yami (1911), the Krewe of Iris (1922), and the Krewe of Les Marionettes (1922). Several Black women’s krewes were formed as well: the Red Circle, Young Ladies 23, and the Mystic Krewe. None of these all-women’s groups paraded.7 In 1941, the Krewe of Venus interrupted the all-male street parades to officially roll with a dozen floats. Venus came to be expected at mid-afternoon the Sunday before Mardi Gras. In 1959, the Krewe of Iris began to parade. Like Venus, they paraded in the afternoon, but days before Mardi Gras, an even less prestigious position.8 In recent times, the women’s Mardi Gras clubs and parades follow the masculine tradition. Writing about the Krewe of Muses, the first women’s night-parading group, organized in 2000, Robin Roberts notes their appropriation of aspects of male privilege during Mardi Gras festivities. These aspects are masking, producing a tableau,9 selecting a court, choosing dance partners, and especially parading after dark. Nevertheless, Muses seized opportunities during their elaborate festival preparations to mock gender norms and playfully and humorously use emblems that were stereotypically feminine.10
A sense of what it meant to Black women to ride on the floats and in limousines as the object of longing, admiration, envy, or amusement comes from the oral histories of women who were queens of “Zulu and the Amazons” in the late 1930s. Catherine Riley may well have been one of the first female queens of Zulu and the Amazons. The tall, brown-skinned, I.C. Beer Parlor waitress lived and worked in the heart of the Black commercial district as well as at the center of New Orleans’s Black cultural economy, South Rampart Street. Catherine learned the protocol and manners of being a queen from Josephine Smith, who had served in that capacity for two years. According to Catherine, Josephine was more “society-like” than she was. In fact, Catherine was comfortable with the residents of a “lowly tenement” house on Julia Street. Robert McKinney reported, “Aware of the reflection on her character caused by residence in this particular house—for her neighbors are notoriously fast in their living as a race horse in the stretch, she yet flatly denied the implication emphasizing the difference with the statement, ‘I don’t go for that kind of stuff. I work for mine.’”
The cost associated with being a king or a queen in the Zulu parade was quite hefty. Catherine noted that irony when she said that, rather than others giving parties for her, she was expected to host revelers. She was specially selected by John Metoyer, a founder of the Zulu Social and Pleasure Club who apparently was smitten by her during the Carnival season of 1937 and sought her coronation the next year. The negatives for Catherine included the gossip, the people rushing her and pulling on her clothes during the parade, the reporters wanting to get a story from her, as well as the expense and the subsequent hounding by debt collectors. Yet she confessed that being queen made her “mighty proud” when her friends saw her riding on the float. It made her proud too that she could throw trinketsto paradegoers. “I enjoyed all of that.”11
At age twenty-five, Odette Delille was the 1939 queen of Zulu and the Amazons. She was from a close-knit Catholic Creole family where it was understood that each family member had to take care of him- or herself. Odette attended Craig School but had to drop out when her mother became ill. After a three-week illness, her mother died. Odette had three sisters, two of whom worked at nightclubs. Hilda worked at the Elite (a favorite haunt of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls), and Stella worked at the Snow Flake. They had a brother, Leon, who worked at Harlem Grill. An exceptionally hard worker, Odette was employed at Haspel’s, the men’s suit-making company, as a factory worker. Due to new federal labor laws, Haspel’s increased the workers’ wages, provided vacation time, and took out funds for Social Security. In spite of the raise, the changes in the laws reduced Odette’s take-home pay, forcing her to seek additional employment. She had been waitressing at Dileo’s beer parlor on Ursuline and Robertson three nights a week for about eight months when Zulu members Leopold LeBlanc and John Metoyer asked her if she would like to be queen. Apparently Dileo was willing to contribute a large sum to the organization, and that was the motivation for the decision. According to Odette, patronage increased substantially when the announcement was made that the queen of Zulu and the Amazons worked at Dileo’s.
Odette could hardly believe her good fortune. She had never masked before, nor even gone outside her neighborhood, and now she would see parts of Carnival that she hadn’t imagined. She would have four maids as part of her court, all wearing sky-blue velvet dresses, gold capes, gold slippers, gold crowns, and pink roses with gold ribbons. The court was supplying Odette her crown and mantle; her sister was giving her calla lilies. On Carnival Day she would toast the king at Geddes and Moss Funeral Home, have pictures taken with him, and then would join him, not on a float but in a car with her maids. They paraded through the city and down to Gallier Hall12 to toast the mayor. The parade would meander and stop at every merchant who contributed money. While she knew that the court was supposed to drink at every spot, unlike Catherine Riley who described herself as “so high it wasn’t even funny,” Odette was planning to abstain. “If I have a drink at every stop by the time Carnival is over, I won’t know myself. I don’t want to fool with none of the liquor. I really can have a good time without drinking.”
After the parade, she would attend the Zulu after-party. Eight days later, there would be a cake-cutting event. Odette would wear a white velvet and chiffon gown with silver slippers and receive presents from her boyfriend, her relatives, and her father, along with the adulation of her community. As for the opportunity to be the queen, Odette was notified in person: “they just sent the officials to tell me” and “I felt proud.”13
Ceola Carter had an unlikely path to the crown in 1940. She migrated from Morgan City, where Blacks had been engaged in jobs integral to coastal communities and domestic work since before slavery. In 1917, when Ceola was about two years old, Hollywood made the first Tarzan film in Morgan City due to its jungle-like appearance. Ceola seems to have been targeted by older men in the community who preyed on young girls. She had been sexualized early, and this seems to hav
e been known in the community. Nonetheless, Ceola’s spirit refused to be crushed, and she aspired for more. She probably left Morgan City after her mother passed. She had fifty dollars from her minister, free whiskey and money from older men, and insurance money received after her mother’s death. When she left, at about eighteen, people advised her not to worry. Her community predicted that, since she was “born under the sign of Saturn,” honor would always come her way.
But her first day in New Orleans was most inauspicious. It found her in a fight with a man, in jail, and in front of a judge who issued a strong admonition for her to go back home, which she seriously considered. Ceola worked as a domestic, a waitress, and lived with boyfriends who often met unfortunate ends such as incarceration or even death. But her spirit was indefatigable, as was her luck with getting their money when they disappeared from the scene. At age twenty-seven, Ceola Carter had a good man, a “good” job, and was queen of Zulu and the Amazons. She ruled from the Geddes and Moss limousine; she wore white satin and lace, a multicolored train with a collar of green marabou, long white gloves, a rhinestone crown, and carried a white bag, all gifts from her former employer for whom she had worked as a maid. She asserted that “I’m doing what I think any woman might do under the circumstances—having my fun. How I have it is my business; the Queen’s Business!”14
CARNIVAL’S UNRULY WOMEN
Women’s visibility in Carnival is more appropriately located as a terrain of struggle; it is a field of competing and contradictory desires where acts of libidinal self-assertion exist uneasily with the pleasures and real dangers of commodification and fetishism.
—Natasha Barnes
Since as early as the fifteenth century, Carnival has been associated with dancing, parading in the streets in masks, visiting neighbors and establishments, and with sexual freedom and sexual display. Women’s bodily expression during Carnival qualifies as performance. That is to say that women’s visibility, via their revealing costumes, dancing, singing, and parading on public streets in front of a viewing audience, is often intended to make certain kinds of statements. According to Belinda Edmondson,15 when women allowed themselves to be viewed publicly, political commentary was plentiful and often followed by state and social attempts at regulating their behavior. As Sarah Carpenter wryly observed, “The faults here attributed to masking are precisely those traditionally held against the unruly descendants of Eve: curiosity, garrulousness, envy and scandal.”16
Historically, carnival revelry and masked identities offered an opportunity for women’s sexual desire to be experienced in novel ways without the burdens of accountability. Female costumes that were considered revealing in their time were often accompanied by performances of songs, often bawdy, and dances, often suggestive. These were considered troubling behaviors for the established social order. Ken Plummer suggests that, for sexual behavior to be seen as a problem for society, a group of people has to organize it as such and articulate reasons for objection. They have to be convinced that the behavior is “wrong.” The behavior must be practiced by a sizable number of people. The opposing group must also believe that the offensive behavior is amenable to being changed. The opposing group becomes determined to do something about it.17
Once targeted, the behavior rises to the level of sexual spectacle because it challenges the morals, values, and hierarchies of the prevailing social order. Women’s carnival masking elicits social anxieties relating to desire, disease, and traditional heterosexual monogamous behavior. Reactions to women’s masking can be considered an example of moral panic because the festive activities are interpreted as a challenge, a confrontation, and an inversion of the dominant and dominating value system. These public attacks are pursued with vigor because, in Plummer’s view, “sexuality appears to be a major device used to tap into all sorts of social anxieties, to generate panic, and to demarcate boundaries. Studies point to many different sources of these anxieties and boundary mapping, but they include anxieties over gender roles, heterosexuality and the family; the importance of reproduction and pronatalism; concerns over the role of youth and childhood; race and racialized categories; the divisions between classes and ‘class fears’ just to name a few.”18
The motives behind the Baby Doll masking tradition are varied. Pamela Franco reminds us that the cultures of Africa used masquerade in very specific ways: to portray ancestors as mentors and educators for initiation ceremonies, and as mediators between the spirit world and the human one. Enslavement and colonial rule changed Africans’ ability to reconstruct their practices in the New World. As a result, they appropriated the European Carnival celebrations to address their concerns with representation (which was derogatory) and to reposition themselves, at least symbolically.19 One group of women maskers, the Caribbean jamet, illustrates this well. Edmondson describes the jamet—a word with possible French origins connected to diameter, or to be below the diameter of respectable society—as serving as a thorn in the side of the colonial authorities: “The term ‘jamette’ refers to black women in nineteenth-century urban Trinidad, black women who were associated with the barracks yards, gangs, and the streets. (Originally the term refers to female stick fighters; stick fighting is considered a male sport.) These disreputable women… were also active as ‘chanterelles,’ or calypso singers, and their ‘carisos’ songs, were habitually castigated as being lewd and erotic, and for allegedly instigating obscene dancing.”20 Franco characterizes the jamet as issuing social criticism through the mas and interprets the mas as portraying the “unruly woman” whose “performance style is usually loud, boisterous, inflammatory and, sometimes, erotic.”21
Franco interrogated two types of practices: the pissenlit and the stick-fighter. The pissenlit (or “bedwetter”; these women wore a nightgown and displayed a replica of a soiled menstrual cloth) was particularly provocative. Franco notes that jamet women were considered prostitutes. Whether they were or not, conviction rates for the rape of Black women were abysmal; beyond that, women could be locked up by unscrupulous policemen if they did not submit sexually. Once confronted with the courts, women would have to undergo invasive exams. The pissenlit, Franco asserts, signaled to the authorities that they had “blood on their hands.” In response to the challenge by the women’s sexual spectacles, the state mobilized. In 1895, the pissenlit costume was banned. Cross-dressing women who engaged in street fighting with other women continued to be worrisome. Franco concluded that the pissenlit “embarrassed the state through a reversal of its condemnation of her. The stickfighting woman inverted the Victorian aesthetic of femininity.… The response to these two Carnival characters was severe—fines, incarceration and possible deportation—primarily because the women’s performances were ‘socially unbounded.’ Despite the harsh responses, jamet women continued to exhibit independence.”22
Samantha Noel also theorized that the colonial response was to reinforce British values and dicta. Women, according to the authorities, should observe propriety, modesty, maternalism, and fidelity to their husbands. Theirs was to be a muted and invisible presence. One way jamets defied these values was in their dance. They “boasted their skill and bravery, verbal wit, talent in song, dance, and drumming, their indifference to the law, their sexual prowess, their familiarity with jail, and sometimes their contempt for the church. The women more often than not were the chantuelles, who sang praises of male stickfighters and used impromptu lyrics meant to shock and entertain; they wore masks and sometimes exposed their breasts.”23 “Wining,” Noel points out, “is an undulating and writhing form of dance that is concentrated in the pelvic area.”24 Noel links the history of modern-day wining currently performed at Carnival in Trinidad with its historic variations, including as practiced in Haiti and ultimately Africa, by citing Katherine Dunham’s research on “the isolation of the hips in the danses grouilles.” Colonial authorities considered these movements vulgar and the lower classes who performed them as “the vulgate,” or common people.
While
many women masked, not all or even the majority fell into the jamet class. Edmondson divides female masking into the political categories of “the vulgar spectacle” and “the decorous spectacle.” The vulgar she defines as transgressive, whereas “the socially approved, ‘decorous’” spectacle is one that does the work of social uplift.”25 Franco explored the phenomenon of “dressing up” on Trinidad’s Carnival whereby groups of women related by occupation or social interests wore the same attire. “Dressing up” and walking in a procession is the earliest form of being a “spectacular performer.”26 In the hands of Afro-Caribbean women, dressing up allowed them to connect to other historical periods in different countries. It also provided the imaginative play space to momentarily create alternative realities, along with opportunities to reclaim personal constructions of the self. Franco concluded that dressing up is a non-confrontational type of performance “that allows Afro-Creole women to be visible, not as objects, but as agents and producers of meaning in their Carnival performances.”27 Noel agrees with this line of thinking. For her, women now and in the past were able to use Carnival as a “lower frequency politics” which was not charged with generating political change per se, but was charged with maintaining “visible representation” for the overlooked and undervalued.
“THE BABIES AND THE DOLLS DON’T GIVE A DAMN”
The "Baby Dolls" Page 7
