The "Baby Dolls"
Page 8
The women and men who masked as Baby Dolls in the early days of the practice lived within the context of racism, classism, heteronormativity, and masculine privilege. But that hegemonic power met a cultural force of resistance. The Baby Dolls were pushed so far out of the mainstream that they ceased looking to White or middle-class norms for their sense of validation and virtue. They took the dominant cultural icons of the times and rearranged them to suit their own needs and purposes. By 1912, the image of the woman as Baby Doll had become a staple in music and movies. Slang terms for kin such as “momma,” “poppa,” and “baby” were being reappropriated into nicknames used in adult romantic relationships. In addition, the evolving children’s culture introduced more toys, including baby dolls, for offspring of the middle and upper classes, creating a longing and sense of lack in poor girls everywhere.
Literary critic Trinna Frever defines the “doll” as a site for contested gender representation. Her study of feminist fiction in which dolls figure as a main trope reveals that their alternative perspective is an intervention and a confrontation with the forces of imperialism: racial, sexual, cultural, and economic. She sees three elements in conflict: the actual doll as cultural object, the woman-as-doll icon, and the real woman as a speaking, thinking, and acting subject. The doll as cultural icon and stereotypical figure places the control of women’s representation in the hands of others, primarily men, who were the cultural and business brokers throughout the twentieth century.
Frever makes a number of assertions that apply to the manner in which the Million Dollar Baby Dolls reconfigured the images of the baby and the doll to transgress oppressive boundaries. Frever sees the women writers who take on the doll icon as reworking the “social messages of ‘dollness’—and by association, girlhood, and womanhood—that circulate constantly through the popular culture in which they also participate.”28 The women writers create characters that break, burn, reframe, and reclaim the doll icon, affording “the survival of the girl and the woman, as represented in doll, as represented in fiction.”29 In demolishing the doll as cultural artifact, the woman writer “attempts to recreate herself in an image that is un-iconic: her own. This breaking open of the doll likewise opens the door for a range of subsequent literary and cultural depictions of identity and womanhood: complex, powerful, shifting, ambiguous, and beautiful.”30 This is what the Million Dollar Baby Dolls aspired to in their street performances.
THE BABY DOLL COSTUME
The most basic explanation of how the Baby Doll costume came into existence is the simple “at hand” nature of the clothes women wore in the District as part of their trade. The “chippie” famously commemorated by Jelly Roll Morton31 was a dress-like garment that stopped at about the knee and could be easily shed. And of course the tiny rooms used to ply the sex trade were called “cribs.” When he was young and naive, jazz musician Sidney Bechet32 was astonished to see women so briefly attired:
I didn’t know what all those women were doing hanging around the doorways in front of those houses. I’d go through and see them all there, standing around the way they do, waiting. They was all wearing those real short skirts and I saw them about, and it’s the first time I recall any wondering about women like that. I was going through there and I looked at all those women and I asked my mother, “What are all those little girls doing standing like that?” I was just wondering about those skirts. They didn’t look like little girls really, but I hadn’t ever seen no women wearing clothes like that so I just up and asked my mother.33
Gerilyn G. Tandberg surveyed the clothing worn by women in the sex industry and identified the “Mother Hubbard” pajama as well as the chippie as two outer garments that allowed for easy access; these were clothes of convenience. In time, “chippie” had become slang for a woman of “easy virtue,” and the outfit became associated with women prostitutes. Tandberg writes that “chippies mimicked the dress lengths of children, thus providing a link between the child’s short skirts of the late 19th century and the fashionably accepted adult short skirt of the 1920s.”34 Up to that time, only a few groups of females could bare their limbs by wearing short skirts. The first, obviously, was little girls, and the other was women in the theater.
As women unafraid to break from the norm and live on the edge, women who worked as prostitutes were the first to adopt new fashion trends. It was to them that upper- and middle-class women looked to glean more liberating and stylish attire. Tandberg was taken aback to learn the degree to which sex workers were catalysts for effecting change in the aesthetics and tastes of the “respectable” class of women. Because women in the sex-work industry depended on their style and self-presentation to garner clients, they did not hesitate to breech social custom and wear styles that were innovative and daring. They gained the envy of respectable women who wanted to safeguard their reputations but who also wanted to express this free sense of style. Non-public women found ways to incorporate the keen fashion sense of the courtesan class.
Tandberg’s synthesis of the evidence on the fashion-setting leadership of the courtesan class is instructive.
New Orleans’ white upper-class women directly copied clothing worn by its home-town prostitutes. Rose describes one madam, Countess Willie V. Piazza, as being an especially important influence on the fashions of respectable ladies in the city:… the “Countess,” who of course had no hereditary claim to such a title, wore a monocle, smoked Russian cigarettes in a two-foot ivory, gold and diamond holder, and favored a diamond choker around her slim neck. In contrast to Lulu White, Piazza could easily have “passed” for white. She was truly a fashion leader of her time, and many respectable matrons of New Orleans’ first families attended the annual opening days at the Fair Grounds racetrack with their dressmakers in tow just to copy the outfits worn by Countess Willie and her girls.35
The courtesan class challenged status-quo fashion sensibility not only for outerwear, but also by promoting the rise of pretty and sexy lingerie. Tandberg notes that “perhaps because of the fashion leadership of the prostitute, the period between 1890 and 1914 is noted for its lavish and titillating underwear.” Fashion writers of the time sought to break the association of dainty undergarments with the courtesan class. “‘Respectable’ women began to ‘pick up the tricks of the trade,’ but needed to rationalize their use of them.”36
Tandberg explains the importance of hair and wigs in stimulating sexual interest. This is another area where courtesans were trendsetters. Tandberg notes that hair is not only a sexual symbol signifying femininity; it is also associated with young, virginal, unmarried women. “As early as the Roman period, bleached blond hair, much later adopted by Mae West, became the mark of the prostitute. Lulu White was not the only prostitute of the early 19th century to make her hair appear to be more abundant by wearing a wig.”37 Through her search of police files, Tandberg identified other District workers who wore wigs either as a beauty enhancement or to disguise their identities. The Million Dollar Baby Dolls and most certainly the groups that came after them wore blonde wigs, as travel writer Eleanor Early wrote in 1947.
PROBLEMATIC ASPECTS OF EARLY BABY DOLL MASKING
While much is made about Mardi Gras being the one day that people were free from social norms, the Million Dollar Baby Dolls freed themselves within the confines of race, sex, and class oppression to break gender norms each and every day. Mardi Gras was just that one day that they dressed together to make a scene and capitalize on the hustling behaviors that characterized their occupation and lifestyle.
New Orleans’s fiscal fortune depended on the marketing of opportunities for sex across the color line, especially the indulgence of White male fantasies about the primitive sexuality of women of color.38 The women who were “Baby Dolls, today and everyday,” were central to that economy. In fact, Beatrice Hill bragged to Robert McKinney that the White sailors preferred the “brownies.”39 “See when them ships come in? That’s when you made money. All them sailors wanted a brownie. ‘Gi
mme a brownie,’ they’d say. High yellers fared poorly less they got into them freakish shows when them sailors come along, but they did alright in their everyday bisness.”
Promoting its reputation for sexual excess and permissiveness, the District was economically flush. Baby Dolls seized on opportunities to participate as entrepreneurs, prostitutes, and vocal members of their communities. As such, while many met terrible ends, others earned a living, and they established their own identities. Some even used their earnings to buy property and then used the courts to defend their rights to it. Misunderstood, devalued, and ignored by Whites and middle-class Blacks, these women formed a sisterhood; yet at the same time, they were committed to being almost completely unreliable and ungovernable, except to meet their own obligations to masking and dancing. For every Black woman prostitute that he dismissed as a “frustrated whore” in interview after interview, Robert McKinney could write with great detail and doting admiration about one woman’s proud walk (e.g., Mary Davis)40 or about another’s undisputed authority among the residents of the rooming house she occupied. McKinney described Baby Doll Clara Belle as “virtually the boss of the neighborhood.”41 The Black women he interviewed were unashamed or, as he put it, “they were proud,” and with that radically subversive attitude, they flipped Victorian conventions on their head.
There was a variety of reasons that a space existed for Black women to insert themselves into the new sexual economy and to display their profession flagrantly on Mardi Gras Day. Long a stronghold for the sale of lightskinned Black women as sexual slaves for White men,42 the city had a tolerance for sex across the color line unmatched in other U.S. municipalities. As women who worked in the cribs and dance halls and plied their trade publicly (in the streets and doorways of rooming houses), they were already accustomed to performing in public. In addition, these Black women were part of a culture that encouraged street dancing for second-line funeral parades, which included the participation of women. Defiant women had a history of cross-dressing and appearing on public streets during Mardi Gras, braving the insults of the “respectable” classes, so the use of male behaviors such as cigar smoking, flinging money at men, and “bucking” up against their rivals should come as no surprise.
Baby Doll masking at Mardi Gras reinscribed the view that women were mere sexual toys for men. With short skirts, revealing halters, flirty behavior, and money in garters that everyone suspected was earned through prostitution, such a view would render them little more than “passive objects of a castrating male gaze.”43 The sensationalist writings of White men, some of whom observed the Baby Dolls in action and others who uncritically reproduced this view in their writings,44 emphasized the women’s jostling for the attention of the men in the Zulu parade or Big Chiefs of the Mardi Gras Indian gangs or any man with a dollar.
Black jazz musicians who interacted with the Baby Dolls from the early days of jazz until the 1970s were often quoted by White male writers in an indiscriminate and confusing way. One might emphasize the women’s nude dancing while another might say that Baby Dolls were more than a little bawdy, but for fun purposes only. These men were from different generations, witnessing differing versions of Baby Doll masking groups.
These contradictory representations continue to the present. Even today, those in the Baby Boom generation recall their mothers and grandmothers warning them against the lewd and lascivious behavior evidenced by many a Baby Doll on Carnival Day. One New Orleanian, who spent Carnivals on Claiborne Avenue, recounted a colorful story of being teased by her mother if it appeared that she might misbehave. Her mother would threaten to mask as a Baby Doll and would playfully get her husband’s consent. This struck terror in her daughter’s heart since the Baby Dolls she saw would be drunk, and they would let loose.45 In contrast, Mercedes Stevenson’s mother did not object to her following the Baby Dolls around in her uptown neighborhood of circa late 1930s and 1940s. These women were known in the neighborhood as a fun-loving trio of friends who worked hard in their daily lives and hosted parties in their time off. Ms. Stevenson herself would go on to mask as a Baby Doll in the early 1970s. She has carried the spirit of her community’s maskers for decades, before becoming the Big Queen of the Wild Tchoupitoulas Indian Gang, a position she continues to hold.46
BLACK WOMEN’S LIVES IN 1912
The year 1912 was not a good one for African American women. Women in general were without basic citizenship rights; they would not gain the right to vote until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. African American women were affected by laws that were meant to restrict their ability to become gainfully and respectfully employed. Sex and race discrimination easily dampened their aspirations and damaged their sense of self. With some notable exceptions, African American women in New Orleans had few educational opportunities and were corralled into low-paying and demoralizing work. The jobs available were mostly as washerwomen, servants in private homes, agricultural laborers, factory workers, and, from 1897 to 1917, legalized prostitution.
Beatrice Hill credited Leola Tate with having the organizational skills to establish their social and pleasure club. Census records reveal two Black women named Leola Tate in New Orleans around 1912. It is likely that neither is the Leola Tate of Hill’s story. But one thing is probable; the life circumstances of the two Leola Tates could easily resemble those of the heroine of Hill’s story.
The first Leola was estimated to have been born about 1895 and was twenty-five at the time of the 1920 census.47 Her mother, Rosie (Rosa) Miller, was sixteen when she married Charles Tate, a man who worked as a laborer on the railroad. Rosie was not able to read or write.48 Yet she managed to keep her large family together when Charles was no longer in the picture. (He was not included with them in the 1920 census). By 1920, each of Rosie’s five adult children was working as a laborer. Leola was listed as a married woman, though no husband’s name was recorded. She lived with her mother and her siblings, Charles, Allen, Louisa, and George, and her niece Albertine, age six, and Allen, her nephew, age five. Rosie was renting at 539 Franklin Street near Poydras in the Third Ward. The eldest, Charles, thirty-two, was a laborer in an auto factory; Allen (Aleck), twenty-two, labored under the direction of a contractor; Leola, twenty-five, and Louisa, eighteen, worked in a tobacco factory; and George, seventeen, worked in a market. The family’s next-door neighbors, the Morisos, were Italian. They too were renters, and their household consisted of two married couples and the niece and brother-in-law of the Morisos, who were listed as head of the house. The Morisos could not read, write, or speak English. Mr. Moriso worked as a laborer on the levee, as did the other two men in the household. Near their home was a renter, sixty-year-old Sam Sing, an unmarried man originally from China and the owner of a laundry. Though he was not a citizen, he could read, write, and speak English. He lived with a boarder, twenty-four-year-old Isaac Bank, a Black male laborer and Louisiana native.
The 1930 census reveals that Charles Jr. was still living with his mother, who was no longer taking in laundry and did not list an occupation.49 Seventeen-year-old Albertine was working at a factory as a pecan picker, and her father, Charles, listed his occupation as a roofer. Aleck was still attending school. Louisa seemed to have been a boarder with a married couple down the street from her mother. She was listed as single and with no occupation.
The second Leola Tate was born around 1908, and in 1930 she was married to twenty-four-year-old Henry Tate, who worked as a chauffeur for an undertaker. Twenty-two-year-old Leola was a servant in a private household. The couple lived at 1418 South Liberty Street. Though not to the extent of the neighborhood of the other Leola Tate a decade earlier, Leola and Henry’s neighborhood was multiracial.
It is reasonable to assume that many of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls grew up in circumstances in which their mothers were illiterate and married young to men who may have also been illiterate. They had large families and were challenged to provide for them through labor-intensive jobs. Both parents were req
uired to work to support their large families, though women could work from home by taking in laundry. In spite of the stresses, some single women managed to keep their families together and to see their children through to adulthood. Many lived in mixed-race neighborhoods and, though literacy rates were not high, there was an air of worldliness that could have been attained by close exposure to recent immigrant populations. It is likely that in 1912 women had no better prospects for employment than did their mothers and fathers and were destined to work at tedious, dead-end jobs outside the home that placed them at risk of sexual harassment. Wages were low, and rents could be high. A hand-tomouth existence was almost guaranteed.
The 1930 census includes one Beatrice Hill who seemed to reflect the profile of the woman bearing that name who was interviewed by Robert McKinney in 1940. She lived at 454 South Liberty at the corner of Liberty and Perdido,50 the heart of Black Storyville. She listed her age as thirty-five, and she was unable to read or write. She recorded the age of her first marriage to be fourteen and her employment as a housemaid for a private family.
The women who formed the Million Dollar Baby Dolls Social and Pleasure Club were already eroticized in the everyday course of their work in the District, but on Carnival, they re-eroticized themselves to mock and entice male and female spectators. What makes their original masking a challenge to the castrating male gaze of their patriarchal milieu was their aim to get the attention not of men but of a group of women that they held up as rivals and competitors. The Baby Dolls were part of a culture in which competitions among artistic groups were common. For example, it was commonplace to see the leading member of a jazz band publicly guide his group in a competition against another jazz band at a street intersection to see who was “king.” The Mardi Gras Indians took rivalry to a new level as they actually settled old scores on Carnival in their masked attire, guns concealed by elaborate feathered cloaks. Danny Barker recalled that two women singers, Esther Bigeou, an accomplished singer of Creole songs, and Lizzie Miles, were competitors. That they came from different parts of the city only heightened their desire to outdo each other. Seventh Ward resident Esther Bigeou and Sixth Ward resident Lizzie Miles would perform in venues where each had brought her own “gang” who rooted for them as fans of prizefighters do for their champions. In addition to their entourages and their artistic repertoires, they carried with them an array of beautiful gowns and would change between performances.51 Both had mothers who were seamstresses, and so each woman’s attire was elegant and their competition extended to style as well.