The "Baby Dolls"
Page 13
As poor women, the original Baby Dolls worked in the District, some as shift workers, and returned to their homes in Black working-class neighborhoods outside the District after their workday, unlike others who were absorbed by the underworld activities of gambling and petty crime in addition to prostitution.1 There was a permeable boundary between the District and middle-class life that some women used to good effect. These multiply identified women were part of the nighttime performative landscape that included dancing, singing, playing as musicians on a par with men in jazz bands, and participating in the religious traditions of the Black Spiritual church, Catholicism, and Voodoun. For example, Eddie Dawson remembered a woman in the 1910s from Back o’ Town who played jazz at night and organ at St. Katherine’s Church during the day. Neliska “Baby” Briscoe’s mother, Neliska Thomas Mitchell, worked at St. Ann’s Church caring for the priests and nuns of the parish by day and at night took her eight- or nine-year-old daughter to perform as a dancer and singer at Alley Cabaret. They were Black women in a White-supremacist and male-dominated society. The ability to earn a decent leaving and be respected by their peers was challenged by the limitations of their employment and educational opportunities and the exclusion of women’s participation in political affairs that determined the very laws by which they were governed in the District and in society as a whole. Yet they managed to have an undiminished sense of their own self-worth.
There are several enduring themes of the Baby Doll phenomenon. The first is the relationship between the women’s dances and the music of the times. The second is the women’s reappropriation of feminine symbols to critique and satirize the limitations on their sex, imposed by patriarchal legal and social norms. Third is the women’s own view of themselves as “tough,” resilient trendsetters and unconventional community leaders. Finally, as “women dancing the jazz” (from jass/jazz to swing, to bebop, to rhythm and blues, to hip hop and bounce), they carry a message of hope and resilience to a community that has always relied on its culture to make it through life.
MUSIC AND DANCE
When Robert McKinney interviewed Beatrice Hill in 1940, she had lost much of her money and was living in the most deplorable of rooming houses populated by drug users and petty criminals. He described her unflatteringly as a dope fiend and syphilitic patient at Charity Hospital. Seemingly immune to the harsh condemnations of those outside her ranks, she evidenced no lack of enthusiasm in recounting her heyday working in the District. Even before they masked as Baby Dolls one Mardi Gras Day, women such as Beatrice inhabited a world whose center was ironically at the intersection of the streets called Liberty and Gravier. There, one might say, they met their restricted freedoms with much grit. McKinney made the wry observation that their attitudes were indifferent, their profanity that of a sailor, and they were prideful.
They wore short dresses, danced with money in their stockings, and sang erotically charged blues songs. And they danced. At work, they danced nude and on the tops of tables and bar counters. They competed to see who could “shimmy” the best. They would lie on the floor while men fed them candy. As dark-skinned Black women, they were barred from places that catered exclusively to White men, like Lulu White’s brothel, Mahogany Hall, for purposes of either work or their own entertainment. Instead, they frequented bars like the Elite and the Black and Tan. The Silver Platter was especially popular when they got off work. It was the after-hours gathering spot for musicians. They dressed up and carried their own money as a show of pride and independence. If they were working downtown, they referred to the women uptown as “rats.” If they were uptown women, they saw the downtown women’s attitude of superiority as thinking their “asses were silver.” Their rivalries extended to jealousy over men, money, and their frocks. They fought each other with “boiling” words and hair pulling. Robert Tallant recorded that “crashing the gate” was a common practice of rival groups of prostitutes, “white, black, brown, yellow and pink.” One group arrived uninvited to the ball of another and forced their way in. There was usually a melee culminating in police intervention.2
It was out of this rivalry among similarly positioned women that a masking tradition was born. “All we wanted to do was to show them up,” Hill told McKinney. First, Hill’s gang, with the aid of a local police officer, invaded a party that was being given exclusively by and for downtown women and their circle. Beatrice and her gang did not simply attend, they entered and took over. They staged a “show” in which Julia Ford got on top of a table, proceeding to “shake on down,” and then the other dancers disrobed her. In the tradition of the cutting contests, Beatrice had wanted the band to play “Shake that Thing” and dedicate it to her. A brawl ensued, and several people went to jail. But Beatrice had made her point as a rumor developed that her group had a million dollars in cash on them. Armed with their dance routines, their short sexy attire, their bodacious attitudes, and a street-carnival culture that empowered them to participate in the public rituals of their community, all these women needed was a name. The brawl gave them that and the notoriety that they desperately sought. They took this panache and turned it into a legacy.
Inasmuch as the business of the District controlled the nature of the economic fortunes of Black women who were among its laborers, the sex industry itself formed and shaped the worldviews of the men, both Black and White, who produced and consumed it. Unconfined to the District, men took that view back to their homes and professional lives. That world-view specifically connoted how the arrangement between the sexes would be instigated, propagated, and integrated into everyday hierarchical arrangements that put women in general, but Black women in particular, squarely at the bottom of the social ladder. To dance for money was one employment “opportunity” available to uneducated poor Black women that existed among a small array of similarly poorly situated jobs: domestic or agricultural worker. The Million Dollar Baby Dolls danced for money. They danced for cultural purposes of participating in the life of the community through the second-line parades. They danced as well to demonstrate just how empowered they felt inside their spirits.
The primary purpose for which musicians played jazz was to provide music for dancers.3 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, African American dance halls in New Orleans were showcasing bands that, rather than relying on sheet music, were improvising their songs. The dances that accompanied this new energetic music were seen as sensual.4 Dances such as the shimmy or the shake and the Lindy Hop grew up from African American vernacular dance’s interplay with jazz music.5 Though the majority of African American musicians during this time were primarily concerned with playing songs for dancers, jazz is hardly remembered today as dance music.
The shift in jazz from dance music to music for concert-hall appreciation, along with the widening appeal of the jam session beyond the musicians themselves, began slowly in the 1930s and was firmly established by the late 1940s due to sweeping social changes. First, there was the migration of Black musicians from the South to the North and the attraction of young White audiences to this new genre. They too danced to the music, but they also would surround the stage to listen to the improvising musician whose creative genius was being evaluated and appreciated. A second change came with World War II, when people had more money, due to war-related industry, but fewer opportunities to travel as gasoline was in short supply. New options arose for delivering adult entertainment. Entrepreneurs began booking otherwise empty concert halls, auditoriums, and even movie theaters in local neighborhoods and began to include jazz bands along with a variety of other entertainment. A third factor was the venue itself. The stateliness of the concert halls seemed to demand something more from the audiences, the musicians, and the producers of these events. Prominent musicians like Duke Ellington began writing multi-movement compositions. Musicians and music critics alike seemed to trend toward creating distance in the relationship between jazz and popular entertainment. A fourth element concerned the decline of the dance band. The hi
gh wages that musicians had come to expect during the war made large dance bands unaffordable. Some, like Count Basie, returned to playing dance music and shifted their focus from the “looking” audience to the dancing one. Smaller bands emerged and fit the new “bebop” style that African American musicians such as Charlie Parker were inventing. Even though bebop would not completely sever its connection with dance, a new paradigm was in place, demanding that jazz’s concert artists were to be accorded respect.6
When they mask, the Baby Dolls carry the unbroken relationship of jazz (including New Orleans’s latest Black musical forms) to dance. In an article aptly titled “‘Remember When?’ Carnival on Claiborne Is Relived,” Rhonda McKendall wrote:
The Baby Dolls were something to see. Every year they flaunted a different get-up, but they always donned bloomers and tight skirts, 10 to 12 inches above the knee. Sometimes they wore false long curls topped with bonnets, derbies or pill box hats.
Backed by a combo, the Dolls’ steppin’ out time was 10 am sharp—rain, hail, sleet or what have you. And as the saying goes, “they would shake up a storm.”
They’d raise their walking canes or tambourines high in the air, rhythmically shaking their bodies to the ground.
Not to be upstaged, the Gold Diggers would show up in elaborate apparel. They were more or less remembered for displaying money in their stockings and flirting with male spectators.
When the Baby Dolls and Gold Diggers weren’t stealing the show there were groups of second-liners, including men dressed like women, some making music with washtubs.7
On the streets on Carnival Day, during second-line parades at funerals, or on St. Joseph feast night, jazz and dance never lost their symbiotic relationship. Somewhere, some women in the community would continue the relationship between dance and music.
Gold Digger Baby Dolls at a Baby Doll celebration. The Dolls wear velvet and have walking canes. The men of the group wear top hats and satin shirts and pants; one is dressed as a policeman. From the Collection of the U.S. Works Prog ress Administration of Louisiana, courtesy State Library of Louisiana.
“Baby Doll celebration at Pete’s Blue Heaven. The music box and tambourines are providing the music.” 1942. Pete’s Blue Heaven Lounge, one of the preeminent jazz clubs of its time, was located at 449 South Rampart Street. According to a jazz history walking-tour brochure from the National Park Service, it was “often both a starting and ending place for Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club funerals.” From the Collection of the U.S. Works Progress Administration of Louisiana, courtesy State Library of Louisiana.
In a Mardi Gras song popular among Creole-speaking Black New Orleanians called “That Is the Gossip, Shut Up!” a woman discovers her man is two-timing her and she vows to leave him. There was fluidity in the way the singer could start the song, but it was a duet. One singer an nounces what the gossip around town is about the woman, and the other singer laments. The accompanying dance is one in which the singers put their hands on their hips and gyrate to the tune.8 The lyrics are as follows:
That is the gossip, shut up!
Aye-ya! I am going to quit,
Me, I’m going to quit. I am going to quit.
The Mardi Gras Indians make music at a Baby Doll celebration. Written on photo: “Tam bourine player beating out some ‘Indian jive’ for spectators.” From the Collection of the U.S. Works Progress Administration of Louisiana, courtesy State Library of Louisiana.
That is the gossip, shut up !
Me don’t like man has two women.
Me lonesome girl, me don’t like that.
No, I’m going to quit my cheri.
Me don’t like a man has two women.
That is the gossip, shut up!
Aye-ya-ya! Me going to quit
Me don’t like that. Me going to quit.
That is the gossip, shut up!
The Baby Doll masking tradition is a living legacy. As with the Mardi Gras Indians, the Skeletons, and the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the number of people participating in the Baby Doll tradition has waxed and waned over the last century. (See appendix B for a list of known participants.)
Resa “Cinnamon Black” Wilson-Bazile (second from left) with Royce Osborn and other revelers, Mardi Gras 2011. Photograph by Reubin Phillip Colwart, used with permission.
Resa (Cinnamon Black) Wilson-Basile was introduced to the Baby Dolls as a teenager. As she recalls, “When I was fourteen, I saw these girls dancing and they looked like girls but they were women. They were so cute and they were having so much fun. They had all this money in their stockings. My grandmother wouldn’t let me watch them. There was another group and she would let me watch them. They weren’t dressed as solicitously as the other girls in the red stain dresses. These women had baby doll little panties that came down to their knees, and nice pretty laces. They had a good time. They hung out with the jazz band and you know when the jazz band comes out, everybody comes out.”9
As an eyewitness to the bifurcated nature of the Baby Doll tradition, Cinnamon Black contrasts groups of maskers for whom expressing raw sexuality and transgressing norms for women was an end in itself with groups of maskers for whom portraying a Baby Doll became loaded with other meanings.10 In fact, people masked as Baby Dolls for a variety of reasons. One woman I interviewed said that because she grew up poor, she never had a doll of her own. To her, the ability to mask offered the opportunity to embody the very thing that was absent in her childhood. She became that which had been denied. Miriam Reed Batiste said, “As for me, I didn’t have a Baby Doll, because they wasn’t making black baby dolls at that time. You had white baby dolls. I did not have a white baby doll.” Her mother and neighbors became living dolls for their children. As Geannie Thomas put it, “When I was coming up, I always loved dolls and we were very poor. My mother had three girls. At Christmas we got candy, but never a doll.”
Antoinette K-Doe (center) and Eva Perry (right), Mardi Gras Day, 2007, with unidentified reveler on St. Claude in the Tremé, between the Backstreet Cultural Museum and St. Augustine Church. Photograph by Reubin Phillip Colwart, used with permission.
Businesswomen had different motivations; the Baby Doll character costume became a marketing device. Antoinette K-Doe, Geannie Thomas, and Tee-Eva exemplify this theme. K-Doe thought that, through rekindling the practice, she would be able to keep her famous husband’s name before the public and hence generate business for her lounge. Millisia White considers her masking within the realm of cultural ambassadorship, carrying on the tradition and extending it to stage shows and videography.
Cinnamon Black explains the varying styles of dance performed in the Baby Doll tradition:
Baby Doll dance movements change depending on the situation. The Baby Dolls came out at certain times: for funerals processions, on Mardi Gras, for parties, with jazz bands, on St. Joseph’s night and for charity events. If Baby Dolls were going to visit senior citizens, they would do monkeyshine. That makes them happy. But when Baby Dolls get the seniors up to dance they should do a low-style dirge. With children, Baby Dolls just do second line and not impose on them something they were not supposed to see. At parades, Baby Dolls do everything. They are with their families and peers and it is a really good time.
If Baby Dolls are at a funeral they don’t want to do movements that are going to hop into the air. Baby Dolls won’t have their umbrellas open if they are presiding over a funeral. They dance to a dirge, and the movements are second line. Their feet are moving in the ground because someone is being buried. The dance has to express the feeling of the moment. Once the person goes inside the cemetery, and they are buried, St. Expedite is passed, and that is where the bones and skeletons reside; then the dance movements celebrate their life. You open your umbrella; let your hair down. Life is good to you. You are there for the deceased and the family. You want their family to have the strength to carry on. The closer you get to where the deceased grew up and lived and certain landmarks, you go from the dirge to the s
econd line to the monkeyshine.
The Baby Doll dances are more alluring in some cases than second-line dance. You have to be eighteen years old or old enough to go inside the clubs. It is fun. Most of the women they had their own businesses and their husbands had their own businesses. These were important women, and on Mardi Gras Day they were able to let their hair down and have a good time.11
African American dance can be considered an intergenerational art form. Dance researcher Katrina Hazzard-Gordon12 writes that African American dances are re-vamped renderings of dances that have been created in prior generations, some as far back as the antebellum period and some that can be identified as having African origins. Hazzard-Gordon noted that African American vernacular social dance is more than an individual pastime and a way of having fun and remaining fit. It has served as a major identity marker for individuals who are members of a community, who have a certain neuromuscular competence, and who can also send a political message of resistance through the body’s movements. African American dance is filled with personal, sociocultural, psychological, and political connotations. These elements have been retained among Baby Doll maskers.