The Idea of Black Female Identity in the Harlem Renaissance - Essay Example

The Idea of Black Female Identity in the Harlem Renaissance The working-class lesbian drops out of literary and cultural histories of the Harlem Renaissance as well, for the same and some additional reasons. Until recently, this period in black cultural production has been characterized as a strictly middle-class phenomenon. According to Jervis Anderson's account, for example, the working classes merely functioned as a literary topic and poetic subject for the black literati, virtually all of whom sprang from or were educated into the middle class. Similarly, David Levering Lewis declares that in one way or another, most Harlem artists were products of the 10,000 privileged Afro-Americans--the miraculous 0.01 percent. Although its leadership was indeed of the expanding yet relatively small contingent of college-educated, white-collar blacks, Harlem as geographical and cultural site was traversed by a much wider and more varied social, economic, and racial traffic. As Hazel Carby has pointed out, the formation of an urban black culture in Harlem is not a history of the black middle class. Rather, 1920s Harlem was a period of ideological, political, and cultural contestation between the emergent black bourgeoisie and an emerging black working class. Moreover, the cultural revolution or successful renaissance that did occur stemmed from this terrain of conflict ... (Carby 738-755). The black middle-class and the black working-class simultaneously sought to demarcate and occupy Harlem's contested space. Joined by scholars such as Houston Baker and Ann duCille, Hazel Carby has attempted to correct the skewed and partial representations of this cultural-historical period. Her recent articles and forthcoming book contend that black women blues singers, musicians, and performers formed a web of connections among working-class urban migrants. Baker enacts a similar analytical turn in his criticism, moving cultural study of Harlem out of the realm of the intellectual, where literary production has been privileged, into the realm of the material, where other cultural forms such as the blues await critique. Positioning a close-up, gritty photo of Ma Rainey on the cover of his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker makes the singer representative of the working-class, or mass black blues space he describes in the book. Also attending to class stratification in 1920s Harlem, Ann duCille seeks to critically reconstruct middle-class writers Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, arguing that they were not unlike Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, and Ma Rainey. Revising earlier scholarship on Fauset and Larsen, duCille postulates that they too concerned themselves with black female desire and erotic relationships, producing what duCille terms bourgeois blues. Though successfully widening the critical lens focused on Harlem to include issues of class and class conflict, and in Carby's and duCille's work to an investigation of how class intersects with gender, nevertheless sexuality remains unexamined, indeed omitted from these otherwise perceptive critiques. As representatives of the working-class, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith invite, if not promote, class and gender analyses; almost too neatly they form a critical package of working women representing work in song. And because of the tidiness of this model, the mere critical nod toward Rainey's and Smith's bisexuality has seemed adequate. Yet how does sexual object choice inflect the cultural and political struggle over sexual relations waged by black female singers, writers, poets? If these women artists manipulated and controlled their construction as sexual subjects as Carby argues, how do displays of sexual preference undermine, modulate, or reinforce white and black efforts to contain black female sexuality? And finally, if these black female artists are read as projecting a woman-proud politics in their lives and work, how is the female-to-male, cross-dressing, blues-singing lesbian to be understood? Called a masculine lady by Langston Hughes, a male impersonator by the New York Evening Graphic, and a woman dressed as a man by Harlem artist Romare Bearden, blues singer Gladys Bentley has been virtually omitted from histories of black cultural production for the very same reasons that she attracted such attention in the 1920s and '30s. Putting into question the definitions of female and male, and gender and sexual preference, Bentley opened up a third term or space of possibility which threatened and fascinated black and white audiences, and which serves to confound current scholars relying on clearly demarcated critical categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Perhaps compounding the analytical challenge are the facts that Bentley never recorded explicitly lesbian lyrics, and in a 1952 autobiographical piece she repudiated the previous four decades of her cross-dressing, lesbian life as immoral, deviant, and evidence of an extreme social maladjustment (Bentley 92-98). Eric Garber is the only scholar to have done more than the most abbreviated biographical work on Bentley. Valorizing her for openly displaying sexual variation when social norms strongly prohibited it, Garber in effect apologizes for what he reads as her disappointing turnabout. He explains it first as a calculated career move, then contextualizes it within post World War II job demobilization, which chiefly impacted women and ethnic minorities. He also cites the negative effect of McCarthy's anti-communist campaign, lack of fellow lesbian support, and finally society's fears and prejudices of homosexuality in general (Garber 52-61)). In brief, Garber attempts to maintain Bentley's private identity as a lesbian, keeping it fixed, and blames communal, political, and economic factors for forcing Bentley's public capitulation to social norms. Because of Garber's own critical and sexual investments, he misreads what I understand as Bentley's ongoing reconstruction of herself as a sexed and sexual subject which began much earlier in her life. Eric Garber and Lillian Faderman have described the public intrigue in homosexuality in 1920s Harlem. Manifesting itself in drag balls at the regal Rockland Palace, the ritzy Hotel Astor, the elegant Savoy Ballroom, and the huge Madison Square Garden, these events were officially sanctioned by police permits and anticipated with great excitement by both blacks and whites. Some men wore evening gowns, some women wore tuxedos, and always the highlight was the beauty contest in which the fashionably dressed drags would vie for Queen of the Ball. As a Broadway Gossip sheet of the '20s reveals, the balls drew large numbers: 6000 Crowd Huge Hall, the headline announces, as Queer Men and Women Dance. The headline, however, hints at a clear distinction between the queers and the spectators and, indeed, a large percentage of those who attended the balls were heterosexual, there to observe rather than participate. Both Harlem's society set and much of the white avant-garde strained their necks from the ballroom's bandstand to view the drags. As Garber comments, Many gays didn't like being gawked at. Unlike the male drag queens, Gladys Bentley delighted in necks craning to see her blues performances at cabarets on 133rd street (an area known as Jungle Alley), later the Clam House, and still later Barbara's Exclusive Club, which Bentley herself owned and operated. In the 1930s, Wilbur Young, a writer for the Works Progress Administration would remember: [Gladys] seemed to thrive on the fact that her odd habits were the subject of much tongue wagging. (Garber 52-61) Wearing masculine clothing and donning a matching cane, Bentley was a well known figure among Harlem residents and tourists. A nightclub map of Harlem depicts her tickling the ivories at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 136th Street, the star next to her name indicating that she played until dawn. One of the unique things about my act, Bentley explains in her autobiographical sketch, was the way I dressed. I wore immaculate white full dress shirts with stiff collars, small bow ties and skirts, oxfords, short Eton jackets and hair cut straight back. Born in Philadelphia in 1907, Bentley was by her own admission a problem child. It seems I was born different, she recalls. At least, I always thought so. ... From the time I can remember anything, even when I was toddling, I never wanted a man to touch me. ... Soon I began to feel more comfortable in boy's clothes than in dresses (Bentley 96). Her schooldays were marked by classmates' taunts about her appearance, her unfeminine behavior, and her weight. While her father pressured her to stop wearing boy's clothes, her mother quietly took her from doctor to doctor. Bentley recalls that An atmosphere of whispering surrounded [her] in the home. At 16 she left Philadelphia for New York City. She survived her first years in Harlem playing the piano at all-night rent parties (Garber 55). Langston Hughes' poem The Weary Blues Performing the blues translates emotion into art; writing the blues traps the music in an alien environment, for the music is necessarily linked to performance. As Langston Hughes laments in his poem, Burden, It is not weariness That bows me down, But sudden nearness To song without sound Despite the difficulty of capturing blues on paper, the five books reviewed here demonstrate that blues must be written, rewritten and prcserved--whether through musical notation, poetry, fiction, non-fiction or photography. Writing the blues captures the spirit of the African-American community, as well as the memory of folk blues and jazz musicians. Black modernism is not confined to high art or to literature. Baker shows how black modernist art, graphic design, intellectual history, music and theatre all subvert white racist culture--including British and Anglo-American modernism. A product of the Harlem Renaissance, black modernism emerged in the United States where black art continues to reflect the labors of generations of black men and women who have been exploited, segregated, physically and verbally abused, denied access to opportunity, and called all manner of untoward names, and who have, nonetheless, forged a mighty identity and forced the white world to stand in awe ..... Black modernism, including blues and jazz, showcases the political tactics blacks have adopted in order to confront and subvert the changing same of a racist culture (Williams 3). Music provides modes of speaking back and black with an expressive brilliance which demands attention because it reflects the vernacular of an alternative, previously silenced and repressed, culture. The blues singer is a formidable hero in twentieth-century African-American literature. For example, Ann Petry's novel, The Narrows (1953), presents Mamie, a blues woman who is flamboyant, independent and defiantly sexual. She sings, Tell me what color an' I'll tell you what road she took, Tell me what color an' I'll tell you what road she took. Why `n' cha tell me what color an' I'll tell you what road she took. The intangible relationship between black cultural identity and blues provides the theme for James Baldwin's story, Sonny's Blues (1957). Baldwin explains through his narrator: All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. (Baldwin 119) Speaking of black culture in the United States, Maya Angelou writes, ". . . we survive in exact relationship to our poets (include preachers, musicians, and blues singers)." (Angelou 156) Thus, as Steven C. Tracy notes in Langston Hughes and the Blues: "It is no coincidence that the commercial recording of blues music by African-American performers and the cultural/artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance began at roughly the same time. (Jones 45-53) Since the 1920s, blues has inspired black writers including Amiri Baraka, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Toni Morrison, Sterling Plumpp, Jean Toomer, Alice Walker and Richard Wright. The folk literature of blues expresses a universal and ineffable state of emotional turmoil described by one musician as "a conflict between obligation and temptation." For some, blues mean "uncertainty, indecision, frustration, and the inability to figure a way out of a difficult situation .... the feeling of being drawn in two or more different directions." (Evans 18) Blues music describes the daily experience of human oppression, while also maintaining a breath of hope. Simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic, the music expresses existential themes and dilemmas which are practically universal and thus could represent black or white, male or female, points of view. Within the context of black culture in the United States, blues music has always celebrated individual autonomy and self-definition. Blues protests racial oppression and serves as a mode of transcendence, as performer and audience assert the personal voice against the economic and political system. The political message of the music is not necessarily directly stated, but is implied in both lyrics and performance. Blues is an art, a philosophy, and a way of life--a complex music which defies academic or artistic analysis, but at the same time demands attention. Consider the life story of Pleasant "Cousin Joe" Joseph reviewed here. This bluesman's life exemplifies the live-for-the-moment philosophy expressed in his songs: Life's a one way ticket, and there ain't no second time around Life's a one way ticket, and there ain't no second time around Get all you can out of life, before you're six feet underground. Cousin Joe did not achieve the glamorous life of more prominent blues performers; his story is significant precisely because it is common, evoking the tension between the romantic image of a bluesman hero and the reality of harsh life choices. As life narrative or autobiography, the book is unique, the product of twenty years' work: historical and archival research, interviewing, writing, transcribing and editing by Harriet J. Ottenheimer. Joseph is candid, sensitive and witty, reviewing his life as a series of heterosexul relationships, musical experiences and ribald episodes. Born in 1907 on a plantation in Wallace, Louisiana, he begins his story like this: My Daddy was a mean man! So mean, boy he used to jump on my mother just for nothing. He would beat my mother for breakfast, dinner, and supper. Almost three times a day. If he'd say something to my mother and she'd answer him back, he'd knock her down. My mother used to keep black eyes all the time. She was 8 good woman, but my daddy was a mean man .... He got that meanness from his father. My grandfather was mean too. With a unique earthy tone (but in standard English) this autobiography outlines a typical bluesman's life. Taking risks, the young Joseph rejected the "bad man" image, but nevertheless began to sing the devil's music, first learning to play ukelele, then piano, banjo-uke, and tenor guitar, always writing autobiographical songs. As a young man, Joseph quickly was recognized as a talented singer and songwriter. He chose a musical career, at the same time embracing a life on the edge. Instead of settling down with an impoverished family, working on a rice plantation, in the sugar-cane fields, or at a shoe-shine stand, he became a nationally and internationally prominent piano player, songwriter and vocalist, beginning and ending his career in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. In New Orleans bars like the Gypsy Tea Room, The Kingfish, The Oriental, The Famous Door, The Mardi Gras Lounge, The Absinthe and The Court of Two Sisters he played traditional Delta blues accompanied by the driving dance beat of a boogie-woogie piano. His career also included performances in Kansas City, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere in the United States and overseas--often playing for white segregated clubs. He was one of the few blues singers to record for Decca Records, also signing contracts for film and television. This refreshing autobiography not only chronicles Joseph's rise to fame and musical success (an American myth), it also depicts the real life of a bluesman. As he travels from city to city and woman to woman, Joseph encounters many famous blues and jazz musicians, but famous names and places are not the point. More important to this chronicle are Joseph's relationships with ordinary women, his gambling, drinking, and connections with the underworld--all of these a part of the life experiences of a bluesman. Because of his charm, talent and eventually his fame, Joseph found that throughout his life women were available and attracted to him. Since his adolescent years, when he "was one of the best dressed cats in the school" and had more girls than Carter had liver pills, he remembers being sexually irresistible, as if "I must have had magic or something," he reflects. "Women would just look at me and they were ready to go". Women, young and old, all shapes, sizes, shades and types--sometimes several at once-supported, loved and fought over him. And he loved at least eleven of them in return. Partly because of his wild behavior, Joseph became ill, first with syphilis and later with cirrhosis of the liver. But this did not stop his drive and determination to live life to the fullest. Recognizing that "When you're young and crazy, you take all sorts of chances", an older Joseph quit drinking, decided to settle down, stopped gambling and got married--a type of secular conversion which is not unusual among blues musicians. As he explains, "The good Lord gave me a chance for a comeback. I had messed up my whole life from drinking: from slow horses, from fast women and bad whiskey. But I cut all that out". Joseph's numerous colorful vignettes are fascinating but disconnected threads which intertwine to create the exotic history of a charismatic bluesman who raises our spirits and brings good times. But Harriet J. Ottenheimer imposes no interpretation upon the text, explaining that this autobiography resists the "myth of personal coherence" because it contains "no single diachronic strand to provide the individual with a single identity". The book reveals a frame for Joseph's music: an employment history, numerous lovers and a tumultuous love life, the places "Cousin Joe" played, the famous musicians he knew and finally his conversion and retirement. Ironically the reader follows Joseph's life and career with only a few glimpses of his music--the link which obviously connects all facets of his life. While chapter titles are derived from Joseph's songs, the music itself is rarely described. Works Cited Angelou, Maya, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1970; rpt. New York, 1985), 156. Baldwin, James, Going to the Meet the Man (1948; rpl. New York, 1965), 119. Bentley, Gladys. I Am Woman Again. Ebony (August 1952): 92-98. Carby, Hazel. Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context. Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 738-755. Evans, David, Big Road Blues (Berkeley, 19B2), 18. Garber, Eric. Tain't Nobody's Bizness: Homosexuality in 1920s Harlem. Black Men/White Men: A Gay Anthology. Ed. Michael J. Smith. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1983. 7-16. Garber, Eric: Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues. Out/Look 1.1 (Spring 1988): 52-61. Jones, Le Roi (Amiri Baraka), Blues People (New York, 1963); Bill C. Malone, Southern Music/American Music (Lexington, 19 79), 45-53 Williams, Martin, liner notes to The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (Washington, 1973), 3. 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