by Ann Powers
The mix is the fundamental form of all American popular arts. Born of Saturday night dance battles in rural barns or urban squares, and of songs shared among family members or workingmen in saloons, the music and movement that uniquely belonged to this country were a conglomeration from the beginning. The mingling and mutual appreciation forbidden by law among individuals was constantly enacted symbolically, especially in music and dance. And often, what singers said and how dancers shook and shimmied brought into the open the erotic charge of such encounters. The story of how American music and American sex shaped each other doesn’t only begin in New Orleans, but the city’s erotic excitement, racial anxiety, and openness to mixing arose early and was noticed. The effect, which theorist Tavia Nyong’o has dubbed “the amalgamation waltz,” still feeds American pop. It’s what made Miley Cyrus’s hips go up and down.5
Scholars have struggled to come up with a powerful term to describe American hybridity that doesn’t also reinforce stereotypes. Eric Lott’s famous formulation of minstrelsy, the foundational form through which white Americans appropriated African American culture as “love and theft,” remains the most widely invoked—Bob Dylan even used the phrase as an album title in 2001.6 But the necessary uncovering of minstrelsy as the source of so much twentieth-century popular culture has led us to overstress the most theatrical appropriations of identity, instead of harder-to-track histories of more common and close-quartered musical encounters. Before the 1830s, when the white itinerant comedian Thomas Rice became widely known for his “Jim Crow” routine, whites and blacks were learning each other’s dance steps in ballrooms and plantation parlors and commenting on each other’s daily lives in domestic songs. Dance-based or informally voiced expressions of cultural mixing were more widespread than theatrical ones and included all members of American society, including children and women who were not professional entertainers. Music played in the streets and at home could trip into anyone’s life. It could feel like a gift, or a violation.
A music-inspired brawl that the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported in 1850 was emblematic of the whole period:
Elizabeth Hyser, a young lady with a red skirt, gipsy hat and blooming countenance, yesterday appeared before Recorder Genois, and made a terrible complaint against Andrea Lobeste, whom she charges with having assaulted her with a dangerous weapon on the levee. It appears that she was discoursing eloquent music on her tamberine, as an accompaniment to an ear-piercing organ, when Mr. Lobeste expressed his disapprobation of the entertainment by cutting up her tamberine with a knife. This grave matter will be inquired into.7
Although Hyser’s name is German, the way she’s described makes her a racial amalgam. Her “gipsy” hat hints at the Latin tinge that has always been essential in American music, and her tambourine was originally a North African instrument. Accounts of New Orleans in the first half of the eighteenth century abound with scenes like this one. And they’re almost always set to a lively beat.
The fact of race mixing was amplified through the fear of it—and the excitement it stimulated. Abolitionist declamations that THE SOUTHERN STATES ARE ONE GREAT SODOM formed a hysterical counterpoint to appreciations of the free and easy Southern life published in magazines and travelers’ diaries.8 The true extent of sexual intimacy among people of different races and ethnicities during this period is very difficult to determine. What was real in this polyglot place, and what spun out quickly into myth? How did these mixing, melding, clashing bodies move?
As many chroniclers like Nicholls noted, New Orleans was dance-mad. The fifteen ballrooms he found upon arriving offered entertainment every night of the week, and their number doubled in the next decade. There were balls for the white and Creole upper crust, for free people of color, and even for slaves; there were children’s balls and smaller soirees in people’s homes. People danced every afternoon on the levee and sometimes out in the Tivoli Gardens amusement park at Bayou St. John.9
In the ballrooms, British reels and French quadrilles preserved and expanded the customs of disparate homelands and brokered evenings of peace within a newly multicultural community. Nationalist tensions sometimes burst through the genteel façade, as in the great “quadrille wars” of 1803, when conflicts over whose national dances were performed led to duels and, one memorable night, to the ladies of the party fleeing into the night after someone shouted, “If the women have a drop of French blood in their veins, they will not dance!”10 Mostly, though, music became the medium through which dancers absorbed the city’s myriad subcultures—even ones that law and propriety might have kept them from openly embracing.
African musicians, slave and free, played in bands, just as they did at parties on plantations. The architect Benjamin Latrobe witnessed one such music maker at a ball he attended in 1819, a “tall, ill-dressed black, in the music gallery, who played the tambourin standing up, & in a forced & vile voice called the figures as they changed.” The fiddle was also a pacifying force used by slavers to create an illusion that, in their galleries, those people being torn from their families and put into chattel were actually as merry as the tunes one of them played. So music was both a tool of oppression and the weapon that could momentarily defeat it. In Solomon Northup’s slave narrative, recently brought to light again by director Steve McQueen’s 2013 film version 12 Years a Slave, the fiddle he calls “notorious” allowed him to travel well beyond the borders of his master’s plantation, but also caused him agony when his keeper forced him to use it as others were whipped until they danced.11
Slaves did dance in happier circumstances, too, on holidays and other fleeting occasions, sometimes alongside free folk. What effect did European music that incorporated African and Latin elements have on the dancers who willingly and joyfully moved to it? The rhythms of the diaspora are hard to trace within the straight lines of sheet music, which is our primary evidence of this period’s sound. But accounts suggest that what jazz historian Marshall Stearns called “rum in a teacup”—“the addition of Congo hip movements to the dances of the court of Versailles”—gave many local dances the added kick that travelers to New Orleans celebrated. The choreography of European dance was still performed, but in a new way—with hips swinging, shoulders delicately shaking, and feet moving more quickly.12
This is probably how the women who’d removed their shoes to get to the dance Thomas Nicholls attended gallivanted across the ballroom floor. In dance, the imaginary merges with the real; movements motivated by rhythm stimulate desires that otherwise would remain unspoken and lend them a proper but necessarily flexible shape. The theorist Joseph Roach has written about New Orleans as a particularly verdant seedbed for “the kinesthetic imagination”—the metaphorical place where history is written into bodies and kept alive through movements and rituals that are passed down. The erotic vocabulary that developed within the music and dances in its ballrooms formed a kinesthetic conversation about civic life beyond their ornate doors.13
THE QUADROON GIRL
The quadrille—a dance in which four couples traded partners and returned to each other in jaunty polyamory—became inseparable in New Orleans from the feminine character whose name shares its root: the quadroon. By the end of the nineteenth century, the myth of plaçage, a system through which mixed-race mothers contracted out their daughters as high-class concubines to sporting men, was accepted as fact and formed the center of virtually every account of social dancing in New Orleans. Dozens of writers described it in fiction and journalism. By 1911, the definition of plaçage was fixed. Rixford J. Lincoln, the Poet Laureate of the Louisiana Historical Society, summed it up in “The Quadroon Ballroom”:
The quadroon girl made white men dance and sigh.
The half-white woman was a creature strange,
A petted, fawning thing, of love and sin.
The poem depicts the chaos that those Latinized quadrille rhythms caused:
There Folly led the dance in madness wild,
When rivals, ’neath the oaks wou
ld often meet,
In duel there, to place their lives at stake,
Because they found a quadroon girl so sweet.
It ends with a moral twist: the ballroom of Lincoln’s poetic fantasia has become an asylum dedicated to the care of the orphan descendants of these sinful girls, maintained by nuns.14
In Lincoln's portrait, even the most upstanding gentleman, pushed beyond reason and morality by the undulations of young ladies lost in the flow of quadrille, could not be expected to resist a sinful union. In such tales, the idea of music as product and tool of miscegenation most obviously becomes attached to the popular styles that eventually became rock and roll. But what really happened on St. Philip Street on Wednesdays? Not always what so many people feared and were drawn toward. Recent scholarship suggests that the infamous quadroon dances were much like every other dance, connecting would-be lovers who might have found each other anyway. Historians Alecia P. Long, Sharony Green, and Emily Clark have uncovered the wide variety of relations women of color joined in during this period, on a spectrum from coerced sex to complicated “mistress” relationships to common-law marriage (known then as concubinage, regardless of partners’ race or gender) to matrimony itself. Kenneth Aslakson, tracing the birth of the plaçage myth within travelers’ accounts, notes that while the tales we know best “shed only dim light on the nature of white male–colored female relationships in antebellum New Orleans or the quadroon balls . . . these accounts reveal a great deal about the Anglo-American preoccupation with miscegenation.”15
Why did the quadroon balls come to overshadow all the other ongoing kinds of social dancing in pre-jazz New Orleans, distorting our understanding of music and dance in this era? The abolitionist view of “the erotic South” contributed; so did the armchair tourist’s desire for an exotic thrill. Paramount within historic accounts of plaçage is the idea that music itself is so seductive that it not only facilitates illicit behavior, but also creates it. The entertainment at quadroon balls was widely considered superior to that available at parties given by white ladies. The promise of close contact with “dusky” beauties definitely added to the enticement, but the dancing was thought to be better, too.
This is where music reenters the frame and determines the story’s shape. Within the dance itself, and the subtly elastic form of the music inspiring it, an interracial sound and body language evolved. We can understand this by looking at another dance popular in the South during the same period. According to the dance historian Jurretta Jordan Heckscher, slaves in the Greater Chesapeake area were drawn to the Virginia jig, “a dance type that set a succession of male-female couples in physically demanding encounters within a circle of participant onlookers.” This move toward couple dancing—which Africans traditionally considered vulgar—provided a way to act out “perhaps the greatest change in social ideals that marked the transition from Africa to America: the passage from a polygynous to a monogamous paradigm of marriage.”16 Through dancing, Heckscher convincingly argues, slaves absorbed and transformed the unfamiliar customs their masters imposed upon them. The horrors of displacement and bondage dominated slaves’ daily lives. Yet the example of the Virginia jig shows how within this dehumanizing process, people preserved Dr. King’s sense of “somebodiness”—of dignity and the ability to adapt without vanishing completely. The Virginia jig revealed the subtle movements of Africans becoming African American, with the sorrow that entails, but also the unquenchable fire.
Dancers in early America, slave and free, absorbed the influence of people who could not otherwise be fully acknowledged by following their steps. The African presence in a community altered that community; in dance, whites found the patterns of movement that made slaves’ experience concrete and sensual, cultivating a feeling of connection in the flesh. Slaves, in their own changing dances, expressed both defiance and resilience. Dance became a temporary antidote to the spiritually intolerable acts of oppression slavery required. It also became a way of acknowledging that in the close quarters of hybrid America, blending of all kinds was inevitable.
This was a confined kind of openness: it only truly flourished within the symbolically free sphere of leisure realms like the ballroom and the dance hall. And when its effects became too strongly felt, white Americans turned away from it. “From at least the mid-eighteenth century to the first decade or so of the nineteenth, then, the slaveholding elite habitually danced in ways that they themselves acknowledged had been invented by those they enslaved,” Heckscher writes. “And then, gradually but unmistakably, they entirely ceased to do so. One looks in vain after the 1820s for any aspect of wealthy whites’ dance that they were willing to attribute to the black aesthetic.”
THE POWER OF THE MASK
One other factor made the ballrooms of the early nineteenth century a safer space for explosive symbolic liaisons, including the damning desires those in the white slave-owning class might want to conceal. Masking was common at these events, as were elaborate costumes that turned their wearers into very different people, for an evening, at least. One group described in an 1850 newspaper report ran the gamut:
A great many prominent New Orleanians attended this ball, and there were Creoles present, as well as American society. George Eustis came as a judge, and his sister Mathilde as a nun, which shocked some of the Catholics present. Mrs. John Slidell was dressed as a “marquise,” and the Deslonde girls, one of whom later married General Beauregard, came as French peasants. Colonel and Mrs. John Winthrop were attired as “a gentleman and lady of the nineteenth century.” A young man named De Wolf, who was a visitor from Rhode Island, was costumed as “an Arab Sheik,” and he seems to have been the sensation of the evening.17
Today the brightly colored, feathered headpieces that fill Bourbon Street shop windows signal Mardi Gras to most people. That annual festival blending French Catholic and Afro-Latin influences has been a part of Southern folk life since the eighteenth century. Mardi Gras, now a Crescent City staple, concentrates a once much more diffuse experience of topsy-turvy self-transformation. In the ballroom era, dancers found liberation in masks nearly every night.
George Washington Cable’s quintessential novel of antebellum New Orleans, The Grandissimes, begins with a masked ball in the theater on St. Philip Street in 1803. The star-crossed lovers Honoré de Grandissime and Aurora Nancanou first meet in the personae of a dragoon and a monk, their odd finery enhancing a level of close engagement that would otherwise not be possible. The strict and sober bachelor and the young widow spar and entice each other while sharing a cotillion. The scene unfolds in fairy-tale fashion, but with a strong sexual pull. “The dance goes on; hearts are beating, wit is flashing, eyes encounter eyes with the leveled lances of their beams, merriment and joy and sudden bright surprises thrill the breast.”18 The music has its own costuming effect. It turns the air into a character, a genie that pushes unlikely lovers toward each other. Cable’s flowery prose suits his romantic tale, written seven decades after the period it reimagines. Yet his portrayal of the ball as a free zone where attachments could suddenly establish themselves—attachments problematic enough to fill a long novel—accurately represents the role dancing played in social life.
In 1834 a law was established regulating the use of masks during dances. “Ladies who may wish to go out of the ballroom, to unmask themselves, as well as such as will remain under mask, will apply for a countermask to the doorkeeper, so as to be identified by the manager, whose duty shall be to recognize masks.”19 The unstable identities created by masking could not be allowed to extend into the street, and a witness had to be established to make sure the costuming remained consistent. The role-playing a masked event allowed threatened order enough that authorities had to contain it.
Masking was also a part of slave culture. Holidays like Jonkonnu, the winter festival, saw slaves donning costumes, often animal in form, and dancing through the streets. Such customs contributed to the precarious sense of balance in a society fundamentally grounded in
inequality. Like dancing, masking was a safety valve that temporarily allowed slaves to experience themselves as different, if not wholly empowered. The threat of genuine resistance always existed in such moments, however, and as the century wore on, events like Jonkonnu were more strongly regulated to prevent rebellion and escape.
New Orleans ballroom culture, too, leaked beyond its own borders. By the late nineteenth century, the quadrille had left polite society and was inspiring a new group of insurgent dancers. In his history of interracial music in New Orleans, Charles Hersch quotes the early jazz bassist Pops Foster and Jelly Roll Morton, who describe the quadrille as a low-down, blatantly sexual dance favored by “the rough gang” who hung out in the uptown clubs where jazz really began. With masks off but fluid identities fully activated, the working people of New Orleans finally turned the courtly turns of a European form into something fleshy and hot and fully American. But that’s a story often told. Before music got there, it took a detour behind less visible closed doors.
CREOLE LULLABIES OF LUST AND LONGING
After a night out, when a Louisiana belle returned to her candlelit bedroom, her slave maid would sometimes sing and talk her to sleep. One antebellum evening brought to life by the novelist and magazine writer Kate Chopin began this way: with the older, “black as the night” Manna Loulou whispering an old song as she turned to her mistress and shared the tragic story of “La Belle Zoraïde.”
In Chopin’s depiction, Zoraïde was a house slave who was like (but not really like) a sister to her mistress, a delicate girl “whose fingers had never done rougher work than sewing a fine muslin seam.” Her mistress doted on her but still controlled her fate. She planned to wed Zoraïde to another slave, the mixed-race manservant of a local doctor. But one day, Zoraïde saw the ebony-skinned field hand Mézor dancing in New Orleans’s Congo Square and was smitten. They met and loved; she became pregnant. Her mistress, horrified, arranged for Mézor to be sold and took away Zoraïde’s baby, too, telling her it had died during childbirth. Zoraïde eventually went mad, holding on to a bundle of rags as if it were her lost “piti,” even when her conscience-stricken mistress tried to return the actual child. She became “Zoraïde le folle, whom no one ever wanted to marry,” and lived to be old in that sorry state.