Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  The cocotte survived, too. In the early twentieth century, the international superstar Josephine Baker brought her back to life in the ballads she sang in Paris and Harlem. “J’ai Deux Amours,” her 1930 signature song, cast her as a classic femme doudou—a colonial woman of color who becomes the mistress of a white man, often a military officer. Baker sang from a heart divided between her homeland and Paris—an internationalist statement that also stands as a metaphor for loving both white and black men. Baker’s performances led listeners back to the Caribbean, to the Creole songs that later migrated to Louisiana. To have two loves is to suffer heartbreak, but also to find a way to step outside by going inside: inside the shadowy home, inside the treacherous heart.32 And so the secrets of the Creole domestic scene, delicately unfolded in songs that barely survived emancipation and the liberation movements of the Caribbean, formed the signature of a twentieth-century performer whose banana dresses and comically subversive African-flavored dancing would enrapture the Western world.

  Baker wasn’t the only one to heed this lost tradition’s siren call. Duke Ellington, jazz’s great musical historian, heard it, too, and focusing on its undercover qualities, used it to show how sequestered sexual dialogue could survive not just through playful lyrics but in musical tone and tinge. Ellington recorded his “Creole Love Call” in 1927. The wordless song borrows from a classic New Orleans tune, King Oliver’s “Camp Meeting Blues,” which had Oliver and his protégé, Louis Armstrong, mooning at each other through their cornets. Ellington’s composition is best known for its vocal, by the vaudeville performer Adelaide Hall. It was the first 100 percent nonverbal scat vocal in jazz. Josephine Baker herself recorded a similar vocal line a few months before, during just one verse in the song “Then I’ll Be Happy”; doing so, she became an invisible joint in the Creole connection between Oliver and Ellington.33

  Adelaide Hall’s description of how her part in “Creole Love Call” originated involves an exchange as thrilling as the moment when two dancers at a quadrille coyly lower their masks. On tour with Ellington in 1927, she persuaded her husband to linger in the wings as the band played its closing set. “Duke was playing these beautiful tunes,” she told an interviewer in 1981. “When it came to this ‘Creole Love Call’ melody, that’s all it was, just the melody. He was playing, and I started humming a countermelody. Duke was catching that melody that I was singing. He came over with his baton right to the edge where I was standing, and he said, ‘Well, that’s just what I’ve been looking for. For goodness sakes, sing it again.’”34

  Hall’s woozily suggestive vocal on “Creole Love Call” opened a door for jazz singers to improvise beyond lyrics. It also carried forward the truth that these Creole songs of erotic disruption first made clear: that music offers disclosures that language cannot accommodate. The Creole love song flourished in murmurs, only to survive in scat singing, a vocal practice that helped listeners realize just how much of America’s erotic history would reveal itself when transported through rhythm and a wooing tune.

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS IN PLACE CONGO

  Creative expression only becomes performance when others outside the circle are observing. The thrill of music, especially in a live setting, arises when the circle feels permeable—artists’ sounds, words, and gestures invite others into a space defined by play. In America, performances of American popular song were grounded in the now-taboo minstrel tradition: both the energy and the moral failing of our pop traditions originate in a white man rubbing cork on his face and turning black culture into a grotesque. But that damned and powerful practice had its own inspiration, arising from the places where slaves came together publicly, always under the watch of whites, and experienced provisional freedom to inhabit the culture that was their own. In such rare environments, white onlookers witnessed African-based dance and music and sometimes literally touched those creating it, entering the circle, making it a show. Unlike the male, comically distorted preserve of minstrelsy, these gatherings made room for women and for welcoming music’s sensual effects. The most famous was, unsurprisingly, in New Orleans. It became known as Congo Square.

  There is a portrait of a handsome dancer in one of the rings that formed on Sunday afternoons in Congo Square. It’s the one that very likely inspired Kate Chopin’s depiction of La Belle Zoraïde’s lover Mézor; in fact, this drawing determined how countless armchair travelers and amateur anthropologists thought about the African, newly American people whose drums and steady-rolling bodies were so important in defining American popular music. In the drawing, from 1886, the man the accompanying text describes as a “black Hercules” has already chosen his companion. They hold hands across their rotating torsos. She demurely turns away, but his chest, naked, is fully displayed and muscular, his other arm thrown back. He sticks out his hip, about to thrust. Half-encircling them is a dense crowd of singers and drummers, mouths open like the dancers’ own. All the energy in the scene flows toward the couple about to move together. It is a wedding scene with music as officiant.

  This illustration is one of nine that Edward Windsor Kemble, widely known for his “coon” cartoons of Southern blacks, fashioned to accompany an article entitled “The Dance in Place Congo.” The author was George W. Cable—the same influential writer whose guitar renditions of Creole songs brought mixed-blood love to the parlors of the North and whose accounts of quadrille dancing bewitched flat-footed readers across the nation. The article and drawings were presented within the pages of Century magazine as a close account of the goings-on in this urban park before the Civil War. Its grounds, on the northeast edge of the French Quarter, were the central gathering place for the city’s slaves, one day a week, for most of the nineteenth century.35

  Kemble’s portrait of this coupling during a brief respite from enforced servitude has dignity. It is different enough from the popping eyes and watermelon grin of the baby that adorned his 1898 book A Coon Alphabet that its shared lineage with the racist caricatures of the minstrel tradition is often overlooked.36 Yet this admiring view of African grace and virility is, like those images, a fantasia communicating both desire and anxiety. Cable’s written descriptions reinforce Kemble’s image. His prose practically drools at the muscled, fallen demigod in the ring, deep brown skin gleaming beneath his rags, who takes an initially hesitant young woman by the hand and leads her into a bout of epic dirty dancing.

  The account was almost certainly mostly fabrication, one of many similar articles magazine editors commissioned in the wake of the Civil War, in part because they made the defeated and now-needy South seem more attractive to Northerners. Allegedly based on the author’s conversations with former slaves, it was more likely cobbled together from various travelers’ reports and highly embellished by Cable’s own flights of fancy. It wasn’t the first white man’s frothing narrative of slaves’ Sunday dancing at Congo Square; one exists from 1822 and Cable’s fellow nonfiction fabulist Lafcadio Hearn noted the lasciviousness of its female rump shakers in a letter in 1885. Yet because it overflows with detail—and puts romantic sexual conquest at the heart of Congo Square’s activity—Cable’s article became the source to which most people turned when trying to understand the very beginnings of African American (and therefore, American) music. No first-person accounts from antebellum Congo Square dancers have survived. This central birthing place of American musical performance only comes to us through layers of glamorous misrepresentation.37

  Congo Square is the strange Eden of the American musical consciousness. Its mythos formed after the antebellum South collapsed, as the music born there was traveling along migration’s upside-down tributaries toward the North and the West. A real place still visited today by tourists who are inevitably disappointed at its scruffy blankness, it survives as an imaginary planting ground for key ideas about what makes American music unique. For the Southern writers who first painted a national portrait of New Orleans, this open field where slaves could be themselves (though always watched) became a touchstone f
or the region’s fundamentally conflicted and exotic character.

  One way for contemporary music lovers to think of Congo Square is as the nineteenth-century Storyville. That red-light district, established in 1897, was a place dedicated to genuinely illicit goings-on. Congo Square was more like a farmers’ market. But both were established to control activity that took place all over the city—the sex trade in Storyville, slaves’ moments of provisional freedom in the Square—and history has turned both into far more magical places than they actually were. Both revolved around performance and voyeurism: the ladies of Storyville displayed themselves while ragtime pianists played, while Congo Square’s dancers courted abandon under the eyes of white spectators. And both have been named as birthplaces for the mixed-race child known as American music.

  Originally covering six or more acres, Congo Square was an open field on the outskirts of town that became more parklike over time. As with any city park, it gained and lost features as the needs of its visitors changed. The research of arts educator Freddi Williams Evans reveals that Congo Square hosted myriad activities, including raquette, a lacrosse-like game African Americans appropriated from their Choctaw neighbors; the occasional circus; military activities; and more brutal events, possibly including slave auctions. In its early years, the cannon that signaled curfew for slaves was kept there; later it was home to its own ballroom, the Globe. When the Civil War ended, it played host to an emancipation celebration. By the end of the century it had been renamed Beauregard Square after a dead Civil War general, and blacks were sometimes arrested for walking through it.38

  Most important, Congo Square was a site of commerce. In his 1819 travelogue, Benjamin Henry Latrobe cited “the useful recreation of going to Market” as equally important for the well-being of slaves as were dancing and playing sports.39 Using what little money their masters allowed them for the purpose of establishing a business (Article 23 of the Code Noir detailed this practice of providing a “peculium”), “market women” and their customers would purchase or sell ginger beer and cakes, items of clothing, and other small items.40 This limited chance to participate in capitalism not only bettered the sellers’ bare-minimum standards of living; it fed the atmosphere of openness that distinguished Congo Square from other places where slaves gathered, either on plantations or in the sequestered spaces of religious ritual. At the same time, because the homespun products they exchanged reflected their own customs, these women in their colorful tignon headdresses shouting out the price of their calas rice cakes embodied the qualities whites found alluringly exotic.

  Selling, and the small pleasures that the marketplace permitted, fed a distinctly secular mood in Congo Square. Contemporary visitors seek the remnants of ritual there, but despite the clear connections between the dances it hosted and those derived from African diaspora religion, Congo Square was not sacred space. Later depictions have gained a mystical aura by associating the dances performed there with spiritual practices like voudou. But those activities were banned by law, and required more secrecy than Congo Square had to offer. Instead, the open, fluid environment of the square made it the perfect setting for blurring lines; what’s likely true is that the dances and songs were reflective of African spiritual beliefs without overtly expressing them. Misinterpreting songs and dances as either strange religion or pure debauchery, early chroniclers of Congo Square helped establish the idea that popular music could intermingle the sacred and the profane.

  So the origin myths arose and multiplied. By the late twentieth century, the romance of the square—its sexual thrum—was accepted as fact by sensationalists and serious scholars alike. Yet it was all based in fiction: not merely the scattered misperceptions of the well-heeled men who gazed upon people they perceived as savage, but a specific story that originated in legend and was then popularized by Cable, that well-meaning voyeur.

  THEY WERE FREE INSIDE THEMSELVES

  For Congo Square to become an Eden, it needed an Adam and Eve. Cable gave it that in his writing—not only in the famous Century magazine article, but also in his novel The Grandissimes, which portrays erotic desire and fulfillment as the central motivator in the antebellum world’s complicated realignments of race and class.

  Cable fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War, but his mind became troubled after his service. Struggling to reconcile his love of white Southerners with the cruelties he witnessed, he tried to locate vulnerability within the sin of slavery. A key part of this project for Cable was describing how slaves felt, and especially how they loved. He first tried in a short story, “Bibi,” which bemoaned the cruel fate of an African king turned slave whose personal rebellion turned bloody. “Bibi” proved too florid for New York publishers, but after Cable found some success with tamer writing about the picturesque South, he made the story of Bibi, recast within the legend of Bras-Coupé, the core of his debut novel, The Grandissimes.

  The tale of the insurrectionist Bras-Coupé was based on a real incident involving a slave named Squier who fled his owner, fought with police, and was eventually killed, his corpse displayed in the Place d’Armes (now called Jackson Square), the site of most slave executions. Before and after his death, New Orleans authorities helped fashion Squier into Bras-Coupé, a one-armed folk demon designed to maintain order through fear. By the time the story became the centerpiece of The Grandissimes—thrice told in the course of the narrative—Cable had given the devil back his arm and made him both a lover and a dancer.

  Cable’s writing proved inspirational to many. Kate Chopin’s short story mirrored Cable’s heaving prose: “His body, bare to the waist, was like a column of ebony and it glistened like oil,” she wrote in “La Belle Zoraïde,” bringing Kemble’s illustration to romance-novel life. Less tragic but equally overwrought was composer Henry F. Gilbert’s Cable-inspired “ballet-pantomime,” which premiered in 1918 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. A New York Times reviewer applauded the spectacle and its star, Rosina Galli, who “achieved an astonishing transformation to the kinky-haired, black-faced vixen of The Place Congo.”41 Cable’s influence also weighs heavily on the pulp travel writer Herbert Asbury, whose much-reprinted 1936 book The French Quarter retells the story of Bras-Coupé, who could “leap higher and shout louder than any of the other slaves who stamped and cavorted in the dance.”42

  Historian Bryan Wagner has followed the trail of Bras-Coupé from its starting point in true stories of the insurrectionist slave named Squier to the present day.43 He notes that Asbury’s book has been a key source for the many jazz historians who trace the American music back to Congo Square. Writers from Rudi Blesh and Marshall Stearns to Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith all reference Cable through Asbury, though none mention Bras-Coupé directly. Duke Ellington, in his 1956 musical allegory “A Drum Is a Woman,” did the same more poetically, trying to reclaim the story as African-born; but he, too, got lost in the allure of violence and black macho.

  These mistranslations changed the very meaning of Congo Square and became the foundation of a great erotic disconnect: this is the process that, in the nineteenth century, added a lascivious tinge to the idea that would later be articulated as “the blues and country had a baby named rock and roll.” Casting African Americans as mute originators and white observers as translators ensured that white appropriations of African American music would always carry a tantalizing tinge of violation. Sexing up the story, Cable and those who followed him submerged the potentially revolutionary power of the dances performed in Congo Square. This cover-up pushed every other meaning—community, soul fulfillment, insurrection, that potent “somebodiness”—under the surface of the music that became African American. But those meanings survived in secret streams. Eroticized performance became a cover and a conduit for self-determination. The voyeurs perceived lust and release; the dancers felt liberation. Knowing they were being watched, the dancers of Congo Square spoke to each other through steps and sounds that they knew would be misread.

 
; One African American artist inspired by Cable did find a way to return the political urgency—and the malice of racism—to the story of the Congo Square candio. The Creole jazz pioneer Sidney Bechet began his autobiography, Treat It Gentle, by reaching back to the story of his grandfather Omar—whose life story he reimagines through the legend of Bras-Coupé. Bechet’s Bras-Coupé/Omar discovers a young woman dancing in the square, woos and beds her, is accused by her master of rape, flees, returns, and is killed. This rebel motivated by love has a voice and the ability to grasp how erotic desire fits within the larger longing for full selfhood. “He was feeling the Love and the Power working in him,” Bechet writes, “and he was feeling strong.”

  Fashioning a tale of two real true lovers from the unmoored exhibition of eroticism that had become the central meaning of Congo Square, Bechet frankly states that, for enslaved people barred from choosing their own life partners, sexual autonomy was key. The ability to dance in the square had to open up into the possibility of real lovemaking, of mutual possession. “They had that to give,” writes Bechet of Omar and the girl Marie’s sexual union, “and they were free inside themselves.” Infusing the insight and real longings of people of color into the story of Congo Square powerfully altered it. But Bechet went further, pointing an accusing finger at the white observers there. In Omar’s story, the master is not simply angered by the candio’s disrespect; he is inflamed with desire for Marie. What stimulates his lust is the strength and power of the couple’s dance, and his perverse later actions—accusing Omar first of raping Marie, and then allowing this accusation to mutate into one of Omar raping his own white daughter—are all dictated by the hunger that identifies itself when he is captivated by a dance he would not, and really cannot, join.