Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  Resentment over the ubiquity of such attitudes was keen. But bad feeling also had to be handled with care. Hurston, for example, freely told her best friend, Langston Hughes, “It makes me sick to see how these cheap white folks are grabbing our stuff and ruining it. I am almost sick—my one consolation being that they never do it right and so there is still a chance for us.” But when she repeated those sentiments to her benefactor Charlotte Osgood Mason, writing to Mason that white people “take all the life and soul out of everything,” Mason took offense. Hurston had to backpedal or give up Mason’s help. Indeed, Hurston’s anger, though shared by almost every other black Harlemite, was usually not made public. Most black artists in Harlem were surrounded by influential or moneyed whites whose feelings needed to be taken into account.

  For white women the enticements of black literary impersonation were particularly strong and the rewards especially rich. White women writers in the 1920s were still fighting Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of them as “scribblers” and gossipers. So the vogue for novels about black life opened an important literary door for them. In addition to those already mentioned, Dorothy Fields, Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Pearl Buck, Helen Worden Erskine, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Florine Stettheimer, Anne Pennington, Muriel Draper, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Hallie Flanagan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ethel Barrymore, and Libby Holman all took advantage of “the vogue.”

  Miss Anne’s view of blacks was not always appreciated by those she wrote about. But because “Negroes are practically never rude to white people,” as Langston Hughes noted, the record of such responses is scant. Many black women, especially, chose to respond to Miss Anne’s portrayals of them with either silence or exaggerated, ironic flattery in place of a more direct critique. There were occasional political cartoons of white women, but not as many as one might expect, and most of them, such as those included here, were both relatively benign and printed anonymously.

  One way to deal with Miss Anne and her portrayals of blacks was to respond to her in kind, embedding depictions of white women into black literature. In contrast to the histories of the period, in which Miss Anne hardly appears, and black writings, including correspondence, in which she’s hardly mentioned, the fiction of the Harlem Renaissance is riddled with depictions of Miss Anne. Almost always, she appears either as a fool or as a monster. Those depictions were a powerful part of the Harlem world that Miss Anne entered.

  Rudolph Fisher’s Agatha Cramp, for example, is based on Charlotte Osgood Mason, and as a caricature, it pulls no punches. Miss Cramp is “the homeliest woman in the world,” with a “large store of wealth” and a “small store of imagination.” Miss Cramp decides that there’s “a great work” for her to do in Harlem, notwithstanding the fact that she knows nothing about black culture and has met no black people other than “porters, waiters, and house-servants of acquaintances.” But enamored of her own “vision” of blacks, she sees an “alien, primitive people” who need her, she believes. Wallace Thurman also created a recognizable caricature in Barbara Nitsky, who appears in his 1932 novel Infants of the Spring. Nitsky seems an exotic and appealing woman, but as it turns out, she is just another “Jewish girl who had been born in the Bronx, sophisticated in Greenwich Village . . . and then migrated to Harlem, broke and discouraged, to discover that among Negro men she could be enthroned and honored like a queen of the realm.” Nitsky (or Countess Bedbug) is a very thinly disguised Fania Marinoff, Carl Van Vechten’s wife, also a Jewish girl from the Bronx, originally named Fanny.

  A certain amount of friendly ribbing was part of interracial life in Harlem. Making one’s way in those circles as a white woman meant making allowances for such playfulness. Often, however, Miss Anne is depicted as an oblivious fool, ridiculously unself-conscious about how out of place she is. In Infants of the Spring, Thurman includes “the ex-wife of a noted American playwright . . . doing the Black Bottom with a famed Negro singer of spirituals. ‘Ain’t I good?’ she demanded of her audience; . . . [and] she insinuated her scrawny white body.” Such portrayals were not always playful.

  Part of Miss Anne’s pathos in those depictions is her earnestness and sincerity—she is almost always well-meaning. In Langston Hughes’s short story “Slave on the Block,” Anne and Michael Carraway are very well-meaning whites. They are “people who went in for Negroes,” even “raved” over them. Unhappily, however, “much as they loved Negroes, Negroes didn’t seem to love Michael and Anne” (or “Miss Anne”). Being earnest is not such a virtue, it turns out. As a fool, Miss Anne’s mere presence can lead to murder and tragedy. In James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man, there is a white woman, known only as “the widow,” to whom the black narrator is drawn against his better judgment. One night, when the “widow” is unaccompanied by her usual black boyfriend, a “surly, black despot,” she beckons the black narrator with a come-hither look. “Knowing that I was committing worse than folly,” the narrator, says, he goes to her. The widow’s enraged black lover enters, pulls out a pistol, and shoots her dead.

  Miss Anne was often depicted as perplexed and out of place; here Fania Marinoff stands in for bewildered white women.

  Sometimes Miss Anne is tragic. In Jean Toomer’s Cane, she appears as Becky, a “God-forsaken, insane white shameless wench” with sunken eyes, a stringy neck, and fallen breasts who has mothered two black sons and been abandoned to die, forsaken by both whites and blacks. Sometimes Miss Anne is simply a monster. In “Portrait in Georgia,” Toomer forswears pity for women such as Becky to, instead, depict the seeming seduction of white women as death-dealing delusion. A white woman’s beauty, he insists, is a grotesque mask of lyncher’s tools, and she feeds not on honeysuckles and love songs but, ghoulishly, on the blood and bodies of black men:

  Hair—braided chestnut,

  coiled like a lyncher’s rope,

  Eyes—fagots,

  Lips—old scars, or the first red blisters,

  Breath—the last sweet scent of cane,

  And her slim body, white as the ash

  of black flesh after flame.

  For the most part, the more well-meaning or well-intentioned such women are, the more dangerous they become. Richard Wright’s doomed white girl in Native Son, the well-meaning liberal Mary Dalton, is nothing if not sincere: “We know so little about each other. I just want to see. I want to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a Negro home. . . . I want to work among Negroes. That’s where people are needed. It seems as though they’ve been pushed out of everything.” Such sincerity is hardly a saving grace when white women’s mere presence, as white women, can endanger black men. Not realizing that is the most treacherous racial misunderstanding possible. Ovington’s acceptance into the inner circles of black middle-class society may have come, in part, from her constant vigilance on these grounds. “That the sincerity of my [interracial] friendship has never been doubted has been my greatest joy,” she wrote.

  White women “oughta stay outa Harlem,” one of Thurman’s characters concluded. The harder they tried, the more damage, heartbreak, and destruction they were likely to leave in their wake. Given those depictions, it is surprising that so many white women did try to gain acceptance in Harlem. Clearly, whatever they were seeking was a stronger pull for them than the uncertain welcome they were likely to face.

  Chapter 2

  An Erotics of Race

  Harlem seemed a cultural enclave that had magically survived the psychic fetters of Puritanism. Negroes were that essential self one somehow lost on the way to civility, ghosts of one’s primal nature. . . . The creation of Harlem as a place of exotic culture was as much a service to white need as it was to black.

  —Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance

  “A Little Paradise”: Harlem as “America’s Racial Laboratory”

  What a crowd! All classes and colors met face to face, ultra aristocrats, Bourgeois, Communists, Park Avenuers galore, bookers, publishers, Broadway celebs, and Har
lemites, giving each other the once over. The social revolution was on.

  —Geraldyn Dismond, The Interstate Tattler

  There were always two Harlems in the 1920s—the one that whites flocked to for pleasure and the one that (mostly) blacks lived and worked in. Guidebooks written for white readers presented Harlem as a “real kick,” “New York’s Playground,” a “place of exotic gaiety . . . the home-town of Jazz . . . a completely exotic world” where “Negroes . . . remind one of the great apes of Equatorial Africa.” Primitivists of many different stripes, from antiracists to racists and everything in between, held that white culture was dull, depleted, restricted, cold, without vibrancy or creativity, and that all the passion, purity, and pleasure it lacked was hidden away in black communities. That conviction was the foundation of what Langston Hughes called the “Negro vogue,” making Harlem, in James Weldon Johnson’s words, “the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious, the adventurous” and drawing whites to shows at interracial cabarets or to clubs that catered to their patronage. Gay and straight, male and female, white would-be revelers descended on Harlem from taxis and subway stations, in spring weather and in snowstorms, individually and by guided tour, in hopes of an evening’s dose of the life-giving force they believed in and that popular culture reinforced. Harlem, Variety promised, “surpasses Broadway. . . . From midnight until after dawn it is a seething cauldron of Nubian mirth and hilarity. . . . The dancing is plenty hot. . . . The [Negro] folks up there . . . live all for today and know no tomorrow. . . . Downtown Likes Harlem’s Joints.” One travel writer gushed, “Here is the Montmartre of Manhattan . . . a great place, a real place, an honest place, and a place that no visitor should even think of missing. But visit Harlem at night; it sleeps by day!”

  Libby Holman with jazz guitarist Gerald Cook.

  Harlem did not, of course, sleep by day. White revelry was not its raison d’être. African Americans came to Harlem from all over the world, paying inflated rents and tolerating overcrowding, to experience a richly faceted black world. As Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, put it, Harlem in the 1920s was “the symbol of liberty and the Promised Land to Negroes everywhere.” There were magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, and cultural institutions rich with community programs, such as the 135th Street Library (now called the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, after the collector Arthur A. Schomburg). There were patrons who wanted to support black artists. There were foundations such as the Guggenheim, Rosenwald, Garland, and Viking that were actively seeking African-American talent. The NAACP and the Urban League supported competitions, as did the Opportunity and Crisis awards, the Spingarn Medal, the Harmon Award, the Boni & Liveright award, and others. And there were literary salons and parties—writer Georgia Douglas Johnson’s, Walter White’s, the famous “Dark Tower” salon of hairdressing fortune heir A’Lelia Walker, and Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff’s apartment—all providing space for black and white artists, intellectuals, musicians, and political leaders to mix and share ideas. It was a heady time, “a rare and intriguing moment,” in the words of Nathan Irvin Huggins, “when a people decide that they are the instruments of history-making and race-building.”

  Harlem street scene.

  If there was anyplace in the nation where race lines could be undone, that place seemed to be Harlem. Its interracial nightlife was legendary. Society columnists in the same papers that warned against race mixing thrilled to stories of Harlem’s “black-and-tan” parties and cabarets. Harlem was the country’s symbol of interracial relations, “a large scale laboratory experiment in the race problem,” as writer, NAACP leader, and professor James Weldon Johnson described it. The “Negro renaissance,” wrote Wallace Thurman, was a place “to do openly what they [whites] only dared to do clandestinely before.”

  Goaded by that possibility, Langston Hughes wrote, “white people began to come to Harlem in droves.” They felt entitled to Harlem’s vaunted exotic sensuality and the escape it promised from urban capitalism’s alienation. As British heiress, activist, and Harlem aficionado Nancy Cunard put it, “It is the zest that the Negroes put in, and the enjoyment they get out of, things that causes . . . envy in the ofay [white person]. Notice how many of the whites are unreal in America; they are dim. But the Negro is very real; he is there. And the ofays know it. That’s why they come to Harlem.” White visitors flooded nightclubs and elbowed their way into literary events. “White America has for a long time been annexing and appropriating Negro territory, and is prone to think of every part of the domain it now controls as originally—and aboriginally—its own,” James Weldon Johnson commented. Those with money took up black writers and artists. Those with political aspirations threw themselves into Harlem politics. A visit to Harlem’s fabled cabarets was de rigueur for out-of-town tourists, who all wanted to go back home to Cincinnati, Seattle, or Dallas and shock their friends with stories of interracial drinking and dancing in New York’s celebrated black metropolis. The cabarets capitalized on white America’s desire for black exoticism, and they presented themselves, as Huggins puts it, as a “cheap trip . . . a taxi ride . . . thrill without danger.”

  But there were upsides as well as downsides to being, as Langston Hughes put it, “in vogue”:

  At almost every Harlem upper-crust dance or party, one would be introduced to various distinguished white celebrities there as guests. It was a period when almost any Harlem Negro of any social importance at all would be likely to say casually: “As I was remarking the other day to Heywood__,” meaning Heywood Broun. Or: “As I said to George__,” referring to George Gershwin. It was a period when local and visiting royalty were not at all uncommon in Harlem. And when the parties of A’Lelia Walker, the Negro heiress, were filled with guests whose names would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy. It was a period when Harold Jackman, a handsome young Harlem school teacher of modest means, calmly announced one day that he was sailing for the Riviera for a fortnight, to attend Princess Murat’s yachting party. It was a period when Charleston preachers opened up shouting churches as sideshows for white tourists. It was a period when at least one charming colored chorus girl, amber enough to pass for a Latin American, was living in a pent house, with all her bills paid by a gentleman whose name was banker’s magic on Wall Street. It was a period when every season there was at least one hit play on Broadway acted by a Negro cast. And when books by Negro authors were being published with much greater frequency and much more publicity than ever before or since in history. It was a period when white writers wrote about Negroes more successfully (commercially speaking) than Negroes did about themselves. It was the period (God help us!) when Ethel Barrymore appeared in blackface in Scarlet Sister Mary! [by white writer Julia Peterkin]. It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.

  White women could get their names in the paper simply for showing up. Joan Crawford, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Helena Rubenstein, Fannie Hurst, and Zelda Fitzgerald all found that useful. Torch singer Libby Holman made Connie’s Inn, the Clam House, and Small’s Paradise into second homes for herself and her bisexual posse of friends: Tallulah Bankhead, Jeanne Eagles, Beatrice Lillie, Louisa Jenney, and others, who liked to go to Harlem “dressed in identical men’s dark suits with bowler hats.” When Small’s Paradise moved, it advertised its new location in Variety by describing itself as a place where the (white) “high hats” who mingled with the (black) “native stepper[s]” came to dance.

  There is an often-repeated apocryphal anecdote that recounts a black porter conversing with Mrs. Astor. “Good morning, Mrs. Astor,” the porter says, picking up her luggage. “Do we know one another, young man?” she asks, incredulously. “Why, ma’am,” he replies, “we met last week at Carl Van Vechten’s.” It didn’t matter that the story was not true. It nevertheless conveyed the idea that Harlem’s social world, to a degree unprecedented elsewhere in the nation, leveled social distinctions. No Harlem Renaissance
novel, black or white, was complete without its requisite party or cabaret scene. Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring vividly describes a rent party

  crowded with people. Black people, white people, and all the in-between shades. . . . Everyone drinking gin or punch. . . . The ex-wife of a noted American playwright . . . confused middle-westerners, A’Lelia Bundles, Alain Locke . . . four Negro actors from a current Broadway dramatic hit . . . [a] stalwart singer of Negro spirituals . . . a bootblack with a perfect body, a . . . drunken English actor . . . a group of Negro school teachers . . . Harlem intellectuals . . . college boys, the lawyers, the dentists, the social service workers . . . [all] unable to recover from being so intimately surrounded by whites.

  Real parties were even more extravagant. A’Lelia Walker Bundles, the daughter of Harlem’s first millionaire, hairdressing entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, was Harlem’s “great party giver,” and her elegant limestone town house at 108–110 West 136th Street was something to see. It had French doors, English tapestries, Louis XVI furniture, Persian rugs, a grand piano, and crystal chandeliers. “Negro poets and Negro number bankers mingled with downtown poets and seat-on-the-stock exchange racketeers. Countee Cullen would be there and Witter Bynner, Muriel Draper and Nora Holt, Andy Razaf and Taylor Gordon. And a good time was had by all. . . . Unless you went there early there was no possible way of getting in. Her parties were as crowded as the New York subway at the rush hour—entrance, lobby, steps, hallway, and apartment a milling crush of guests, with everybody seeming to enjoy the crowding.”