by Carla Kaplan
Nancy’s first trip to Harlem, in July 1931, scheduled to coincide with the death sentences issued to the Scottsboro Boys, was evidently quite a disappointment. She had determined that Henry should accompany her and be her guide, but he was just coming back to Europe from a trip to the United States himself and returned with her only grumblingly. They were not getting along well, and he foresaw more difficulties ahead for him in New York:
Imagine, a Negro man sailing to New York in the company of a wealthy white woman. . . . Me, of all people, a great big black man, running around New York with a white woman. I must have been crazy. . . . To make matters worse Nancy was the kind who would want to go everywhere and see everything.
Nonetheless, he booked them passage and they endured a “disagreeable” crossing together.
Their first hotel was infested with bedbugs, and they had to gather up their things and move after two nights, taking up residence at the Grampion Hotel instead. Nancy saw the American Depression firsthand, with people out of work, beggars on the street, and storefronts shuttered and abandoned. The year 1931 had already been the hottest ever on record. In July, when Nancy and Henry arrived, the city was gripped by a blistering heat wave. “Nancy was always complaining about the heat,” Henry recalled.
Henry also complained. He was not interested in Nancy’s causes, did not want to meet with Scottsboro organizers, was constantly wary that his wife would find out he was back in the country. “He would not even join her in demonstrations or go to Scottsboro protest meetings.” He was sick of Nancy’s longing for Michelet—which intensified as soon as she landed in New York—and her heavy drinking. He was drinking heavily himself.
Nancy did indeed want to “go everywhere and see everything.” Henry refused to leave Harlem, certain that they would encounter “a lot of trouble” if they ventured downtown. Nancy persuaded him to go see Marc Connelly’s hit play The Green Pastures on 47th Street, however. Featuring an all-black cast with “hundreds of black performers,” the play recycled many familiar stereotypes: “fantasies . . . [of] black innocence . . . child-like and credulous.” “Bunk,” George Schuyler called it. Nancy was appalled at how whites like Connelly were representing and taking over black culture. Yet in her distaste for Connelly she revealed not dissimilar notions:
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—out of curiosity and jealousy and don’t-know-why. This desire to get close to the other race has often nothing honest about it.
Had she arrived just a few months later on this trip or just a few months earlier on her next, she could have seen Zora Neale Hurston’s The Great Day or Annie Nathan Meyer’s Black Souls, either of which would have suited her more than Connelly’s depiction of “happy Negroes at a fish fry.”
Nancy saw a clear distinction between her view of racial differences and those of Connelly or the white tourists, who filled her with “utter disgust,” or Carl Van Vechten—“the spirit of vulgarity” itself, she said. To her, there were a right and a wrong “kind of race-consciousness.” Hers was the right kind, she believed, backed by a commitment to full social equality.
Nancy did not meet many of the Scottsboro activists in New York; by the time she arrived, the executions had been stayed on appeal to the Alabama supreme court. Some of the black activists, especially, were wary of her. “They regarded her as irreparably damaged by her background.” She wanted to go south, to Alabama, but Crowder would not hear of it. She did meet as many of the key intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance as she could, including NAACP officials Walter White, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Pickens. She also struck up friendships with Alain Locke and Langston Hughes. She toured Harlem. And she collected contributors to her planned anthology, then called Color. There were occasional hoots from passing motorists—“Can’t you get yourself a white man?”—but mostly Nancy and Henry were left alone. She was saddened (as was George Schuyler) by the many skin-whitening and hair-straightening parlors in Harlem, the amount of garbage in the streets, and the way that New York’s grand avenues narrowed into shabbiness as they came north. But she was thrilled with “the atmosphere” and “tempo” she found in “the capital of the Negro world.” She loved the “superb quality” of dancing in Harlem, the “magnificent and elaborate costumes” of Harlem’s famous drag queens, and the “immense sound-waves and rhythmical under-surges” of Harlem’s revivalist church services. The real Harlem, she asserted, is “hard and strong; its noise, heat, cold cries and colours are so . . . it is restlessness, desire, brooding . . . gorgeous roughness.”
According to Henry, Nancy was not as well received in Harlem as she would have liked. “She was white, they were black; they could not forget the difference,” he said. Nancy would not have wanted them to forget it, since that difference—for her—was the root of the cross-racial appeal. But if Henry was right and Nancy had hoped for greater acceptance than she received, she was laying the groundwork for a place in black culture, even on that not entirely satisfactory first foray.
“Black Man and White Ladyship”
She pursued her own path, with no regard for her happiness.
—Raymond Mortimer
Her Negrophilism was passionately serious.
—William Plomer
Through the rest of 1931, like most progressives, Nancy monitored the progress of the Scottsboro case, which had become not only an international cause célèbre but also a referendum on social courage and political strategy. The case, and the wrangling for control of it, forced supporters to ask just how far they would go and what risks they were willing to take.
Nancy Cunard picked up the gauntlet in her own way. In December, she self-published one of the stranger essays in the annals of modern literature, “Black Man and White Ladyship,” a vitriolic no-holds-barred attack on her mother. As Anne Chisholm noted, “Nancy attacked her mother at every vulnerable point.” One friend who knew both Nancy and her mother at the time wrote that Nancy’s pamphlet created “an explosion such as has never been known” in the Cunards’ social circles. “Your Ladyship,” Nancy wrote, “you cannot kill or deport a person from England for being a Negro and mixing with white people. You may take a ticket to the cracker southern states of the U.S.A. and assist at some of the choicer lynchings which are often announced in advance.” The second half of the essay was a minilecture on 244 years of the American slave trade, the practice of lynching, and an argument for Africa’s superiority to industrialized, militarized, urbanized modernity.
Nancy had the pamphlet printed privately and distributed to her—and her mother’s—friends and acquaintances on both sides of the Atlantic. She republished it a year later in New Review, ensuring that it would be as widely read as the previous “Does Anyone Know Any Negroes?” had not been. She knew the effect it would have. “I trust we shall never meet again,” Nancy wrote of her mother. She was right. Nancy and her mother never spoke to or saw each other again.
Many were shocked by how Nancy’s pamphlet had crossed the line from private to public. Black writer Claude McKay, one of the most important voices of the “New Negro” literature, said that she was “taking a Negro stick to beat the Cunard mother” with. Most commentators have found the pamphlet inexplicable. Nancy Cunard’s first biographer says that “there can seldom if ever have been a more savage public attack by a daughter against her mother.” Some have made it the linchpin of arguments that everything she ever did was part of an oedipal struggle with her mother.
Of course, Nancy Cunard never cared about the line between the public and the private and prided herself on blurring it. Her essay was, in part, a demonstration of that. But it is really in the context of Scottsboro, with which she was then obsessed, that the essay makes sense. Indeed, it is written only as if it were an open letter to her mother. I think it is a response to Scottsboro written to and for black readers. “Black Man and White Ladyship” opens with Nancy’s dec
laration that she has a “very close friend” who is a Negro and also “a great many other Negro friends in France, England, and America.” Though the first statement was certainly true, the second is more dubious. What Nancy had then was the desire for “a great many other Negro friends,” and the essay addresses them. It demonstrates what she is willing to risk, and to lose, on their behalf and for their company. Its repudiation of her mother is a disavowal of whiteness, similar to the ways that Edna Margaret Johnson, Lillian Wood, and Annie Nathan Meyer also disavowed whiteness by publicly decrying it as monstrous. Because “Black Man and White Ladyship” went too far out on a limb to allow Nancy to ever return to her family, it said, “I am no longer one of them; I am one of you (now), and you must take me in.” Read in that way, “Black Man and White Ladyship,” is less a letter to her mother than Nancy’s plea to be adopted by Harlem.
Nancy was, of course, using her racial politics as a stick. And she never saw what others viewed as wrong with that, as long as her politics were sincere. Her willingness to do battle at any time, on any front, and regardless of personal cost, she felt, was proof of her commitment. The essay’s failure—almost no one saw anything of value in it—seemed genuinely surprising to her. She was often unable to anticipate how others would see her. Not especially valuing the cachet that came with being a Cunard, she was baffled by the venom with which others responded to her willingness to throw away her privileges, wealth, and status. She could not understand that people experienced her lack of interest in what they coveted as a slap in the face. Black educator and NAACP field secretary William Pickens observed rightly that “most girls would sell their souls for what Nancy’s mother was trying to make Nancy accept and which the girl absolutely refused.”
As satisfying as it might have been to take an inevitable break with her mother into her own hands, “Black Man and White Ladyship” was still a symbolic gesture. Nancy had resolved to effect a wider sphere than the “dreary and decadent” social circle that clustered in her mother’s parlors.
Then, in the winter of 1932, Ruby Bates recanted. There had been, she now admitted, no rape. To Nancy, back in Europe, Ruby became an exemplar, a woman of “very great courage” whom she credited with achieving “the first great crack in the old Southern structure of white supremacy.” Ruby’s new testimony, she believed, was “piercing the whole of the rotten Southern fabric of lies and race hatred, holding it up to the entire world, tearing it inside out.” There was the fighting spirit that Nancy so admired.
In truth, Ruby had never intended to recant. She had done so when a letter she’d written to her boyfriend, Earl Streetman, made its way into the hands of the lawyers: “Dearest Earl,” she had written, “those Negroes did not touch me or those white boys. i hope you will believe me the law don’t. I know it was wrong to let those Negroes die on account of me.” She said that she had made her original charges out of fear—so that she would not have to “lay out a sentence in jail.” She recanted, in part at least, out of fear that she’d lose her boyfriend otherwise. She did eventually join the fight to free the Scottsboro Boys, even traveling with some of their mothers on ILD-sponsored tours that gave her the opportunity to visit places such as New York City and the White House, ride at the front of parades, and speak to huge audiences.
Scottsboro Boys’ mothers with Ruby Bates.
But Nancy re-created Ruby Bates as a fearless fighter in her own image. Through Ruby’s story, she saw how historical forces had influenced the script that both accusers had been handed: “The girls were not individuals with alleged wrongs, but had been transformed into part of the lynch machinery.” And she imagined Ruby standing up to all of it, saying “No” to race, class, and gender and to the way society intertwined them. In re-creating Ruby as a heroic warrior, Nancy also adopted a feminist perspective on the women—as both agents and victims—that very few others evinced. Even the IDL lawyers who defended Bates and Price also demonized them as liars and whores. Shut out of white womanhood by class, both Price and Bates had been given the unexpected opportunity to purchase social status through a racist lie. In truth, Cunard was ignoring certain truths about Ruby. She overlooked what it meant for barely working-class women to try to scrabble their way upward. And she overlooked the powerful incentives for such women to turn on those considered beneath them. Had Ruby Bates, in fact, voluntarily attempted to back out of the nation’s racial bargain and expose it for what it was—as Nancy credited her with doing—she would indeed have been quite a heroine. Even as she recanted, however, she kept a racist outlook, consistently referring to blacks as lower and less valuable than whites. Bates wanted to do right, she insisted. But she did not want to go down in history as a “nigger lover,” the insult slung so freely at Nancy.
As the activist and writer Mary Heaton Vorse put it in her essay “How Scottsboro Happened,” “There is one precious superiority which every white person has in the South. No matter how low he has fallen, how degraded he may be, he still can feel above the ‘niggers.’” Not even blacks were impervious to the force of the epithet “nigger lover,” sometimes having less regard for whites who loved blacks than for other whites. Henry Crowder, at one point, said about Nancy Cunard that in loving blacks, “instead of raising the lowest of the black race to her level by associating with them she lowers himself to their level,” suggesting that even he saw Nancy’s love for blacks—for him—as crazy or unnatural, perverse or degraded. So it is not surprising that very few white women were willing to be called “nigger lovers.” Nancy Cunard was willing. And the Ruby Bates she reinvented as a model for herself, an “American white friend with feelings such as mine,” was willing as well. When the appeal was filed for the Scottsboro Boys, Nancy decided to return to Harlem again.
If the Ruby Bates she had reimagined was the image in Nancy’s mind as she planned and executed her second trip to Harlem, met with contributors to the anthology now called Negro, and faced an explosion of racial hatred, it may well have helped her weather the storm of controversy that her visit evoked. She was ready to show the American public what a “nigger lover” really looked like.
“I Love Everything That Has Come Out of Africa”
Some books are undeservedly forgotten.
—W. H. Auden
On Nancy’s second trip to the United States, in the spring of 1932, she was determined to meet more people and go more places than she had been able to do in 1931 with the nervous Henry in tow. This time she traveled with her friend John Banting and other friends she had met in New York and Boston.
After the media uproar in early May, there was a feeling of resentment in Harlem about all the bad publicity, and Nancy was persuaded to retreat to the country, where she could concentrate all her energies on Negro, which had by then become a mountain of unorganized and mostly unedited contributions. In July, she took a trip to the West Indies with a black man from Boston, A. A. Colebrooke, and the press had a field day with that trip as well, insisting that Colebrooke had left his wife for Nancy. But Nancy was determined not to lose her focus on Negro, and she mostly ignored the coverage. She visited Cuba and Jamaica, met with both Nicolás Guillén and Marcus Garvey (who adored her), and by August was ready to return to Michelet, Paris, and the job of shaping Negro.
Only an impassioned outsider such as Nancy would have imagined that it would be possible to create one “entirely documentary” record of everything that “is Negro and descended from Negro.” And probably only Nancy Cunard would have determined that the record could be written by both whites and blacks. As she envisioned it, Negro would cover all corners of the diaspora, all forms of cultural expression, and every possible discipline of scholarly thought on black culture and history. It would contain artwork, literature, bibliographies, travel guides, “documents, letters, photographs . . . articles, essays . . . documentary facts . . . Spirituals, Jazz, Blues . . . African tribal music . . . Reproductions of African Art . . . Accounts of lynchings, persecution and race prejudice . . . [as well as]
outspoken criticism and it would be as inclusive as possible.” Clearly Nancy imagined herself as a cultural ambassador, representing black American culture to Europe and the world:
The vast subject so well known in the United States of America was little known in England, where one point of view was even “Why make such a book—aren’t Negroes just like ourselves?” While I could see what was meant by this intellectual and scientific point of view, I could assure whoever it was who asked the question that if Negroes be like us their lives are mighty different!
It did not concern her that she had never been to Africa or its colonies and had been able to make only short and relatively superficial visits to the United States.
The agenda was absurdly ambitious—both unreasoned and unreasonable, as Michelet later said. “I am terrified by the size of the book, the effort it will be to get everything in,” Nancy confessed to one friend in an unusually unguarded moment. But Negro achieved it, and more, when it finally appeared in 1934. The book weighed in at 855 pages, 385 illustrations, and well over 200 entries by 150 contributors, including Theodore Dreiser, William Carlos Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler (under the name Heba Jannath), Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter White, Countée Cullen, and many others. An extra-large-format book weighing eight pounds, it was one of the most expensive books ever published. Nancy fussed over its every detail, from endpapers to typesetting. No publisher would touch the book, so (like Annie Nathan Meyer) she had it printed at her own expense. “The publishing company I am going to in London, though visibly very interested in my book would not think of putting up one penny towards its production. . . . They say the subject would not make it worth their while.” The book was originally budgeted at about £350, but its costs rose to more than four times her estimates. Fortunately, she’d just won a libel suit in the British courts over the press’s misrepresentation of her second visit to Harlem. The proceeds from the case just covered the printing bill. “Did I tell you who, really, paid for it? The British press!! Out of the £1250 I got off them for three libels on myself and the Negro race at the time I was in N.Y. Not bad? Even that does not cover the cost; it has cost between £1400 and £1500 to produce the edition of 1,000.” Even with that, she nearly could not get the book printed. To her friend Arthur Schomburg, she confessed that “getting the book through the press was incredible. The board of Directors of the printers and I almost came to blows over their cretinous refusal to print one or two small things.” At the last minute they absolutely refused to print a contribution called “The Negress at the Brothel” that Nancy had to have printed elsewhere on matching paper and hand-sewn into the book with page numbers I, II, III. The price of the book, not surprisingly, was high. Nancy was mortified. “It is my grief that our book has to be so dear,” she told Schomburg, unable to meet the many requests she received for free copies.