The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  On May 19, Valdosta, Georgia, in the southeastern part of the state near the Florida border, was the scene of one of the most unspeakable crimes ever committed anywhere outside Nazi Germany (which made a study of Southern racism). Mary Turner, aged twenty-one, was newly widowed and eight months pregnant. Her husband was one of thirteen men killed in a mob-driven manhunt to avenge the death of a white farmer. Mary Turner insisted that her husband never knew the farmer and threatened to have some of the men who killed her husband arrested. This was Turner’s mistake. When she was lynched, they tied her ankles, hung her upside down from a tree, doused her in gasoline, and set her on fire. While she was still living one of the men split her abdomen with a pocket knife and crushed under his boot the nearly full-term infant who fell out. Although Walter White and others investigated and verified the full story of Mary Turner’s death, and passed it on to the Northern media, only the black press mentioned her pregnancy. The racist Associated Press, which rejected black membership, wrote about people taking exception “to her remarks, as well as her attitude.” (Attitude?) In April 1919 the NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, listing the names, by state, of Negroes lynched.

  CHAPTER SIX

  North/1920s

  HARLEM RENAISSANCE

  SUDDENLY, IN the decade of the 1920s, the word “Harlem” began to have a specific meaning all around the world—which is why, for example, the Harlem Globetrotters did not call themselves the Chicago Globetrotters for their real hometown. The odd thing about the word “Harlem” was how new it was. Blacks had lived there only since 1911 or so, thanks to some brilliant real estate dealings by John “Jack” Nail and Henry C. Parker, the famous black realtors—one of whom (Nail) was James Weldon Johnson’s brother-in-law. No one spoke of the Harlem Renaissance in the spring of 1921, but it was just about to happen. In June 1921 The Crisis published a poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” by a Cleveland, Ohio, high school senior named Langston Hughes. When Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset passed the poem to W. E. B. Du Bois, she wrote a note saying, “What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like that and is yet unknown to us?”

  If the literary Harlem Renaissance began in June 1921 with a Cleveland teenager, the theatrical Renaissance began a month earlier on May 23, 1921, at the Cort Theater on West Sixty-Third Street in New York City with a revolutionary new musical revue called Shuffle Along. Both the teenage poet and the musical put Harlem on the map forever. The title of the show may have been regressive, but the show itself was progressive in the extreme. Produced on a shoestring, Shuffle Along had a wonderful score written by two young men, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, both of whom had played with Jim Europe. Noble Sissle, aged twenty-two in 1921, had been through the war with Europe. There was even a Cleveland connection. Though born in Indianapolis, Sissle was raised in Cleveland. His mother was a teacher and his father a preacher who played the organ. Sissle had played the violin since childhood and had been a soloist in Cleveland’s integrated Central High School chorus. Considered one of the best public high schools in the country, Central High School was actually more desegregated than integrated—out of 1,500 students, six were black. Sissle had a very successful high school career. Butler University, where Sissle wrote college songs and cheers, gave him a scholarship, but he transferred to DePauw, earning money for his education by organizing a small dance band. But he left college at nineteen to become part of the Royal Poinciana Sextet, the first black dance band to play full-time at the exclusive Palm Beach hotel of the same name. The country and the world were dance mad—and blacks were making the music. In 1916 the sextet played the Palace in New York City, the first black act to work the Palace wearing dinner jackets and without burnt cork. That year Sissle was invited to join Jim Europe’s famous Society Orchestra. Eubie Blake was a member of the orchestra.

  Baltimore-born Eubie Blake, the son of two former slaves, was a musical child prodigy who received music lessons from a neighbor. Blake’s father, John Sumner Blake (note the middle name), had been secretly taught to read and write by the daughter of his owner. Eubie, the youngest of eleven children and the only one to reach adulthood, never knew his brothers and sisters. As a child, he sang on the street for change with three friends. Later, at age fifteen, he played in a sumptuous white brothel, having climbed out the window at home after his parents went to sleep. Blake composed his “Charleston Rag” the same year as Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” In 1912 Blake began playing with Jim Europe’s orchestra. When Europe and Sissle went to war, Blake put music to the words Sissle sent from France. After the war, Sissle and Blake became vaudeville’s “Dixie Duo,” playing the Palace in New York once again without blackface.

  Two years after the victory parade, Sissle and Blake produced the show that not only revolutionized the American theater, but specifically marked the beginning of a decade of black achievement in the arts and entertainment. West Sixty-Third Street was actually closer to San Juan Hill, the prewar “Harlem,” than to the Broadway theater district. Despite the title, Shuffle Along was a fast-paced semi-revue that became an overnight smash thanks to unanimous praise from the critics. It was revolutionary because the characters were not cartoons or stereotypes (except for one pair of blackface comics, without whom the audience probably would have walked out). Besides bringing blacks back to the Broadway stage after ten years of banishment, Shuffle Along made Broadway history by featuring a pretty ingenue and a handsome young leading man who sang a romantic—not a comic—love song, “Love Will Find a Way.” Above all, audiences left the theater humming another song that became a sensation. The plot concerned an election in a small Southern town, where a chorus of pretty dancers sings the campaign song, “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Sissle and Blake had an overnight hit song as well as a hit show. Shuffle Along was also a fashion forerunner. The Variety critic commented:

  Broadway may not know it, but the fashion of wearing the feminine head with the bobbed hair effect has more fully invaded the high browns of the colored troupes than in the big musical shows. All the gals in “Shuffle Along” showed some sort of bobbed hair style, principals and chorus alike.

  Younger black women performers were known to almost slavishly follow Vogue. Skirts were inching their way up and waists were uncorseted. The show also fostered young black talent, such as Josephine Baker in the chorus. Other wonderful black performers got their start in subsequent productions of the show, which ran for over a year in New York and two years on the road—including London and Paris. Yes, there was ethnic comedy, but there was also sophisticated humor and costumes that were simple, flattering, and not grotesque. Everything was very modern. It was about the 1920s, not the 1850s. Heywood Broun of the Evening World loved the cast:

  We don’t suppose the members of the cast and chorus actually pay for the privilege of appearing in the performance, but there is every indication that there is nothing in the world which they would rather do. They are all terribly glad to be up on the stage singing and dancing. Their training is professional, but the spirit is amateur. The combination is irresistible.

  Actually, if they could have, the cast members would certainly have paid to perform on Broadway after having been barred from performing there for ten years. The show was such a success that there were special midnight performances on Wednesday nights so that other performers could see it. Sissle and Blake were invited to join ASCAP—a rarity for black composers. “I’m Just Wild About Harry” alone made Sissle and Blake well-off for the rest of their lives. Alan Dale, in the New York American, perceptively called the show “a semi-darky show that emulates the ‘white’ performance and—goes it one better.” Of course, Sissle had to be a “semi-darky” to be the success that he became at Central High School. This was the secret of Noble Sissle’s success. His was always “society orchestra” music—black musicians playing “white” music. Standing halfway between uptown and downtown, Shuffle Along was a fabulous hy
brid.

  All of this was before an enchanting young dancer-singer named Florence Mills stepped into the ingenue lead in September 1921, after the show opened. Unlike any black dancer-singer before her, Flo Mills was “Dresden china” who “turned into a stick of dynamite.” The daughter of former Virginia slaves, Mills had been a six-year-old cakewalk champion. The wildly popular cakewalk, a high-stepping Reconstruction dance famously captured on film by Thomas Edison, was named for the fact that the best dancers won a cake. (“That takes the cake!”) As an adult, Mills was still a waif, a genuine gamine, a magical dancer with a sweet, heartbreaking soprano voice. From 1921 until 1927 she made audiences and critics in America and Europe fall madly in love with her. Just as an army band made the French love black American music and musicians, Shuffle Along in London, with Flo Mills, made the British people fall in love with black American music and musicians. Noël Coward, icon of the 1920s, saw the show two or three times a week when he was in New York; the Prince of Wales, another 1920s icon, did the same when the show went to London. Dancers from the company taught the younger royals how to Charleston. The Shuffle Along company was the toast of London high society. Several novelists of the period refer to it. (In the movie Gosford Park, an ironic and constantly on the move footman, played by the inimitable Richard E. Grant, suddenly says, apropos of the bossy butler, “Shuffle along everybody, here he comes.” This is a tip of the hat by writer Julian Fellowes to what was of the moment in popular culture among the upper classes and their betters belowstairs.) Shuffle Along started a decade-long series of copycat musicals that at least put a lot of talented black performers to work.

  Florence Mills starred in several hit shows and became an international star, featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair and photographed by Edward Steichen. In 1923 she was a guest star in The Greenwich Village Follies—the first black female star to appear in a white revue. In 1924 she turned down an offer from Ziegfeld, but starred in Dixie to Broadway and became the first black star to headline at the Palace. In 1925 she starred in another Sissle and Blake hit, Chocolate Dandies, and in Blackbirds of 1926, which the Prince of Wales claimed to have seen eleven times and which made her a superstar. It was her last show. After taking it to London and Paris, she died on November 1, 1927, at age thirty-two, in New York of what was described as complications from appendicitis. Thousands attended her funeral, including Noël Coward, and a flock of blackbirds was released over her grave. Her signature song from her last show was “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird.” When she came onstage singing it in her little runaway newsboy costume with her slim little legs and a bundle on a stick, there was rarely a dry eye in the house. Sissle and lyricist Andy Razaf wrote a tenderly beautiful ballad, “Memories of You,” in tribute to Florence Mills.

  While Edwin Horne was the black Calhoun bon vivant in New York who would have seen Shuffle Along more than once, Cora Horne, miles away from Broadway, was in the real world of Brooklyn. Working with the organization since its beginning in 1917, Cora had been named a director of the national Big Brothers and Big Sisters Federation. She was a founder and chairperson of the Black Big Sisters of Brooklyn, which, by 1923, had fifty Big Sisters. Edwin and Cora were on separate tracks. At no point now did their lives interconnect. They were not even going in the same direction.

  To say the least, baby Lena Horne, who would be called “another Florence Mills,” came from a dysfunctional family. In a way, it was dysfunctional because it was Northern. Perhaps there were too many choices in the North. In the North, unlike the South, her father could choose to live on the edges of the “rackets” and her mother could choose to be an actress. If Teddy Horne had grown up in Atlanta there would have been no choice except to be a doctor, lawyer, small businessman, or postal employee (a very good black middle-class job). And Edna Scottron would have had no choice except to be a housewife, teacher, librarian, or social worker. The dysfunction started before Teddy and Edna. It started when Edwin, Lena’s grandfather, chose to have an affair with a white magazine editor who looked like Cora when she was twenty-two. And Cora, who basically divorced Edwin without bothering the state of New York or arguing over a stick of furniture, chose not to forgive him. She had several good reasons not to forgive. Ingratitude, for example, though Cora would never admit this to herself. She had married Edwin when he was mourning two wives and as many babies and had presented him with four healthy sons. They had been married for twenty-five years and she had spent many of those years alone in Brooklyn with the boys, while he had enjoyed the nightlife of Manhattan as a Tammany man. From Edwin’s point of view, maybe Cora was a bit of a shrew. Her anger made her sharp with everyone, especially Edwin. It was her tone—her icy, modulated sarcasm. Cora took secret pride in never raising her voice. At the same time she could reduce healthy young males to tears. Lena never forgot seeing a teenage Burke, Cora’s youngest son, standing outside his mother’s closed door in utter dejection, weeping after a tongue-lashing.

  Edwin, on the other hand, was a boulevardier. It was not necessarily Edwin’s fault that in 1912, when he was winning elections for Tammany, he was so incredibly attractive to women, with his silvery hair, sad blue eyes, old-fashioned manners, and love of music and poetry. Blacks would always be locked out of much of Northern life because they were Negroes—but they still lived in the midst of a broader, more seductive world of choices than their Southern cousins.

  Lena, who began to accompany Cora to meetings almost as soon as she could walk, was always a solemn baby—as if she understood that she had been orphaned by two living parents. This is clearly seen in the picture taken in the NAACP office the day she met James Weldon Johnson. She is wary—but also brave and poised. Toddler Lena apparently managed to keep her aplomb at Cora’s various meetings. She learned her meeting manners early: shake hands, look people in the eye, sit still, and do not speak unless spoken to. Cora loved Lena dearly, but she believed that her own role in life was to be a teacher—even to her only grandchild.

  Cora had retired from the marital bedroom around 1912 or 1913—over the Vogue editor, one presumes. She retired from the kitchen circa 1914, when Burke went into high school, and immediately threw herself into social work, war work for the YWCA, and Republican women’s circles. Blacks in the North still had a home in the GOP. When the Nineteenth Amendment finally gave Cora the vote, she chose the straight Republican ticket, ignoring the siren song of Edwin’s Tammany Hall. Meanwhile, she was the mayor’s appointee to the Brooklyn victory committee, secretary of the Brooklyn Urban League Board, president of the Big Sisters Club, vice president of the Brooklyn Charity Club, chairman of the big sister department of the National Association of Colored Women, a director of the Katy Ferguson Home (the only home for unwed black mothers in America), a director of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters Federation, a member of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, statistician of the Greater New York Federation of Churches (for social workers), and editor in chief of the New York State Federation monthly. And these were the quiet years. She did not get really busy until 1923.

  It is hard to imagine Cora—such a delicate, small-boned woman—with enough stamina for the life she had chosen, but apparently she was a dynamo. Paul Robeson said she was known as the “Tiny Terror.” This Carrie Nation of Harlem truancy would swoop down on street-corner boys, demanding to know why they were not in school. It would be easy to believe that all her energy and stamina came from anger—a powerful source of adrenaline. Cora had decided to hold on to her anger forever, but did not show it in her public smile. She had her picture taken in Washington as part of a group of Big Brother and Big Sister directors visiting President Harding. (When asked about his rumored black ancestry, Harding had memorably replied, “How should I know? Maybe somebody jumped the fence.”) Cora wore her steel spectacles all the time now. She was vain only about her small feet and always wore beautiful shoes; otherwise she had no interest in clothes. After her son Errol died, she wore only black. When she came hom
e from her busy day, she went directly to her chaise longue and left it only for her bed. Burke brought tea and toast on a tray, while Lena lay on the floor looking at picture books. Evenings before bed were light reading times for both Cora and Lena. Lena always remembered that it took her grandmother forever to read The Forsyte Saga because she read it before bed—otherwise she read only her committee paperwork. One evening Lena knew she herself could read when she was lying on the floor in Cora’s room looking at Little Orphan Annie in the funny papers and read the word “asylum.”

  Cora had planned Act III of her life. Act I had been raising her boys. Act II was living in sorrow, over Errol’s death and Edwin’s betrayal. And Act III was discovering her talents for organization and activism and putting them to work for the greater good. Act III was going to be her time. The nest was essentially empty. Errol was gone. Teddy was transitory. And Frank had just followed his namesake uncle into his Chicago ophthalmology practice, where he planned to stay at least two years. Burke would soon be ready for City College. Cora certainly had not planned on dealing with a baby. So Lena, pretty baby that she was, was never a baby to be loved and adored—she was more like a favorite pupil. It was Edwin who gave all the love that Lena’s mother, father, and grandmother seemed unable to give. It turned out that Grandfather Edwin was the warm, maternal figure in Lena’s life. She thought of him later as “a mother and father rolled into one.”

  Thanks to Tammany, Edwin had a pension and all sorts of fire department perks. He had security for himself and his family, but he was disillusioned and bitter. He had wound up a clubhouse pol. Politics had betrayed him at every turn—but it had also rewarded him. He should not have expected anything better from Tammany. He was tired of the battle—happy for a gentle life with his little granddaughter. He loved strolling around Bushwick with Lena or taking her to the botanical gardens.