Harlem Nocturne
Page 1
MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
HARLEM NOCTURNE:
“A definitive and arresting account of three women artists. Farah Griffin gathers an array of Harlem stories and incorporates them into a wonderfully written and well-grounded narrative describing the artistic experiences and everyday lives of these three unique women. Harlem Nocturne is both intimate and comprehensive in its exploration of black women’s creativity during World War II. A rich history that investigates the imagination and originality of black women’s expressive culture in mid-20th century America, this book is timely and important.”
—Deborah Willis, author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present
“Farah Jasmine Griffin has written, beautifully and powerfully, about the complex intersection of gender, race, and place in the lives of three extraordinary black women. In her delicate hands, Pearl Primus, Ann Petry, and Mary Lou Williams stand as ‘representative women,’ exemplars of imagination at work and of the daunting task of the art of living in trying political times. As we get to know them, their lives narrate a distinctive story that offers us advice about how to live with courage, power, and beauty.”
—Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Princeton University, author of In A Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America
“Readers who accept Farah Jasmine Griffin’s invitation to imagine Harlem in the 1940s through the eyes of three remarkable women—Pearl Primus, Ann Petry, and Mary Lou Williams—will be richly rewarded. Wearing her erudition lightly, Griffin brilliantly illuminates a place and time of enormous hope and achievement. Harlem Nocturne is an inspiring and inspired study of the artistic imagination in conversation with an American democracy tainted by injustice. It is, quite simply, a joy to read.”
—Gayle Wald, author of Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe
“As elegant and dynamic as the figures that it chronicles, Harlem Nocturne is a groundbreaking cultural history of three black women artists at work in 1940s New York City. Farah Jasmine Griffin is a dazzling storyteller whose lyrical prose evokes the musical cadences of a Toni Morrison novel. Her study beckons us to soar with dancer-choreographer Pearl Primus, to walk with novelist Ann Petry as she chronicles the streets of Harlem, and to roll with pioneering jazz musician and composer Mary Lou Williams as each woman made art that laid down the blueprint for the modern Civil Rights Movement. By placing their lives in conversation with one another, Harlem Nocturne illuminates the myriad ways that Primus, Petry and Williams helped to shape the social, political, and cultural landscape of their city. As much a love letter to New York as it is to the heroism of these artists, Griffin’s study is a work of incandescent beauty.”
—Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University, author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910
“An engaging biography of three remarkable women who taught art to reflect life.”
—Kirkus Reviews
HARLEM
Nocturne
HARLEM
Nocturne
WOMEN ARTISTS &
PROGRESSIVE
POLITICS DURING
WORLD WAR II
Farah Jasmine Griffin
BASIC CIVITAS
A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP
New York
Copyright © 2013 by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Published by Basic Civitas Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th floor, New York, NY 10107.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Griffin, Farah Jasmine.
Harlem nocturne : women artists and progressive politics during World War II / Farah Jasmine Griffin.—First [edition].
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-06997-2 (e-book) 1. African American women artists—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 2. African American women artist—Political activity—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 3. Petry, Ann, 1908–1997. 4. Primus, Pearl. 5. Williams, Mary Lou, 1910–1981. 6. New York (N.Y.)—Intellectual life—20th century. 7. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.
NX512.3.A35G75 2013
704'.04208996073—dc23
2013010855
10987654321
For My Mother,
Wilhelmena Griffin,
With Love and Gratitude
In America’s bosom we have the roots of Democracy, but the roots do not mean there are leaves. The tree could easily grow bare. We will never relax our war effort abroad but we must fight at home with equal fierceness. This is an all out war; we will not stop fighting until everyone is free from inequality.
PEARL PRIMUS
There is a deep public reverence for—a love of—democracy in America and a deep democratic tradition. This love of democracy has been most powerfully expressed and pushed forward by our great public intellectuals and artists.
CORNEL WEST
Nations rely on artists and intellectuals to create images of, and to tell stories about, the national past. Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness.
RICHARD RORTY
CONTENTS
Prologue
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
PEARL PRIMUS: DANCING FREEDOM
CHAPTER TWO
ANN PETRY: WALKING HARLEM
CHAPTER THREE
ROLLIN’ WITH MARY LOU WILLIAMS
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Sources and Suggested Reading
Notes
Index
PROLOGUE
New York beckoned, and they came. One came as a child, brought by immigrant parents. The other two came as adult women seeking the freedom to create themselves and their art.
They were shaped by this city: their sense of the possible, the movement of their bodies, their style. They walked. They looked. They listened. They gave to the city. They danced for it, wrote it, set it to music. New York beckoned; they came.
New York told them anything was possible, told them there were no boundaries. There were. Though the city welcomed them as visitors, students, teachers, and entertainers, as residents they were not always received with enthusiasm. So at some point, they all lived in Harlem: the Black Mecca, born of the migration of black peoples from the Caribbean and the American South, the antiblack violence that erupted in other parts of the city, and the entrepreneurial energies of African American real-estate developer Philip A. Payton Jr. Harlem, race capital. Eventually, the immigrant’s daughter moved to another historic black neighborhood—Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
Harlem: Who wanted to live anywhere else? If given the choice, they probably would have chosen Harlem, but they would have liked having the choice. So each, in he
r own way, protested the limitations placed on her life and her people, meanwhile helping to build a city within a city: a place full of black and brown faces speaking a multitude of languages, living high and living low, making love, making music, making word-worlds, making new peoples. It was a city of swinging rhythms and bebop changes; a city of weary brown-faced children and adults—some enraged, others resigned; a city that danced the Lindy Hop, modern choreography, and African isolations.
Certainly, these women were not Harlem’s only architects; nor were they its best known. But they, like others, tried to leave their mark on New York. They built a city where people mattered. They were concerned about poor and working people, about women and children, about the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. They brought a radical vision from the 1930s into a new decade, helping to create a political culture that would inspire people worldwide. Thanks to their efforts and the efforts of others like them, Harlem, in the 1940s, sent the first black New Yorker to Congress; helped to elect an Italian Harlemite to that august body, too; and sent a member of the Communist Party to New York’s City Council.
This energetic optimism was often tempered by the ongoing reality of American racial prejudice, even in New York. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, their city feared for itself. It experienced a patriotism so broad that even the mob offered its services. Their city saw its boys (and girls) enlist, and saw its patriotic black sons consigned to a segregated military and sent to the Jim Crow South for boot camp. Their neighborhood joined in the urban uprisings of 1943 that spread from Los Angeles and Texas to Detroit. After the riots, Harlem watched its middle class move to Queens and the Bronx and its white habitués abandon its nightlife. Both would have a devastating impact upon the neighborhood’s economy.
Still, New York beckoned. It recognized their differences as a source of originality. You should come, the city told them; you should be here, you belong, you are invited, you are welcome, stay a while. You are smart enough, beautiful enough, hip enough, tough enough, enterprising enough. You are mine.
And—as with every heart that races at the speed of New York streets, every eye struck with awe at the grand façade of an elegant apartment building or the sheer audacity of a skyscraper, every mouth that smiles at a brief encounter, an overheard conversation, or the constant chatter—these women fell in love with this city. At times, they grew tired, a little weary, and sojourned away from the chaos and confusion of urban life. But always, they couldn’t wait to return, to be back in the crowd, in the thick of it. New York beckoned, and, yes, they came, again and again. Amid the noise, the rush, the thrill, and the trepidation, they came, they settled, they made homes, and they made art.
There was also a cherished quiet. The still silence of a small apartment, where a woman sat at a typewriter in the hour just before dawn. A dance studio where a young woman marked her steps before her students or other members of the company arrived. An early-morning walk through the northern tip of Central Park, where newly fallen snow muffled the sounds of the city and revealed a striking magenta hat. On a pink-covered twin bed in a Sugar Hill apartment, a woman tried to notate the sounds in her head so that she might eventually sleep in peace. These women were alone but not lonely. They knew solitude, welcomed it and the gifts it bore. They welcomed the rare chance to hear their own thoughts, before the city stirred, before rousing from that pink-covered bed.
Their city is a place that nurtures, produces, and challenges not only their art, but also their ideas, their thought, their aesthetic. In their city, they wear pompadours and platform shoes. One woman makes her clothes; one dresses like a bobby-soxer, complete with ankle socks and saddle shoes; and one is inclined to the fashionable life, with her Dior gowns, B. Altman shoes, furs, and orchid corsages. Platforms and pompadours sweep them up high, revealing foreheads and intelligent eyes. Not hiding behind bangs, they are forthright, honest—and the added height doesn’t hurt. Platforms and pompadours “splendidly uprising toward clear skies.”1
Their New York is Sugar Hill, Strivers Row, The Hollow, Upper East Side, The Village, and Bed-Stuy. Their New York speaks Spanish and Jive, French, and West Indian–inflected Queen’s English, in dialects born of the Yankee North and the Black South. And some Saturday mornings the Italians, Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Jews, and southern migrants leave their own Harlem to mingle under the bridge on Park Avenue from 111th to 116th—the open-air markets beneath the railroad tracks. There, the writer tells us, the vendors “quarrel, bargain, exchange insults with customers in Spanish, Italian, Yiddish and American ranging from tough East Side, New York to the soft accents of the Old South.” Under the bridge, “stalls piled with . . . a bewildering variety of foods . . . long-grain Carolina rice, Spanish saffron, chili powder, fresh ginger root, plantains, water cress, olive oil, olives, spaghetti and macaroni, garlic, basil, zucchini, finocchio, white corn meal, collards, mustard greens, black-eyed peas, big hominy and little hominy, spareribs, hot peppers, pimentos, coconuts, pineapples, mangoes.”2
New York, in all of its delirious deliciousness, beckoned, and they came.
INTRODUCTION
New York is a city of culture and commerce, skyscrapers and bustling crowds, opportunity and deferred dreams. There are many ways to know this city, but being acquainted with its artists, especially if they are artists who are concerned with the complex lives of ordinary people, is particularly illuminating. Such artists help us understand New York’s particularities while also giving voice and vision to universal feelings: fear and longing, trepidation and possibility. Through them we experience the city: navigate its crowds, walk its streets, and ride its subways. We see how they relate to those who share their environment and how they address—or ignore—the social and political concerns of the day. Attending to the artists and their work helps us to remember that people are always bigger than the theories, narratives, and histories that seek to explain, define, narrate, and contain them.
The generation of artists who lived and worked in New York, especially in Harlem, during and immediately following World War II understood that people could not be contained or fully explained by academic or political theories. The stories of three such artists drive the narrative of Harlem Nocturne, an exploration of politics and culture in New York during the 1940s: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, writer Ann Petry, and composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams. Although they are not well known to contemporary readers, Primus, Petry, and Williams were among the city’s most celebrated artists in that decade. Each was inspired by her times to produce highly innovative art that communicated the aspirations of everyday people.
None of these women were native New Yorkers. Petry, a fourth-generation New Englander, was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1908. Williams was born in Atlanta in 1910 and migrated with her family to Pittsburgh when she was a girl. Primus was born in Trinidad in 1919 and came with her family to New York when she was three years old. Primus spent her teenage years in Harlem. Petry arrived there as a newlywed in 1938. Williams settled in Harlem in 1943, after over a decade on the road.
Primus and Williams would become friends and collaborators while both were working at Café Society, the politically leftist jazz club that presented some of New York’s most important and exciting talent. Surely Petry, the loner, was aware of them, but there is no evidence that she knew them personally. However, this is not a group biography. Primus, Petry, and Williams are bound together by a place and a time, and together they give us an understanding of the relationship between artistic endeavor and political aspiration. During the 1940s all three women were producing celebrated art, actively promoting progressive causes, and working to merge their political and aesthetic concerns. Each sought to expand the contours of the American ideal of democracy to include the most marginalized peoples. Each commented upon and critiqued the limited practice of American democracy. And each strove to contribute to American culture by bringing to it the perspective, history, and traditions of its citizens of
African descent.
Importantly, all three women were recognized by their peers and by the arts establishment as significant artists. They also shared an extraordinary sense of themselves, a belief in their capacity and a willingness to build upon their natural talent through intense preparation, practice, and learning. In addition to being artists and activists, each was also an intellectual who critically engaged questions about her chosen art form.
The first half of the decade offered these women unprecedented opportunity. This would change by decade’s end. By that time in each woman’s experience, the range of opportunities was narrowing, the result of changing politics and shifting aesthetic sensibilities. By the early 1950s, Petry, Primus, and Williams had all left New York. Primus, who had been traveling in West Africa, returned to the United States to find herself under investigation by the FBI. Williams toured Europe and wouldn’t return for two years; it would be decades before she reached heights similar to those of the earlier years. Petry spent the rest of her life in New England. Still, they all continued to be productive artists in spite of these changes.
Although Harlem Nocturne focuses on individual women, it also seeks to place them in the context of the city and the organizations and institutions that helped to shape them and their art. The war years offered a brief period of possibility and hope for many, especially for white women and black Americans of both genders. These years tested the capacity of the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. During this time, a new group of gutsy, confident, and insistent black people joined a generation of progressive whites who were committed to a vision of their nation as a place of potential, a place capable of change and worth fighting for. Many of this generation would later be challenged and silenced by Cold War politics, or would capitulate to those politics, but not before laying the groundwork for the militant activism that exploded in later decades. Tactics that we most often associate with the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties—sit-ins, freedom rides, economic boycotts, and mass marches—originated in the forties. The first March on Washington was to have taken place in 1941, and the plans for it became the blueprint for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.