Harlem Nocturne

by Farah Jasmine Griffin

  Primus did not romanticize southern life. Of the South, she wrote, “The Spanish moss hangs like a crepe over everything, is a fungus that creeps through everybody.”41 She wasn’t nostalgic for a past that never was; nor did she look longingly to the South as a home, like many black migrants. Instead, she wanted to experience firsthand the land that informed the sensibilities of many of her contemporaries and audiences. A large number of African Americans living in northern cities were recent migrants who had come north during the Great Migrations, and she wanted to understand the world they had left behind.

  Primus’s trip to the South was an eye-opener for her. She didn’t see a world of victims and villains: “I could not hate anyone,” she later said. “It was a pathetic scene, both sides swallowed by fear of one another. Everything looked ugly to me there—the Negroes because of their hunger and feeling of inferiority, the whites because of their fear and hunger.” Her experience was not one that made her fall in love with black southerners. Nor did it cause her to hate whites. In fact, a few encounters with whites made her question her own assumptions. When she started to faint in a Jim Crow bus, a white man got up and offered her his seat.42

  Primus sought to know intimately the landscape and the people, so she disguised herself as a field worker, worked alongside sharecroppers, and visited their churches in the evenings and on the weekends. It was in church that she made note of the core rhythms of black music, oratory, and movement: the preacher’s intonations were as rhythmic as the drum, his movements as dramatic and graceful as a dance. The congregation responded to him with tears, ecstatic movement—shouting and leaping from their seats. Primus observed leaps and crawling bodies, “snake-like undulations” not unlike the dances to the god Damballa in the Caribbean. She began to see connections between the Caribbean dances with which she was familiar and the movement she observed among former slaves in the South. She visited little churches and open-air prayer meetings in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, and everywhere she observed similar kinds of movement.43

  Primus had danced the part of a sharecropper in “Hard Time Blues” at the Negro Freedom Rally, but now she bore witness to their bodies and movements. During this trip, Primus joined a historic trail of black intellectuals whose first encounters with the American South would inform their artistic, intellectual, and political sensibilities forever. W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, and the painter Eldzier Cortor, among others, undertook this “Journey of Immersion” before emerging as people who could articulate the concerns of American blacks and build upon both the pain and the beauty of life under Jim Crow. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who was born in Alabama and raised in Florida, left New York for extended forays into the South, a place believed to be the fount of African American culture. Primus would later say:

  If I were dancing about how sharecropping or how our spirituals came into being and what they mean in the lives of people or if I wanted to know the truth about the commissary stores that refused food to the people, then I wanted to know what they were like. . . . That’s why I went south. I went south to live among the people and to be part of the cultures of the Southlands to know what cotton was. Except for the museum up here in New York . . . I didn’t know what it was. . . . I did get into the fields and along the dockside and into the revival churches of the South. I walked those long dusty roads between towns. So when I began to create about these experiences the remembered feelings were part of what I was speaking about. It wasn’t that I’d read about it but that I had experienced it.44

  This would be the same reason she ultimately went to Africa: to move beyond reading in order to experience what her migrant audience had experienced; to witness and bear witness to what Du Bois had called, in the title of his 1903 book, the “Souls of Black Folk.” She saw and placed movement in context. The trip to the American South was the first time she brought this kind of methodology to dance.

  It was also during this period that Primus tied her political activism to the causes of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). Founded in 1937, SNYC was an organization of young black activists who were devoted to guaranteeing and protecting the rights of southern blacks. They worked closely with a number of leftist and political organizations, black and white. According to her FBI file, Primus attended the organization’s Leadership School in Atlanta from August 7 through August 18, 1944, right in the middle of her research trip. SNYC’s Leadership Academies were held throughout the South. Prominent activists and educators attended the one in Atlanta, including Horace Mann Bond, an educator and leader who was also the father of civil rights activist Julian Bond. Primus would have joined students, people from the community, teachers, sharecroppers, and faculty members of neighboring black colleges for these classes.45

  Given the nature of her research among southern sharecroppers, it is not surprising that Primus would have been moved by their condition and want to help alleviate their economic, social, and political sufferings. As an activist-minded artist, she would have been drawn to other courageous young people working to empower southern blacks. The young people of the Southern Negro Youth Conference represented a cross-section of the black community. Many, such as Esther Cooper Jackson, her husband James Jackson, and Louis and Dorothy Burnham, were college-educated young people from the North who came to Alabama to organize rural blacks. Esther Cooper Jackson received her bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and her master’s in sociology from Fisk, where she wrote a thesis on organizing black domestic workers in New York. She was on her way to the University of Chicago for a PhD when she went to Alabama to work on a SNYC voter registration drive. Other members of SNYC were young sharecroppers or factory workers. Still others were young southern students, such as Sallye Bell Davis, a Birmingham native and student at Miles College. Davis would give birth to radical activist Angela Davis.

  Many of the members of SNYC were also members of the Communist Party. But, like those black Americans who were committed to Double V, who were more focused on waging national battles for equality and civil rights than on pursuing the goals of international communism, SNYC didn’t have explicit ties to the Soviet Union. As Esther Cooper Jackson later asserted: “There wasn’t anybody from Moscow telling us what to do.” One of the organization’s pamphlets said, “We Negro Youth act to win the full blessing of true democracy for ourselves, for our people, for our nation.”46 They were committed to the vision of an interracial society free of poverty and racism where all people would exercise their right to vote and have the opportunity to reach their full potential.

  Because SNYC activists understood the centrality of the expressive arts to black Americans, they also placed a premium on the “unique Black cultural heritage,” making the arts central to their organization and to their vision of the world they sought to create. James Jackson invited Primus to contribute an essay on the “Negro Youth’s Heritage in Dance” for one of SNYC’s publications. Primus wrote that she was “truly happy to be called on to write the essay.”47

  Given the FBI’s ongoing campaigns against black activists and Communists, the Bureau was especially interested in SNYC. It is therefore not surprising that investigators made note of Primus’s involvement with the young radicals. They opened a file on her in September 1944. According to Primus’s file, at this time she was also a member of the Communist Party and had been involved in the party since her college years, when she was a member of the Young Communist League, an accusation that she would confirm in later years. If Primus was seen as a great “Negro” dancer by reviewers and other members of the press who hailed her artistry, for the FBI she was “a negress born July 1, 1917[,] at Trinidad, British West Indies.”48 She seems to have first come to their attention when an informant reported that she had been in touch with the Communist Political Association to invite Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945, to her performance.

  According to her file, Primus had participated in a number of Communist-sponsored
events that encouraged interracial unity and harmony. The Bureau noted her own sponsorship of the Citizens Non-Partisan Committee to Elect Benjamin Davis, the black Communist city councilman from Harlem; her participation in the Negro Freedom Rally, which it referred to as a “monstrous annual affair” run by Communist front organizations; her performances at the Harlem Youth Center and Café Society; and all of the coverage she received in the Daily Worker. In this she would have been no different from a number of other prominent artists and intellectuals of the Reformist Left. Like many of these artists, Primus would not have been likely to have had the exposure or critical success that she had without the support of these progressive political and cultural organizations.49 Many of these organizations were already under surveillance and would become the objects of government investigation during the McCarthy years.

  In an interview in the Daily Worker in September 1944, Primus spoke “highly of the Southern Negro Congress, with whose leaders she had discussed a plan to include the Arts in their organizing drives,” and articulated a philosophy that mirrored the one behind the Double V Campaign. The statement and the context in which it was made helped to make her of interest to the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. From the distance of time, her perspective doesn’t seem that radical. In fact, she appears patriotic, committed to a US victory against fascism, and as fervently devoted to fighting racism at home. Her stance seems little different from that of the civil rights movement then in its infancy, which would soon blossom at the very center of American political life. For the next year, the Bureau sought to find out her naturalization status. But by May 30, 1945, the FBI had lost interest. A note in her file said, “There is no information in the files to indicate that she is either a prominent or influential Communist. Because of her dancing engagements, and theatrical work, it is believed she has very little time for actual Communist activity at present. In view of the fact that she is not considered dangerous to the internal security of the United States at the present time, it is recommended that the Security Index card on Primus be cancelled.” The file would be reopened, however, in 1951.50

  In the FBI affidavit she later gave, Primus said she was led to believe that the best way to aid the Negro in the United States “was through the Communist Party.” According to Primus, she joined the party shortly after the Negro Freedom Rally: “My reason for joining the Communist Party, if in fact, I did so, was that I believed that the lot of the Negro in the United States would be best served by the Communist Party.” After returning from the South, where she was “appalled” by the conditions of the southern Negro, she resolved to “do whatever possible to help this situation.” She went to the Daily Worker with suggestions for addressing racial issues more effectively. She wanted to petition the president and Congress, but the receptionist told her that this would be considered treason while the country was still at war. According to Primus, the party’s retreat from racial issues during the war years “angered and upset her.” In this way she was not unlike the many black activists—or even the fictional protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, published in the same year of Primus’s affidavit. These activists and intellectuals claimed that the Communist Party had abandoned an explicit commitment to the black struggle in favor of supporting the image of a united front between the United States and the Soviet Union in the fight against fascism. They believed that this decision had resulted in the party’s unwillingness to be a vocal critic of American racism.

  Following her return from the South in 1944, Primus claimed to have suffered a nervous breakdown. Isolated and having received no word or support from her political colleagues, she convalesced at the home of Rockwell Kent at AuSable Forks, New York. Kent was a painter, printmaker, and writer, and Primus had met him at Café Society. After a brief stay at Kent’s home, Primus moved to 536 Madison Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. While Manhattan would continue to be central to her performance life, she would now call Brooklyn her home. Bedford-Stuyvesant had been a black enclave as early as the nineteenth century, when James Weeks, an African American entrepreneur, began to sell land to other blacks, and some blacks had moved from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant beginning in the 1930s. The area presented the opportunity for home ownership, and many blacks, particularly Caribbean immigrants, chose to relocate there. Madison Street, known for its stately and beautiful brownstones, predominantly housed middle-class blacks. When the A train was constructed in 1936, the New York subway linked the city’s two most important black neighborhoods, Harlem and Bed-Stuy.

  Upon her recovery, Primus began preparing for her Broadway premier at the Belasco Theater. New York once again provided her with the venue and the audience for her new work. As part of the Belasco program, Primus performed updated versions of “African Ceremonial,” “Hard Time Blues,” and “Strange Fruit.” Her experiences in the South had made her rethink some of her earlier dances. With “Strange Fruit,” she would join artists, black and white, who created works that addressed lynching. Talley Beatty premiered “Southern Landscape” in 1947, and Dunham presented “Southland” in 1950. In 1960, Gwendolyn Brooks would write a poem from the perspective of a young white mother who had to continue living with her husband after he brutally murdered a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till, supposedly for flirting with her. One of the earliest such works, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poem called “The Haunted Oak,” had appeared in 1903.

  Primus’s new version of “Strange Fruit” was choreographed as a solo, without music, accompanied only by the spoken words of the Lewis Allan poem. Primus wanted to focus not on the lynched victim or a member of his or her family, but instead on a member of the lynch mob, a woman who had watched the deed. Primus said the character was “not one beloved of the victim, but one of the lynch mob who had been screaming and shouting in animal fury with the rest. Then, the act accomplished and the satisfied mob departed, this one, drained of the poison, stays behind, realizing with grief and terror what has been done.”51

  “Strange Fruit” differed from other Primus performances. Gone were the leaps. In their place, there is a body on the floor, a writhing, distraught human figure, reaching to the tree one moment, fallen down in twists and turns the next. And running but getting nowhere: running in a circle. The isolation of the figure was striking—its profound aloneness, its separateness from both the mob and the lynched body. Its physical isolation seemed to mirror a kind of psychological isolation, a person tormented by her mind, by the lingering horror of what she has witnessed and in which she has participated. There was no transcendence. There was no airy flight. The figure’s fixedness to the ground insisted upon a connection between the legacy, the torment and restlessness, of the southern land.

  As in “Jim Crow Train,” Primus made the lynching scene a canonical moment for her New York audiences. She brought the tragic dimensions of the South to the northern stage in an effort to provoke empathy and action. Like the authors of slave narratives, who often presented sensitive white female characters with whom their northern audiences could identify, Primus made her protagonist a white woman—but one who had both witnessed and taken part in the brutal act. Through works like “Hard Time Blues,” “Jim Crow Train,” and “Strange Fruit,” Primus created a dance narrative of black southern life for New York audiences. This sophisticated group would understand, appreciate, and be moved to political action by her performance.

  There is very little footage of Primus dancing in the forties. However, we do have access to eyewitness descriptions and a contemporary restaging that help us appreciate Primus’s talent as a dancer and choreographer. In 1945, Donald McKayle, then a high-school senior, saw Primus perform at Central High School of Needle Trades in New York’s garment district. McKayle, who attended a different high school, had been invited by his friend Anna, who was an aspiring dancer—and McKayle himself eventually became a dancer. His description is worth quoting at length because it is one of the few firsthand accounts of a Primus co
ncert by someone who was not a critic: “A beautiful vision, a carving in ebony, was dancing. . . . The movements were powerful, yet sparse. It was living sculpture on view. Every curving of her spine, every thrust of her hips, every flapping of her loins, every wave of her heavily bangled wrists was a gesture from an ancestral ritual of unknown origin.” He was especially moved by “Strange Fruit”: “She was a woman consumed with horror, recoiling from a lynching she had just witnessed,” as the words of the poem were “spoken so beautifully by the actress Vinette Carrol,” he later wrote. The author of the poem “Strange Fruit,” Lewis Allan, was actually McKayle’s English teacher that year. After seeing Primus dance—“her feet (running) along the air and then she landed with the assurance of an avian creature”—McKayle knew he wanted to be a dancer. He told Anna, “I want to dance like her!”52

  Thankfully, a few Primus pieces of the 1940s have been restaged by contemporary choreographers, including “Strange Fruit,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and “Hard Time Blues.” The choreographer and founder of Urban Bush Women, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, created a work dedicated to Primus entitled “Walking with Pearl . . . Southern Diaries” inspired by Primus’s trip to the US South and the dances she created based on that research. The piece includes a restaging of Primus’s “Hard Time Blues” by Kim Bears-Bailey. The quotidian movement of black rural life in the 1940s permeates the movements of this dance, from the field to the church house, climaxing in the ecstatic “shout” of the black worshipper. In Zollar’s restaging, a series of dancers take on the part that Primus danced solo, each expressing the pain, the suffering, the self-expression, the ecstatic worship and release of the field-worker. So convincing were the dancers that Zollar has to remind us of all the technical work, all the rehearsal and preparation that one must bring to the moment of performance in order to reach a zone where individual stories can be relayed. For Zollar, dancers are actors, movement actors. “It is not ritual, but performance,” says Zollar. As if to remind viewers of Primus’s skill, Zollar notes that the numerous leaps required of the piece challenge even the best of dancers, requiring the dexterity and strength of “a highly skilled athlete.”53