My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  I had a voice the crowd liked, and a look. “The Gob with a Throb,” as one nightlife columnist dubbed me. But I could have sung those songs in a hundred other jazz joints around the country and gone nowhere. The Roost wasn’t just another joint. In the winter of 1949, it was the epicenter of jazz, a birthplace of bebop, its nightly torrent of hot licks broadcast live around the country from a glassed-in booth in the back of the club by radio’s premier jazz DJ, Symphony Sid. And it was Symphony Sid, as much as Monte Kay, who helped launch me.

  “This is your man Symphony, Symphony the Sid, your all-night, all-frantic one …” Symphony Sid, born Sidney Tarnopol on the Lower East Side, had become the “dean of jazz,” a white hipster who introduced black jazz stars to mass radio audiences. He had a regular show on WJZ, which Lester Young promoted in his song “Jumpin with Symphony Sid” (“The dial is all set right close to eighty …”). But in a collaboration with Monte, he often broadcast live from the Roost. That first week of my intermission gig, Sid presided from his booth in back, telling his fans to listen. “Down here at the Royal Roost, a lot of exciting stuff going on, we got an exciting singer here, Harry Belafonte. Now this is a great story, folks…. One week ago he was in the garment district pushing a rack of clothes. Now he’s packin’ ’em in at the Roost! It’s a Cinderella story, is what it is, which is why we call him … the Cinderella Gentleman!”

  That first week, Monte and Symphony Sid became my co-managers, and the Roost’s publicist, Virginia Wicks, became my publicist. Until I made some serious money, Monte and Sid would help me for free; Virginia was the only one I had to pay, for working the phones to bring the jazz critics in, and for planting a mention here and there. What I needed, Monte and Sid agreed, was a record, right away. Monte had the moxie to make that happen.

  Overnight, he formed Roost Records, rented a studio, and hired a few sidemen. These were none other than Machito and His Orchestra, the hottest Latin band in America. During the recording of one of the cuts—“Lean on Me”—the trumpeter Howard McGhee and tenor saxophonist Brew Moore stepped to the mikes for two remarkable solos. The B side was the song that I had written—“Recognition.”

  The copy Monte gave to Symphony Sid was probably still hot from the pressing. “Listen to this, my fellow hipsters,” Sid crooned that night to his radio audience, “the Cinderella Gentleman, Harry Belafonte, has gone and made a record.” Fortunately, Sid’s arrest for marijuana possession had just that month ended in a mistrial. Instead of doing a short term in the pen, he stayed right there in his glass booth at the Roost, and with his steady plugging, the record sold ten thousand copies in New York City alone. At that rate, Monte told me excitedly, we could sell a million copies around the country. Except that Roost Records had no distribution, only Monte and Virginia going around on their own to New York record stores.

  The news did reach Edgecombe Avenue, Harlem’s most elite address, where Paul Robeson lived with his wife, Eslanda. On one of my nights off from the Roost, the Robesons invited me and Marguerite to dinner. They lived on that part of Edgecombe Avenue called Sugar Hill—the nicest part of a very nice neighborhood—in an apartment filled with framed pictures, some of Robeson onstage, others signed from black leaders around the world. Eight or ten guests were gathered, including John Oliver Killens, who would soon publish his deeply moving novel Youngblood, about a black family in Georgia at the turn of the century; Langston Hughes, the poet I’d spied glimpses of on Harlem streets; and none other than Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, who laughed indulgently when I told him the story of going to the Chicago public library to seek out the great “Ibid” he’d referenced in so many of his footnotes.

  Over dinner, at a long table set off by two huge silver candelabras, the conversation crackled with hot political talk. Robeson was about to go to Paris for the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Congress, a controversial move now that the Cold War had begun. I remember a couple of his guests arguing about the wisdom of his going, and I remember going back to Sugar Hill for dinner upon his return, after he’d uttered the words that brought the full force of the federal government down upon his head.

  Robeson had angered a lot of America by declaring, in Paris, that in the event of a full-blown conflict between the two superpowers, it would be “unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations [by which he meant the United States] … against a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind [by which he meant the Soviet Union].” I remember him saying his quote had been taken out of context. But he didn’t disown the sentiment.

  At that long table, Robeson and his guests debated only which civil rights blacks should hold out for before once again joining a war to fight for white America—not whether or not they should hold out. The previous July, President Truman had formally desegregated the entire U.S. military by executive order, and to the black bourgeois—like Marguerite’s family—that was a grand step forward. In his deep, commanding voice at the head of the table, Robeson dismissed Truman’s move as a bone thrown to black northern voters for the 1948 presidential election. For all anyone knew, it may have provided the critical votes in Truman’s upset victory over Wallace and Dewey. But what was Truman doing for blacks now that he’d won reelection? Nothing, as far as Robeson could see. Not until the South’s last COLORED ONLY sign was banished, the last school desegregated, and every black allowed to vote in free and fair elections should blacks begin to feel patriotic again. At Robeson’s table, we all agreed that Truman was as cynical a politician as we’d seen, and that only mass protests would push him to do more for civil rights.

  Late that August, Robeson traveled up to Peekskill, New York, to headline one of those protests: a benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress, an alliance of labor and Negro groups condemned by the Truman administration as a communist front. As Robeson approached the rally site by car, he and his hosts could see locals beating early arrivals with baseball bats, and a cross burning on a nearby hill. Robeson tried to get out of the car to confront the mob, but his hosts restrained him. The concert was rescheduled for some days later. This time, I was one of the roughly twenty thousand people who came to hear Robeson perform, along with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. The labor unions had organized a tight cordon of security around the crowd, and the angry locals were kept at bay. But as the concertgoers left, they had to drive through a miles-long gauntlet of jeering counterprotesters, shouting, “Go back to Russia, you niggers,” and spewing their venom just as harshly at the “white niggers” who’d attended. Some concertgoers were pulled from their cars and beaten as the police stood by. As an unknown, I would suffer no consequences for appearing at that Peekskill rally, but Robeson would soon be forced to surrender his passport under the McCarran Act, and spend most of the 1950s hounded by the FBI.

  Everyone at those dinners on Sugar Hill was a socialist to some degree or other—at least in the fuzzy sense of wanting the United States to become racially, as well as economically, egalitarian. Everyone, that is, but Marguerite, who sat quietly, knowing her own views would appall the others. After the first couple of dinners, she never again joined me. She’d give me an arch look when the invitations came, and tell me to enjoy myself, as if I were off for a poker night with the boys.

  Marguerite was still living at the Bethany Day Nursery’s dormitory, where Mrs. Bears, my staunch supporter, let me stay as well, despite the prohibition on overnight guests. But clearly, with Marguerite’s swelling belly, that would have to change. Early that spring, Marguerite moved down to her family’s home in Washington so she could give birth at Adams Private Hospital, the same segregated black hospital where her mother had had her. Up in Harlem, I embarked on a dogged search for the perfect apartment for the three of us. I wanted a park or river view, at least four rooms, and a rent we could afford. I never did find that apartment. But by the time Adrienne Michelle was born, on May 27, 1949, I’d settled on a fourth-floor walk-up at 501 West 156th Street.
It offered three rooms instead of four, but a reasonable rent at fifty-five dollars a month, and proximity to my mother’s latest apartment, which for some reason seemed a plus; despite her constant carping, I thought now that I was married with a place of my own and a glimmer of a career, we might forge a new bond. I wouldn’t have dared rent an apartment on my new, uncertain income as a nightclub singer, but with Marguerite’s steady seventy-five dollars a week, we could afford it. I spent my daytime hours getting the place furnished and ready for Marguerite’s return in June. With her came an unexpected guest—her mother—holding Adrienne Michelle with a protective glare, to take up residence as our full-time nanny. I called her Mrs. Byrd, and neither then, nor later, did it occur to either of us that I might address her by her first name. Mimi was one formidable mother-in-law.

  I can’t say I much enjoyed Mimi’s presence in the apartment, but I saw the need. By the time Adrienne was born, I’d gone from the Roost to a number of out-of-town clubs, like Chicago’s Black Orchid and Philadelphia’s Rendez-Vous Room—a quickening blur of club dates in eastern cities large and small that made me a part-time father at best.

  I wore a fancy suit now, and a pencil-line mustache, as I stood stiffly in the spotlight, my hands folded over my abdomen as if I had a stomachache. My repertoire had grown, though at Monte and Virginia’s insistence, I was tilting more toward pop than jazz. My new managers had noted I drew a lot more women than men, and had me crooning love songs that tugged at their heartstrings. I sang standards like “Skylark, “Lover,” “Stardust,” and “The Nearness of You.” Afterward, I stayed up drinking with the musicians, wondering how a onetime gig at the Roost, meant only as a stopgap until I found work as an actor, had turned into a full-time job.

  I felt like a fraud. I’d never had singing lessons. I hadn’t taken enough piano lessons from Miss Shepherd even to learn how to read music. I might be a natural, as Monte and Virginia kept telling me, but I sure didn’t sing standards as well as Billy Eckstine or Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra. The proof was in the plastic. On July 19, 1949, I had my first big-time recording date, the first of two for Capitol Records that Monte wangled for me. I made two 78 RPM singles, one with “How Green Was My Valley” and “Deep as the River,” the other with “They Didn’t Believe in Me” and “Close Your Eyes.” All were classic Tin Pan Alley ballads, better done by others, as my lackluster sales showed. On December 20, 1949, I recorded four more: “Farewell to Arms,” “Whispering,” “I Still Get a Thrill,” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” None of these singles took the world by storm, either.

  By then the Roost had closed; its owners had failed to come to terms with their landlord on a new lease. But the party had just moved to a new space a couple of blocks north, to Broadway near Fifty-second Street. Same great jazz players, same friendly waiters, just a new name: Birdland, in honor of the Bird himself, Charlie Parker. Lester Young wrote a “Birdland” song, and played it on the club’s opening night. Charlie, of course, helped inaugurate the place and Monte Kay became its manager; I was part of the opening bill. Shortly after Birdland opened, Monte booked me into a new club across the street called Bop City. There I was part of a “History of Jazz” show, singing songs from Dixieland to bebop in a clean-cut quartet. (One of my fellow singers was Brock Peters, later to play the black man accused of rape in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird.) I felt proud to be there, but somewhat out of place: less a singer than an actor acting like one.

  For better or worse, Erwin Piscator and his Dramatic Workshop had made a mark on me I couldn’t—and didn’t want to—erase. I’d plunged into a world of heavy academic study, read too much of Shakespeare and Aristophanes, Ibsen and Sartre, taken in too much of Piscator’s passion for theater as a noble art and social mission. Suddenly I had a new life singing ballads that struck me as silly at best. “Will you love me by the moonlight, on the shivery waters of the Baccalatta?” I knew other singers didn’t care about the lyrics, but somehow I did. Singing words I didn’t believe in, I felt … inauthentic. I’d crossed a line I shouldn’t have crossed. I’d drifted out of my realm.

  During this time, between club dates, I scoured the acting trades and auditioned. Not for black parts—aside from butlers and manservants, there were none to be had—but white ones I thought could be black. “Look,” I’d say to the white casting director, “this is just the white girl’s friend, he’s not a love interest; why can’t he be black?” I never won that case, not once, but I kept trying, and now that I had money to spare, I took more Dramatic Workshop courses when I could. I landed one role in a production of The Petrified Forest, by Robert Sherwood, because I pushed hard for it—and because the character was black. Even Piscator, it turned out, wouldn’t cast me in white parts.

  When I played a New York club, my white Dramatic Workshop pals would come to hear me, and, ironically, marvel between sets at what they saw as my great success. Tony Curtis would come, and Walter Matthau, Marlon Brando, and Rod Steiger. To them, I was the guy with the steady gig, halfway to stardom. One of my most loyal new fans was Henry Fonda, who’d first heard me at the Roost and now followed me from club to club. He was a great jazz buff, and later a strong civil rights supporter who always answered my calls for help for the cause.

  What I got from these club dates, along with applause, was much-needed bread. By the spring of 1950, when I sang a number of weeks at New York’s Café Society, I was earning more than $350 a week—big money at that time for anyone, but especially a former janitor’s assistant. Monte and Sid were kind enough to forgo any commission—they told me they’d start taking cuts when I played the Copacabana—so aside from taxes, I still had only to pay Virginia for feeding items to the press. I had money to help support Marguerite and Adrienne. I even had money saved, for the first time in my life—enough, I began to suggest to Monte, that maybe I could take an extended break from singing and give acting a make-it-or-break-it try. After all, I’d just recorded three more singles—for Jubilee Records—and they’d gone no further than the ones for Capitol. Shouldn’t we face reality?

  At that, Monte would groan and give me his pep talk yet again. Look at how far you’ve come, he’d say. Each season, you are playing bigger clubs. “These are the building blocks,” he’d say. “Each is better than the last. This is how you play the game. If you want to make it, you play the game.”

  One day in the fall of 1950, Monte called me in great excitement. The next building block had just fallen into place: I had a two-week gig at Martha Raye’s Five O’Clock Club in Miami, for $500 a week. This was moving up, all right. But as I pointed out to Monte, it also meant heading down deep into the segregated South—a first for me. “Oh, come on,” Monte said. “It’s Miami! Land of the Jews! You’ll be fine.”

  In my nearly two years as a jazz/pop singer, I’d ventured as far west as Chicago, but no farther south than Pittsburgh. I’d sensed discrimination at almost every stop, but never overtly. The maître d’ would nod when I asked for a table, then lead me back to one across from the kitchen’s swinging doors even when other tables were free. The hotel desk clerk would look startled when I checked in, and fuss with his reservation book, and somehow, against all odds, I’d end up, again, on the top floor in one of the narrow, low-ceilinged rooms once set aside for live-in maids. But that was kid stuff compared to what I encountered when I got off the plane in Miami.

  Martha Raye, the famously foul-mouthed comedienne, had lent her name to the Five O’Clock Club, in the heart of Miami Beach, on Twentieth and Collins. Its success owed at least as much to its policy of drinks on the house at five o’clock as to the twenty-four-hour bookies upstairs. When I arrived, the manager cheerfully handed me a number of passes and explained the drill. I would be staying in a fairly cheap motel on the black side of town. One pass was for the taxi driver to take me there—the black taxi driver, since white taxi drivers wouldn’t pick me up and it was against the law for coloreds to hail them. Another was for the driver to take me b
ack. I’d need a third pass to travel after curfew—actually a police card—and a fourth to perform at the Five O’Clock Club, just as I would, the manager helpfully explained, at any white cabaret.

  Miami’s “Harlem of the South” had a black business district along Avenue G, lined with wood-framed food stalls offering sweet-potato pies, barbecued chicken and ribs, and hot fish sandwiches. At night, zoot-suited dandies and their dates, in fancy silk dresses, promenaded between clubs like Harlem Square and Rockland Palace, where black entertainers like Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith held forth. For me, the sting of segregation was so strong here, so close at hand, that none of Colored Town’s sights held any charm for me. In the small room shown to me, I unpacked my bags, wondering how I’d ever get through a week here, much less two.

  That night I took my passes with me back to the Five O’Clock Club—curfew, the driver told me, was at nine o’clock, though of course only colored residents had to observe it—and came onstage determined not to betray any of my churning emotions. The crowd—all white, mostly women—applauded heartily, and more than one woman at the front tables gave me a wink. As long as I was onstage, crooning love songs, I had a certain power over them. But when the lights came up, I was just another colored man hotfooting it back to Colored Town—or else. And God forbid I stop to chat outside the club with any of my new white female fans. That could end in jail, or worse.

  After the second or third night’s performance, the manager came back to tell me he wanted me for another week. “No thanks,” I told him.