The "Baby Dolls"
Page 1
THE
“BABY DOLLS”
THE
“BABY DOLLS”
BREAKING the RACE and GENDER BARRIERS of the NEW ORLEANS MARDI GRAS TRADITION
KIM MARIE VAZ
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2013 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
LSU Press Paperback Original
First printing
DESIGNER: Mandy McDonald Scallan
TYPEFACE: Calluna
PRINTER: McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.
BINDER: Dekker Bookbinding
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vaz, Kim Marie.
The “Baby Dolls” : breaking the race and gender barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras tradition / Kim Marie Vaz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8071-5070-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5071-9 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5072-6 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5073-3 (mobi)
1. Carnival—Louisiana—New Orleans—History. 2. African American women—Louisiana—New Orleans— History. 3. African American women—Louisiana—New Orleans—Social conditions. 4. New Orleans (La.)—Social life and customs. 5. New Orleans (La.)—Race relations. I. Title.
GT4211.N4V39 2013
394.250976335—dc23
2012023994
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library.
In memory of my great-grandmother, Virginia Bender Glover
Who is this Baby Doll, and why is she
referred to as such? This is her story.
—Robert McKinney, February 9, 1940
CONTENTS
PRELUDE: On Being an Example of Hope, by Millisia White
FOREWORD: Black Storyville, by Keith Weldon Medley
INTRODUCTION: A New Orleans Mardi Gras Masking Tradition
1. Gender, Race, and Masking in the Age of Jim Crow
2. Women Dancing the Jazz
3. “Oh You Beautiful Doll”: The Baby Doll as a National Sex Symbol in the Progressive Era
4. A New Group of Baby Dolls Hits the Streets
5. “We Are No Generation”: Resurrecting the Central Role of Dance to the Creation of New Orleans Music
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
APPENDIXES
A. A History of Baby Doll Masking in the Baby Dolls’ Own Words
B. Some Known Million Dollar Baby Doll Participants
C. The Geographical Landscape of the Million Dollar Baby Doll
D. Million Dollar Baby Doll Slang
E. Charting the History of Baby Doll Groups
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
“Baby Dolls Strut Their Stuff,” late 1930s
Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls
Young women Baby Doll maskers from The Porch
New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies, parading on Mardi Gras Day, 2010
Map of vice-district boundaries
Robert Joseph McKinney, 1933
Virginia Green, 1912
Louisa Barnes, 1912
Bertha Bailey, 1912
Baby Dolls dancing in the streets, Mardi Gras, 1931
Baby Dolls posing for the camera, about 1940
Baby Dolls in Fat Tuesday (and All That Jazz)! ballet
Couples dancing at a Baby Doll celebration, 1942
Couple dancing at San Jacinto Club and Dance Hall
Couple dancing at the Baby Doll celebration
Tony Jackson and the Panama Trio
“Negro Maskers,” drawing by John McCrady
“A group starts out for the day,” drawing by John McCrady
“Street Scene during Carnival,” 1930s
African American male maskers
Gold Digger Baby Dolls
Baby Doll celebration at Pete’s Blue Heaven, 1942
Mardi Gras Indians at the Baby Doll celebration
Cinnamon Black with Royce Osborn and other revelers, 2011
Antoinette K-Doe and Eva Perry, Mardi Gras Day 2007
Geannie Thomas and Miriam Batiste Reed as pallbearers
Antoinette K-Doe and Miriam Batiste Reed
Merline Kimble and other maskers at the funeral of Collins “Coach” Lewis, 2011
Gold Digger Baby Dolls at the Louis Satchmo Salute
A Skeleton and a Baby Doll
New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies with DJ Hektik
PRELUDE
On Being an Example of Hope
MARDI GRAS maskers of the Baby Doll tradition began as a small group of determined, independent-minded Black Cre ole women of New Orleans who came together and rebelled against the many constraints they faced regarding social segregation and gender discrimination. With an immeasurable love of freedom, on every Mardi Gras Day, groups of Black women and some men became the Baby Dolls and would parade, sing, and dance while represent ing their independent free spirit.
This Baby Doll tradition of women maskers was conceived and created around 1912. There are multiple stories of origin that are presented in my video documentary work, in this book by Kim Vaz, and in our collective work educating tourists, schoolchildren, locals, and scholars. We aim to tell the story of the key role the early Baby Dolls played in shaping New Orleans’s cultural traditions. The origins of Black Storyville are better known, but the unknown story is told by the family of the late Alma “Karro” Trepagnier-Batiste. Ms. Karro was a Mardi Gras reveler and matriarch of one of New Orleans’s most popular musical families: the Batiste family (original Sixth Ward), with its Dirty Dozen Kazoo Band. In the old New Orleans Mardi Gras traditions of the Black Creole societies, the Baby Dolls were celebrated right along with the Mardi Gras Indians, the Skeletons, and the parade krewe of Zulu. We have found that, from the beginning, the Baby Dolls were also referred to as the “women of the jazz.” As jazz entrepreneurs, these women were a fixture in the downtown streets of old New Orleans not only on Mardi Gras but every day.
Today, wherever the Baby Dolls appear, whether on Mardi Gras, on Super Sunday, or at the Satchmo second-line parade salute, locals tell us about their grandmothers who were Baby Dolls. Little children get excited and tug at the sleeve of the elder and ask, “Who is that Baby Doll?” And they always ask, “Can I dance with them?” The familiar reply is, “Those are Baby Dolls, but those are women.”
Resurrecting this cultural practice has been good for the local community and the women who continue the tradition. It lifts up our hearts as we inspire others by dancing the route of the Zulu parade or participating in the second lines, in venues where we educate children, the community, and tourists about the tradition. We are following in the footsteps of the original Baby Dolls. Our giving back to the community by teaching our song and dance traditions follows the lead of the earlier generation, such as Alma Batiste, Miriam Batiste Reed, “Uncle” Lionel Batiste, Merline Kimble, and Resa “Cinnamon Black” Wilson-Bazile, a self-proclaimed “renegade” Baby Doll. We pay our respects to the late Antoinette K-Doe and her Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls and the throngs of neighborhood Baby Dolls who masked in by-gone eras—such as the Big Queen of the Wild Tchoupitoulas, Mercedes Stevenson, who masked as a Baby Doll with two of her friends in the 1970s.
Through our professional dance organization, the New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies have resurrected this unique tradition of live art and celebration of life, incorporating a teaching mission. In connecting with our elders, we bring to them a
nd others happiness and affirmation. This tradition was shown to us by Ms. Batiste-Reed and “Uncle” Lionel Batiste, daughter and son of the late Alma “Karro” Trepagnier-Batiste, and by Geannie Thomas and Eva Perry of the K-Doe Baby Dolls. In this book, you will meet other Baby Dolls who have paraded in the streets through thick and thin: Resa “Cinnamon Black” Wilson-Bazile, Merline Kimble, and Lois Nelson.
When Uncle Lionel Batiste made bonnets for me by hand, and his sister, Ms. Miriam, shared the history and customs of the Baby Dolls with our group, we became the new generation of Baby Dolls. We are carrying the torch of our ancestral traditions. The costuming, dancing, parading, and pageantry are crafts and art forms handed down through the generations— a responsibility that these Baby Doll Ladies don’t take lightly. Much like our forebears, contemporary Baby Doll groups personify womanhood through dance. The diversity in the creative and vernacular expressions of the current Baby Doll tradition by the city’s various groups is dedicated to representing the uninhibited spirit of New Orleans with the same determination, perseverance, and attitude of excellence in all endeavors that was true for our predecessors. The reader will witness the Baby Doll tradition from the perspective of the old as well as the new. All generations of Baby Dolls demonstrate the smart and sassy attitude of excellence that is synonymous with New Orleans’s women of the jazz, then and now.
Millisia White
Founder and Director, New Orleans Society of Dance, Inc.
FOREWORD
Black Storyville
As we got off the car, I looked straight down Liberty Street. Crowds of people were moving up and down as far as my eyes could see.
—Louis Armstrong on his arrival in Black Storyville as a young boy
BLACK STORYVILLE was the poor person’s version of the famed Storyville red-light district a short distance away, perhaps with out the fine champagne. It was within walking distance to the French Quarter, the Central Business District, and Central City. The ordinance establishing Black Storyville identified specific streets on which otherwise illegal activities such as gambling and prostitution could take place. These were Tulane, Gravier, Perdido, North Poydras, South Poy dras, and Lafayette paralleling Canal Street, and streets going from the river toward the lake, roughly Saratoga, South Franklin, South Liberty, Howard, and Freret stretched forth in parallel.
While characterized largely as a site of moral degeneracy, the area housed a number of institutions that offered educational, social, and re ligious sustenance for its residents. Louis Armstrong, the neighborhood’s most famous son, lived directly across the street from Fisk School for Boys at 507 South Franklin. Later in his life, Armstrong wrote appreciatively of the school, where he learned to read, write, and absorb musical styles and rhythms as the school staged operettas, developed choirs, and supported Creole musicians as teachers. He recalled childhood pastimes that included playing street games such as coon-can and craps, and having brick wars with his friends. He grew up around characters nicknamed Cocaine Buddy, Little Head Lucas, Egg Head Papa, Sister Pop, One-eyed Bud, Black Benny, Nicodemus, Dirty Dog, and Steel-Armed Johnny.
Four buildings down from Armstrong’s house was the United Sons of Honor Hall, the home of a benevolent association incorporated on February 12, 1868, to assist the sick, bury the dead, and “attend to the distressed widows and succor the orphans of its members.” As much as the area was known for its pleasure industries, it supported not only the profane but also the sacred. Churches abounded to satisfy the spiritual hunger of the residents. Mount Zion Baptist Church stood at 512 Howard Street, led by the Reverend George Poole. Wesley Chapel Methodist-Episcopal Church (Negro), the Wesleyan Chapel Hall, and a rectory located in the 400 block of South Liberty were places of note. In Black Storyville, many women worked as laundresses, some as seamstresses and hairdressers. Some women ran boardinghouses and restaurants either alone or with their husbands. Those men who did not own businesses were laborers working on steamboats and in coal yards, sugar plants, sawmills, and blacksmith shops.
Local residents worked hard and played hard. South Rampart Street was the high-energy entertainment strip. Vic Dubois’s Union Station Exchange Restaurant and Bar was at 836 South Rampart; Mrs. F. J. Luins ran the Union Lodging House at 719 South Rampart; Porters Exchange Restaurant was nearby at 1000 Perdido, as was the Liberty Liquor House at 1332 Perdido. The Original Panama House at 328 South Liberty offered rooms with or without board. On South Saratoga Street (now 234 Loyola), the still-standing Pythian Temple housed Black professional offices and hosted theatrical productions, musical offerings, and other events in the building’s “Theatorium.” The Pythian Temple, a towering and impressive piece of architecture, was the location of ground-breaking cultural innovations. Early New Orleans jazz legends such as Sidney Bechet, Papa Celestin’s Original Jazz Orchestra, and Kid Rena performed there. In addition to music, there was theatrical invention. About 1909, a play by a group called the Smart Set titled There Is and Never Will Be a King like Me, about a Zulu king, was staged at the Pythian. The performance and its content so captured the imagination of a group of Black male friends who masked on Carnival that they transformed their image of themselves from “tramps” to “kings” (literally as portraying African royalty). They called their reinvented group “the Zulus.”
The neighborhood was rough-and-tumble, especially after the passage of the city ordinance officially designating certain blocks of this Black neighborhood as a legalized vice district. As such, it attracted the unsavory. Yet, as Armstrong wrote, “Bad men liked good music.”
The neighborhood, with its prominent intersection of South Liberty and Perdido streets, played a prominent place in the lives of the residents. These “hot thoroughfares” came to be embodied in music with recordings such as “Liberty & Perdido,” “Perdido Street Blues,” and “New Orleans Stomp.” The neighborhood’s brick and cobblestone streets reverberated with the feet of marching clubs and brass bands that broadcast the streets’ rambunctious sounds. There was the Tammany’s Social and Pleasure Club, the Bulls, Hobgoblins, and the Zulu Club. Others who paraded through Black Storyville included the Young Men Twenties, Merry Go Rounds, Tulane Club, Young Men Vidalias, Money Wasters, the Jolly Boys, and the Million Dollar Baby Dolls.
The Million Dollar Baby Dolls came into being in the same neighborhood that nurtured Louis Armstrong. Though women’s groups abounded, none offered anything as unusual as the Carnival theatrics of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls. Like many representing the extant New Orleans street-culture legacy that arose from Black Storyville, this group of women managed to maintain their earliest traditions, re-create them Carnival season after Carnival season, and delight and seduce Mardi Gras goers every year. Back then, the women were rowdy, bawdy, and competitive. Today, they are professional dancers, seamstresses, choreographers, teachers, and nurses who resurrected the tradition and re-create a 1912 Black Storyville Mardi Gras tableau for us to appreciate and remember.
In the 1950s, the area and its surroundings were demolished and replaced by the Civic Center—a development that comprises City Hall, the New Orleans Public Library, and the former residence of the Louisiana Supreme Court. The physical structures are no more. But the music, masking, and parading that traditionally expressed pride in their communal identity, and that enacted a vitality of life that started in the heart of this Black community, continue to permeate New Orleans as a whole. Even today, the brass bands, the Mardi Gras Indians, the Skull and Bones Gangs, and the social and pleasure clubs join the Baby Dolls in preserving our rich legacy.
Keith Weldon Medley
THE
“BABY DOLLS”
Introduction
A New Orleans Mardi Gras Masking Tradition
Sure they all call me Baby Doll, that’s my name. They have been calling me Baby Doll for a long time.
—Clara Belle Moore to Robert McKinney, February 9, 1940
The popular new orleans tradition of dressing up as a Baby Doll on Carnival Day had i
ts origins around 1912. The Baby Dolls began as a kind of Carnival club for women who were working in the dance halls and brothels. These women worked and lived in what was an unofficial vice district in the heart of New Orleans, bordering Perdido, Gravier, Basin, and Locust streets, an urban setting popularly thought of as “rough.” It was the neighborhood from which Louis Armstrong emerged.
While Armstrong is the Perdido and Gravier neighborhood’s most celebrated son, the area was generally rich in expressive arts and vernacular culture. On Carnival Day friends and neighbors “masked,” that is, created a collective identity and put on a costume that reflected their sense of themselves. The most famous were the Black Indians of New Orleans. Much has been written about the masking tradition in general,1 but little is known about a particular African American women’s tradition that, though having waned in popularity, has endured in pockets of the city to persist through a century. The women from the Perdido and Gravier area who decided to mask one Mardi Gras, imitating little girls with short skirts and bonnets, were playing with conventional, paradoxical notions of gender. These wise, worldly women dressed as innocents, embodying the girlish disguise of the New Woman of the Progressive Era seeking independence and self-fulfillment. They called themselves the Million Dollar Baby Dolls.
The Million Dollar Baby Dolls actively participated in the entrepreneurial activity of sponsoring dances with live jazz bands in which some women dressed in a variety of Baby Doll attire, while others cross-dressed and appeared in male clothing. They were simultaneously “women who danced the jazz,” “women of the jazz,” and jazz entrepreneurs.
In time, the practice spread to the mixed-race Creole families in the Seventh Ward and in the Tremé area, a section of the Sixth Ward that borders the French Quarter. Women in these neighborhoods formed social and pleasure clubs to plan their masking for Carnival. These women generally were mothers of large families. Some groups wore short, sexy costumes imitating the Million Dollar Baby Dolls, and some innovated with Baby Doll costumes resembling the toy doll, complete with lollipops, pacifiers, and bottles. These Baby Doll groups were often accompanied by a mock band consisting of the women’s husbands, sons, and other family members. By the 1940s, the Baby Doll masking tradition was well established. Women from different parts of the city might mask a few years as Baby Dolls, follow various marching groups on Carnival Day, and then go on to mask in other traditions.