“LET EVERY TUB STAND ON ITS OWN BOTTOM”: THE ORIGINS OF THE MILLION DOLLAR BABY DOLLS
After a long night at work, and after hearing the “buzz” around how the downtown Black sportin’ women were planning to mask for the upcoming Carnival season, Beatrice Hill made a decision. It was time for the uptown women to make a statement. Only part of what happened next is widely quoted; the rest of the story has not been quoted or referenced at all. According to Beatrice Hill, “Here is what happened in 1912. Ida Jackson, Millie Barnes and Sallie Gail and a few other downtown gals was making up to mask on Mardi Gras.” Beatrice did not know the particulars, but she wanted to form a group of her friends and colleagues. “Well, I wasn’t good at forming no club or nothing like that, so I told Leola Tate.” Once Leola understood Beatrice’s desires and concerns, Leola called the women together in the wee hours of the morning, “about three thirty after they had finished work.” The women met at Beatrice’s home and Leola set the rules. “We wouldn’t do no drinking because we wanted to talk sense and get something done.”
Beatrice held Leola in high esteem. Leola had been active in many church and social aid and pleasure clubs and knew how to organize groups and activities. According to Beatrice, “Leola and all of us was sitting around the room. The room was packed. Leola who used to belong to church and one of the helping hands associations and who use to go to all those meetings and things, says, ‘Let’s come to order.’ She stands up and says, what’s your pleasure? We didn’t have none but we had a motion and an object. I raised that by saying we wanted to mask up in an association for Mardi Gras to outdo all [Black women]32 maskers.”
In 1912 the idea of a grown woman as a Baby Doll was a titillating image to arouse men’s sexual desire, and the women were poised to use that image strategically. When it came to selecting a name for their association, Althea Brown is reported to have said, “Let’s be ourselves, let’s be Baby Dolls, that’s what the pimps call us.” According to Beatrice, “that suited everybody.” To this group of extraordinarily independent women, and calculating and defiant ones at that, Althea’s suggestion was packed with their experiences in sex work.
As Beatrice continues her story, the women in the room began to pull out their money. The social aid and benevolent societies of the day charged each member dues, and the money was pooled and used for the association’s activities and responsibilities. Knowing this, the women began to contribute their money. Leola Tate stopped them in their tracks and ordered the group to “Hold your horses. Let every tub stand on its own bot tom.” This common phrase has always meant for each person to contribute her own share and not let a few handle the burden for the whole. It meant that each should make her own preparations as if she were relying solely on herself and judged according to her own merits. Then someone asked about naming their group and, stressing their financial success, the women decided to call themselves the “‘Million Dollar Baby Dolls’ and be red hot.”
Baby Dolls dancing in the streets, Mardi Gras, 1931. These recently discovered photos are taken from an unidentified film shot about 1931, according to Story Sloane of Sloane Gallery. Used with per mission from The Sloane Collection/www.SloaneGallery.com.
“Baby Dolls posing for camera.” Baby Doll celebration on Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans, 1942. From the Collection of the U.S. Works Progress Administration of Louisiana, courtesy State Library of Louisiana.
At minimum each woman had to mask with a stocking containing at least fifty dollars. Not only were they “red hot,” but they determined to be independent of the male-dominated masking groups like the Indians and the Zulus. “We didn’t have nothing to do with the Zulus,” said Beatrice. “Old Johnny Metoyer wanted us to come along with them but we wouldn’t do it. We told Johnny we were out to do up some fun in our own way and we were stopping at nothing, no indeed. Yes sir, the Zulus had their gang and we had ours.”
When Robert McKinney interviewed Clara Belle Moore in February 1940, she labeled herself a “Baby Doll today and every day.” She recalled that, when she was just twenty years old, a gathering of women decided on a collective identity to imitate Clara Belle’s regular Carnival costume, consisting of a tight skirt, bloomers, and a rimmed hat. They wore “short gingham red plaid dresses” that hung from a yoke. The Baby Dolls wore “little bonnets and curls and bloomers,” yet some could be seen in “longwaisted dresses with a short, pleated skirt.”
According to a traditional saying in New Orleans, “You could do what you wanted to do on Mardi Gras.” And so many women did. Clara Belle noted that these women would meet at someone’s home to put on their outfits. “This was done because a lot of our husbands and old-men didn’t want us to be Baby Dolls cause they knew a lot of men would follow us on the street and try to make mashes [i.e. have sex] on us. We didn’t tell them how we were going to mask but just came out as a Baby Doll on Mardi Gras. And boy was we tight!” Beatrice Hill told McKinney that their initial outfits consisted of rainbow colors, with panel backs and fronts made out of gold lace. Some of the women made their own costumes, and some had them made. Money was key to the costume to showcase their economic prowess. Each of the women with Beatrice had at least fifty dollars in her stockings. The garter on the thigh with money has come to be a signature component of the masking tradition. On that first outing, there were about thirty women with “money all over them” and “even in our bloomers.”
Needless to say, such showmanship attracted a large following. Beatrice was thrilled that the men “liked the way we shook our [bottoms], and we shook it like we wanted to.” Starting at 10:15 in the morning, they paraded around parts of the city. Then they met up at Sam Bonart Playground “on Rampart and Poydras and bucked against each other to see who had the most money. Leola had the most, one hundred and two dollars. I had ninety-six dollars and I was second, but I had money at home in case I ran out.”
The Million Dollar Baby Dolls transgressed the socially constructed hierarchy and went downtown to directly challenge the other Black women maskers on their own turf. Beatrice recalled with pride, “We went downtown and talking about putting on the ritz, we showed them [women] how to put on the ritz. Boy we was smoking cigars and flinging ten and twenty dollar bills through the air.” The response of the downtown women in Beatrice’s view was concession. “The gals couldn’t do nothing but look at us. They had to admit that we were stuff.” Of course the flagrant display of flashing and tossing away money made a scene. “When we started pitching dollars around we had sportin’ [Black men] falling on their faces trying to get that money.” The uptown-downtown rivalry was short lived. As Beatrice noted, “We all made peace.”
For the Million Dollar Baby Dolls, the masking was not just a one-day event but a way of life and a stage act designed for their economic profit, even if that stage was on the street. A second day for Black Carnival revelers to mask was the night of the feast of St. Joseph, an annual event on March 19. Sicilian Americans introduced the practice of building elaborate food altars on the day of the saint’s annual feast. When they immigrated to New Orleans and its surroundings in massive numbers at the turn of the century, they kept the tradition alive. African American Spiritual churches were quick to integrate this practice into their own altar-making rotations of commemoration of saints and other biblical figures. There was much synergy between these ethnic groups as Italian Americans were known to attend the services at Spiritual churches.33 The pageantry of St. Joseph’s Day resonated with this African American collective thanksgiving and created an evening ritual involving masking, chanting, and parading through the streets. In fact, night masking on St. Joseph’s feast night had become just as important to the Mardi Gras Indian community as Carnival Day.
The Million Dollar Baby Dolls were among those who celebrated on St. Joseph’s night.34 Robert McKinney noted, “This is the night that is a second Mardi Gras for a lot of people, i.e., the Baby Dolls and their ilk. They mask and wave their hips, sing low down blues songs to the accompaniment of l
oud cornets, banjos, drums and other instruments. They frolic on the streets in the same manner as they do on Fat Tuesday; their shimmies are strictly ‘solid’ and always attract a large crowd.”
As the Million Dollar Baby Doll association grew and matured, they held significant social events in the community and became a real presence. They did not simply parade on Carnival Day. They hired bands and held dances. Beatrice describes the band that the Baby Dolls hired as consisting of a cornetist, a flautist, a drummer, a banjoist, a bassist, and a few others. She praised their musical performance because, when the band’s music “heated,” it allowed the Baby Dolls to “strut,” to shake it on down while dancing.
Financial and personal independence as both a style of life and an attitude for these women is verified by Beatrice: “We on down the years never did ask any help from anybody.” In 1914, however, the Million Dollar Baby Dolls were hired by a local distributor of the Bernheim Distillery to advertise I. W. Harper whiskey.35 A sampling of Bernheim’s I. W. Harper trade cards used to advertise their products from 1900 onward confirms the company’s use of Black and female bodies to appeal to their multi-racial and predominately male clientele.36 Harper was also a popular brand among the New Orleans Jazz Age community.37
Eventually, this group of Baby Dolls gave way to the natural aging process and its vicissitudes. Beatrice’s story comes to a close with the words, “We couldn’t keep up our association. Some of us got sick, some of them dropped out, but the Million Dollar Baby Dolls went on.”
AND THE TUBS STOOD
During the 1912 Mardi Gras, a group of women who lived and worked uptown were deliberating over how to respond to the costuming plans of a rival group of downtown women. Uptowner Althea Brown is credited with having the vision for her friends to “be themselves,” that is, to be Baby Dolls.38 As downtown residents, Virginia, Bertha, and Louisa might have encountered the uptown women who decided to mask as Baby Dolls and who called themselves the “Million Dollar Baby Dolls.”39 The aim of their masking was to gain recognition from the only people who would see them as human beings, that is, other Black women in the sex industry. The Baby Doll tradition evolved out of need for more than a costume. It was a ritual of recognition. Even though the groups were rivals, they could offer each other validation in a way that was impossible to achieve with the majority of middle-class Americans, Black or White, male or female, rich or poor.
Largely objectified and denigrated by Whites and men and middle- and upper-class African Americans, with each other these Black women could experience the pleasure of mutual recognition. That is, they could see each other as separate subjects with “equivalent centers of experience.”40 Mutual recognition is the development of the capacity to have an emotional identification with the perspective of another person even if the two do not agree. The Baby Doll masking tradition served as a form of play that built relational bonds among similarly situated Black women. In the safety of play, the uptown women knew that the downtown women would recognize and respond to their statement of “I am.” “I am alive.” “I am myself.”41 “I am a Baby Doll!”
2
Women Dancing the Jazz
Early New Orleans’ musicians did not call their music Jazz, they called it Ragtime. This implied a syncopated treatment or a rag in time on marches and other popular music of the day to induce people to dance.
—Old U.S. Mint display
THE TIES BETWEEN the Million Dollar Baby Dolls and jazz musicians is complex, and much of this relationship remains unknown. What is known, however, is that these were women who “danced the jazz.”1 They improvised movements to the new rhythms and defined their lives through and around this music. As such, they helped to shape the development of jazz itself.
In the second decade of the twentieth century, New Orleans jazz musi cians advertised the places where they were to perform by riding around neighborhoods in wagons and trucks, playing their tunes. Frequently they would encounter each other on street corners. If they were rivals, they might engage each other in battles to claim musical superiority. These impromptu street-corner competitions were called “bucking” or “cutting” contests.
One such contest occurred between an esteemed band leader, Henry “Kid” Rena (pronounced Ruh-nay) and noted trumpeter Lee Collins before or around the 1920s. Their contest occurred, according to Collins, while Kid Rena was advertising for a dance to be given by the Lady Baby Dolls.2 Beatrice Hill describes the early promotion of the Baby Doll dances: “Leola went out and got a band. We had to pay two fifty a piece for that. She had got sign carriers. We had to pay half a dollar a piece for that. That’s all the public expense I think we had. There must have been more but Leola took care of that. We gave her the money.”3
In New Orleans, African American dance and music have a symbiotic relationship. Historically, the musicians have changed their rhythms to fit the dance steps of the time. And those people who frequented the dance halls and honky-tonks, like the Million Dollar Baby Dolls, made the ever-changing dance steps. In 1912, the steps were “hot,”4 and the music accommodated.5 Noted jazz musician and historian Danny Barker makes this point repeatedly in a 1992 interview. Barker recalled watching a performance of Kid Rena: “Kid Rena opened his shirt like [sound of buttons popping], sit on stage back of that horn, never went in the high register of the horn. Just played pretty music.… You don’t get winded. A man’ll get on the floor and dance with a woman if it ain’t too exciting, because… their hearts can be beating together, and their foots shoving, and knees hitting against one another, and belly buttons hitting next to one another. That’s what music is all about. A dance.”
Writing about the development of jazz in the twentieth century, musicologist Lawrence Gushee noted that “at the outset and for decades to follow jazz was functionally music for dancing.”6 African Americans in the dance halls and honky-tonks were engaging in sexy, expressive, free-spirited dancing to the newly emerging “ratty,” or “hot,” music. Black New Orleanians took this one step further. They danced in the streets. New Orleans is famous for its parades of live bands and the followers who dance to their music on public thoroughfares. The first line is the band, and the second is the crowd. Reid Mitchell noted that the people who accompanied the bands on the streets, the second line, also helped to shape jazz. “It was the second line that insisted that jazz be played in the streets.” Second liners did not want to march—that is, do the old dance steps—they wanted to “jump,”7 meaning to dance sexy. Danny Barker described the women merrymakers at the bucking contests derisively as “dancing their vulgar dances all through the battle.”8 Despite the disapproval inherent in this statement, he at least etches these women into the historical record as women “dancing the jazz.”
JAZZ AS MUSIC FOR DANCING
That American hot jazz evolved from the dance, the mother of all arts, should be self-evident. However, in these days of commercial jazz, in which the true dance music is often disguised… one is apt to forget that jazz roots are deeply imbedded in folk arts and the dance.
—William Russell, “Jazz Sources,” Dance Observer, 1940
The beginning of jazz was about producing music that people wanted to move their bodies to. In the darkened halls, they could experience one another’s bodies through dancing sensually to music. It was through their participation in jazz circles that they could bring their changing social identities away from Victorian-era constriction and into a contemporary view. The dancers demanded a musical style that matched their feelings, and they wanted to experience that feeling through their bodies. They wanted to dance to performances by musicians known for their prowess in delivering “hot,” sexy, spontaneous rhythms. If the musicians wanted to get hired again, they needed to provide the right rhythms.
The early jazz musicians were influenced by the musical genres of their times: ragtime, gospel, blues, marches. It is widely acknowledged that a young African American uptowner named Buddy Bolden broke with traditional dance-music arrangement
s and introduced to dance-hall performances versions of established tunes that were syncopated and improvised—in other words, “raggy”9 music. His transformation of standard popular tunes and marches of the day was accomplished by quickening the music’s tempo and by incorporating Black church music, syncopation, improvisation, and the blues. Bolden emerged as a leader among the musicians playing in the new genre. Others followed his lead, and those bands playing in this ragging style drew large crowds for their dances. A new music full of energy and fun, well suited to the tastes of young people, had been born.
One of the favorite songs of early jazz dancers was the “Funky Butt”10 (later recorded by Ferdinand “Jelly Roll Morton” LaMothe as “Buddy Bolden’s Blues”). So popular was the song and accompanying dance, the “funkybuttin’,”11 that many such dances held at the Union Sons Hall on 1319 Perdido resulted in the hall being dubbed the Funky Butt Hall. The funkybuttin’ dance craze spread throughout the South in African American dance halls, juke joints, and barrel houses. Coot Grant, a performer in the husband-wife team of Coot Grant and Sox Wilson, though not a New Orleanian, described the “funkybuttin’” dance she saw as a child in Alabama in the 1910s: “women sometimes pulled up their dresses to show their pretty petticoats—fine linen with crocheted edges—and that is what happened in the Funky Butt.… I remember a powerful woman who worked in the mills pulling coke from a furnace, a man’s job.… When Sue arrived… people would yell, ‘Here come Big Sue! Do the Funky Butt, Baby!’ As soon as she got high and happy, she’d… pull… up her skirts and grind… her rear end like an alligator crawling up a bank.”12 The repertoires of early jazz bands included the standard fare of schottisches, waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, and quadrilles. To these they incorporated fast one-steps, slow drags, and blues. The most popular songs were risqué, like “If You Don’t Shake You Get No Cake.” Also popular were such blues songs as “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor.”13
The "Baby Dolls" Page 4