Shot of the characters of the Baby Dolls from Fat Tuesday (and All That Jazz)!, a ballet that featured the Arthur Hall Dance Company and was conceived, produced, and directed by Wesley O. Brustad. A number of Arthur Hall Dance Company members performed the role of the Baby Dolls, including Delphine Mantz, Ruth Mills, Sharon Ingram, Andrea Vinson, and Regina Taitts. Photograph reproduced courtesy Wesley O. Brustad.
Putting It All Together
Fat Tuesday and All That Jazz is a jazz ballet commemorating the African American–inspired New Orleans Mardi Gras and its dance, music, and costuming pageantry. Choreographed by the Arthur Hall Afro-American Dance Ensemble and featuring Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band, the ballet has been performed on stage and broadcast on PBS. It features West African and African American dances. Notably, the Baby Dolls have a central role in the ballet. Writing of the performance delivered by the Chicago Muntu Dance Theatre, Sid Smith noted that “there are traditional African moves in the form of an opening processional, but, before the finale, a wide range of American pop dances from the 20th Century get their salute.… Hall’s work is a modern ballet dressed in the moves of jazz and the Caribbean, buoyed by the music of Dixieland jazz, rhythm and blues and folk.” Fat Tuesday chronicles a classic melodramatic story of young lovers Kid Bunky and Mimi Pechet; a villainous card shark; and a seductive woman, Mamie Desdoumes. Smith described the Baby Dolls’ performance as being “a saucy tap trio.”39
Couples dancing at a Baby Doll celebration, 1942, Mardi Gras in New Orleans. From the Collection of the U.S. Works Progress Administration of Louisiana, courtesy State Library of Louisiana.
Couple dancing at a Baby Doll celebra tion, at San Jacinto Club and Dance Hall, 1422 Dumaine Street, New Orleans. From the Collection of the U.S. Works Progress Administration of Louisiana, courtesy State Library of Louisiana.
Couple dancing at the Baby Doll celebration. From the Collection of the U.S. Works Progress Administration of Louisiana, courtesy State Library of Louisiana.
BABY DOLLS AND DANCE
Some of the original Baby Dolls made their living in the brothels and dance halls, innovating on dance steps popular in their day. Robert McKinney captures the spirit of working-class social dance parties in his description of Saturday “front parlor” “Shakedown Dances” where dancers dressed in “any kind of clothes desired from overalls to shimmies.” Food was served, generally consisting of whiskey and sandwiches. A pianist and drummer provided live music. These were free parties where “lights are always dark, dancing close and the guest drunk.”40
The families in the Tremé used their homes as hubs of entertain ment for their large families, and the arts were central to their gatherings. Families, friends, and neighbors danced to popular tunes, to “hot” music, and to Creole songs. On Carnival Day, some of these families took their singing, dancing, and costuming as Baby Dolls and hit the streets. Lyle Saxon relates a story illustrating the symbiotic relationship between the drummer and dancer that has been embedded in Black New Orleans culture from the days of Congo Square. Saxon tells of a young White boy who was entrusted to an African American family servant on Carnival Day. The servant, Robert, put the boy in a mask so they could pass undetected as to their race and go into Black clubs and other Black-dominated spaces with little notice. Saxon portrays Robert as intent on partying all Mardi Gras Day. He was not going to let his little charge get in the way of a good time. Robert knew all the top Black haunts and located the dance hall and saloon where King Zulu was holding court, the High Brown Social and Athletic Club. Sitting on King Zulu’s lap was a woman wearing a short red dress. There is no evidence to suggest that she was a Baby Doll per se, but her short-skirted personage drinking with King Zulu signifies the ambition and desire not uncommon for men and women rebelling against the social restrictions of the 1920s Jim Crow South.
Saxon describes a women’s dance contest. What is of significance is not that the women were competing against each other for the prize of King Zulu’s attention but the style of their dance and the rapt attention and enthusiasm they generated in the crowd, including the musicians:
And the members of the orchestra laid aside their instruments and turned about in their chairs in order to watch. All except the drummer. His big drum was moved further out upon the dancing floor and he began beating out a measured rhythm.
To the center of the floor came a woman, a thin quadroon. She began to shake in time with the drumbeats, first a shoulder, then a hip. Then she began to squirm and lunge. At each beat of the drum her position would change, and as the measured beating continued she moved her body with each beat. At last she was shaking all over, head wagging, hips bobbing back and forth. And as the drumbeats became more rapid, her gyrations became more violent. At the end of a few minutes the drumming stopped and she stood limp in the center of the floor.
There was wild applause.
She retired and another girl took her place, this time a black girl. Her movements were more suggestive, more animalish—and pleased the crowd more extravagantly than the first dancer had done. The drumming was done in the same fashion as at first. When she had finished a third girl took her place.41
The winner of the contest, was, according to Saxon, “a large, fat, black girl, dressed in a yellow dress. Her face shone with grease and sweat, but she was proud and happy with her success.”42
Even as late as the 1940s and 1950s, the Baby Dolls’ jazz entrepreneurship endured. Anita Thomas, the aunt of Sylvester Francis, founder of the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé, was a member of and gave dances with the Satin Sinners Baby Dolls group and was a Big Queen of the Eighth Ward Hunters Black Indian Gang. It was Mr. Francis’s emphatic narration of his aunt’s significance in Black Carnival that helped me to realize the significance of the Baby Dolls in their community.
Similarly, Andrew Justin, a native New Orleanian born in 1942, learned to sew from his mother Anna and his grandmother Geneva Lopice, who owned the Carr-Lopice Funeral Home located in the Tremé. Influenced by the neighborhood’s Indians, he grew up to form his own tribe called the Wild Tremé. “Anna and her sister Pauline Guillemet were Baby Dolls. A sisterhood of promiscuous maskers who cavorted on Fat Tuesday in the first half of the twentieth century, Baby Dolls wore skimpy pink outfits— short skirts, bloomers, satin blouses, and bonnets tied under their chins with ribbons.” They were, recalls Chief Drew, a rough-and-tumble bunch: “Kick a man in his ass.”43 These women challenged traditional notions of feminine domesticity because their environment was tough. Wages were low for Black people, and women in Andrew’s family relied on the informal economy. Anna was the mother of nine children, including twins who died. Anna and her female relatives gave fish fries and waistline parties, in which the cost of admission was based on the width of one’s abdomen. She made pralines for sale, took in laundry for Whites, and worked for decades at a factory making belts. When money was tight, she and the other women met the sailors at the ports and earned enough to feed the family. This work in the informal economy allowed the women in Chief Drew’s family to give food to the poor people in Tremé, to care for their own children, and to buy the materials necessary to mask as Baby Dolls on Carnival.
On Carnival they all came out together, dressed, recalls Chief Drew, in fine silk and linen. They wore socks or tights with two-inch heel shoes. They wore bloomers with ruffles and lace. They would also sport razors and ice picks, if someone dared to touch them. They would sing songs like “I’ll Fly Away” as they paraded, and the Baby Dolls had a kazoo band accompanying them.44
Arthé Anderson observes that Black Creoles born at the turn of the century were not as likely to migrate west and north as other Black New Orleanians. Black Creoles had access to the building trades, which provided them with enough money to purchase their homes and to sustain the rich cultural life they had inherited from previous generations. Joseph Lee, the inventor of the playground movement, believed that, when adults engaged in play, they were renewing their lives. He came to th
e conclusion that White culture could learn from the tendency in Black culture to “never lose hope for the future nor a sense of joy of living.”45 In spite of the suffocating discrimination, Black New Orleanians had managed to build play into their lives. Every family had a musician, singer, or dancer who could easily become a local celebrity. Saints’ days and holy days were frequent and required family preparation. The culture was given to humor and light-heartedness, as can be seen in the practice of giving pet names to children that lasted throughout their lifetimes.46 And the whole community had Carnival, or as the locals called it, “Old Fools Day,” during which you could “be anything you want to be.” There was a vitality that was built into everyday Black life.
The Million Dollar Baby Dolls danced and organized and innovated on the vital elements in Black New Orleans culture. Living in the Progressive Era, they were part of the wave that women dancers like Irene Castle were riding by tapping into their own desires to shed Victorian restraints on their ability to earn income as women, to dress in less restricted fashions, to experience their sexuality, and to be a force in their world. On a national level, Castle was creating a place for the independent sexual woman; in New Orleans parlance, “she masked.” According to Lewis Erenberg, Irene “remained a girl; she never achieved an image of a mature woman.” She fostered an image of the dancing woman as an “elegant American girl.” “Even to dabble with what little female sensuality was expressed in the dance required that women become girls, safely isolated from the dangerous knowledge they were beginning to acquire.”47 Women like Castle opened a space for middle- and upper-class White women to participate in sensual social dancing by constructing the image of the adult female as “both sexual and innocent.” The Million Dollar Baby Dolls would turn this concept on its head. They combined short skirts, soft pastel colors, and blonde curly wigs with sensual dance on the streets and an attitude that gave little care to what others thought. They surely must have sent fear up the spines of men who were part of a generation beginning to lose control over women. It would be little wonder that this generation would experience an unprecedented number of wildly popular songs about women as babies and dolls. Expressing both the excitement and titillation of grown-up women acting coy and innocent as a girl and paradoxically wishing that the New Woman was more childlike, songs burst on the scene to define the changing arrangements between the sexes.
3
“Oh You Beautiful Doll”
The Baby Doll as a National Sex Symbol in the Progressive Era
SONGS CELEBRATING women as “dolls” and “babies” flourished in the early years of the twentieth century. “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” written by A. Seymour Brown (1911), and “Pretty Baby,” created by musician and New Orleans native Tony Jackson (1912 or earlier), and other similarly titled numbers were part of the new and popular rag time music. “When the Grown Up Ladies Act like Babies (I’ve Got to Love ’Em That’s All)” (1914), by Maurice Abrahams, Joe Young, and Edgar Leslie, is a further indication of what was titillating male desire at the time. The actress Florence Mills wore a baby doll costume and performed with composer Tony Jackson as a “Pretty Baby” with her Panama Trio around 1918. On the flip side, Bessie Smith’s “Baby Doll” (1926) expressed women’s desire to be someone special to a special someone: “I want to be somebody’s baby doll so I can get my loving all the time. I want to be somebody’s baby doll to ease my mind.” “Baby Dollism” was in the air. It was a part of the national sensual ethos. In New Orleans, one clever group of African American women seized on the emerging icon and turned it into a marketing strategy and an expressive art.
Jackson’s “Pretty Baby” rag was specially written to accompany erotic dancing that characterized entertainment in the District after midnight. His lyrics described how a person in love with an adult is just like a person loving a baby:
Tony Jackson accompanying the Panama Trio, formed by Florence Mills with Carolyn Williams and Cora Green, about 1918. Photograph by Duncan P. Schiedt, used with per mission.
Won’t you come and let me rock you in my cradle of love
And we’ll cuddle all the time.
Oh, I want a lovin’ baby, and it might as well be you,
Pretty baby of mine.
It is thought that Jackson wrote this for his male lover and the words were more explicit in the original. Another jazz musician, Clarence Williams, who was well acquainted with the sporting scene of Black New Orleans, wrote the popular “You’re Some Pretty Doll” (1917). His lyrics go to the heart of male fantasy of sexual play:
Now listen Dolly, come over here
There’s something I must whisper in your ear
You’ve got me hanging ’round you like a child
It seems as if you’re goin’ to drive me wild.
Williams’s song captures many of the features of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls. The “Doll” not only makes him nervous, i.e., “sets my heart jumping,” but will make him “fall.”
Those charming little curls and dimples too
They make me know that it is you, just you
I wonder if your dear heart is mine
If so, it is a joy divine,
Oh! won’t you tell me and put my heart at ease
Oh! for a loving squeeze.1
The song ends with a declaration that he has “millions” that he will spend on his pretty doll.
In his “Fragment of an Autobiography,” Ferdinand “Jelly Roll Morton” LaMothe recalled that, in the District, prostitutes stood “in their cribs with their chippies on.” He noted that a chippie was a dress that “women wore, knee length, very easy to disrobe.”2 Morton’s signature sentence, “The chippies in their little-girl dresses were standing in the crib doors singing the blues,” captured the fantasy that some men were willing to pay for and a group of women used as one economic option under the restricted employment opportunities available to them. Historian Samuel Kinser views the Baby Doll tradition as being borrowed from a similar practice in Trinidad. While the direct line cannot be proven, and the available evidence does not support this assertion, he rightly concludes that male libido was aroused by the image.
“MIND YUH BABY”: BABY DOLLS AND TRINIDAD’S CARNIVAL
From the inception of their participation in Carnival, Afro-Caribbeans would critique their conditions of bondage and oppression. As newly freed Africans in the Caribbean began to participate in Trinidad’s Carnival around 1832, the colonial authorities as well as the White and Black elite were alarmed and scandalized. The revelers dramatized characters from folklore or historic persons, and some were novel expressions of European Carnival personalities.3 Over time, they invented numerous Carnival characters and masks that satirized the practices of the ruling class. One satirical mas was the Baby Doll, which Dylan Kerrigan describes in the following way:
In her short, frilly dress, exposing her legs, and her large poke bonnet or mob-cap, the baby doll—named for her eponymous accessory, a child’s doll—was already a common sight during Carnival in the 1860s and 1870s, the period of Jamette Carnival. Sometimes she roamed alone, sometimes in pairs or groups, but the masquerade was always the same: the baby doll pursued any respectable gentleman she encountered on the street with piercing cries of “Mister! Mister! Look your child!” embarrassing him into forking over money for support of the hypothetical infant.
This clever routine spoke to one of the realities of life under slavery and in its aftermath, when many slave-owners fathered children with their servants, only to refuse to recognize these illegitimate offspring.
One of the paradoxes of the baby doll was that she herself usually dressed like the infant whose mother she was meant to portray—in a simple child’s dress. Originally she wore a full wire mask, later reduced to a half-mask covering just her eyes, and finally no mask at all.4
Philip Scher wrote that old-time Trinidad carnival costuming traditions were accompanied by scripted speeches. Samantha Noel argues that Carnival offered Afro-Caribbean Baby Dol
l maskers the opportunity to speak their minds.5 The maskers would accuse both Black and White men of neglecting and abandoning their responsibilities to their children. In addition, in dressing as a baby, the adult herself or himself was a living symbol of the pathos of feeling neglected by the family and the state. Noel’s analysis springs from the drawing “Carnival on Frederick Street, Port of Spain,” published May 5, 1888, by Melton Prior, an English illustrator and war correspondent whose drawings appeared in the Illustrated London News. Noel speculates that underlying the priest’s stoic expression is shock and annoyance. His emotional reaction stemmed from being close to a woman he would consider his social inferior. His upset was at being singled out by her for condemnation.
Whether it was a dark-skinned woman carrying a blue-eyed baby doll or two men playing the mas (one dressed as a Baby Doll and the other a policeman who would get the accused to give some money to the Baby Doll), Kerrigan notes, “in the early decades of the 20th century, baby doll mas became less and less frequent on the streets of Port of Spain, but never entirely disappeared. Today she is most likely to be found at J’Ouvert or at special theatrical presentations of traditional mas characters, still reminding onlookers with her haunting, taunting cry of a painful phenomenon in Trinidad’s social history.”
Just as the New Orleans Baby Dolls emerged from the cultural mix of immediate environment, so also did the Baby Dolls of Trinidad according to anthropologist John Cupid. Cupid suggested that “the Trinidad baby doll has a distinct origin. She is a woman looking for her husband, the child’s father.… The sailors and soldiers who came from the Second World War weren’t the start of this character. Instead they carried on a reality dating back to the slave period, when slave masters separated children from their fathers. With emancipation, the baby doll character evolved as an ironic release from the torturous conditions of their recent past.”6
The "Baby Dolls" Page 6