The original intent of the Baby Dolls was solely about female spectatorship. Men were not the object of their gaze. Rather, their aim, clearly and colorfully stated, was to outdo and impress another group of Black women they defined as competitors, a group that in their estimation had unearned privilege due to their ability to work “downtown.”
BLACK WOMEN’S LEGAL AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE
These women gained their headstrong attitudes and proven leadership abilities through their daily interactions with patterns of domination and subordination, both in their relationships with their male lovers and in the exploitation encountered in their work environments. They were gained as well through their routine negotiations of inequality as women to men, as poor to rich, as Black to White, and as disenfranchised to enfranchised. They paid a high price for creating even this modicum of pleasure for themselves. The price included venereal diseases, high-risk abortions, drug addiction and alcoholism, homelessness, and both domestic and workplace violence. But it is not certain that in 1912 they would have escaped these risks or fared any better if they had not been working in the District. Despite the challenges, they carved out a niche of empowerment that combined the annual opportunity for free expression with the African American tradition of creating live art. If masking is about self-expression, what were the maskers trying to tell us? Black maskers impart the following message to adoring fans and mystified tourists: They are beautiful and good looking. They are tough and can survive. They are valuable beyond all measure and, in a society that discriminated against them, this was an important statement. They belonged to a community of people who saw them as important. They inspired others to feel joy and to be happy.
Leola Tate, Beatrice Hill, and Clara Belle Moore—the original Million Dollar Baby Dolls—were not an anomaly among Black women in the commercial sex industry in refusing to silence themselves or to retreat to the margins of their society to live in shame and disgrace. They rebuffed pressures to be submissive, helpless women as the prevailing social norms required for “respectable women.”
In 1897 the New Orleans City Council passed an ordinance that would serve to segregate women in the population based on their occupation. Ordinance number 13032 C.S. created a vice district. A later ordinance that year (number 13845) created one in the Perdido and Gravier streets area but held it in abeyance. Both districts were located within largely African American but mixed-race neighborhoods. Nor were these the only red-light districts to have been imposed on majority African American communities. The red-light district in Crowley, Louisiana, located in Acadia Parish, was created amidst collective opposition of African Americans and White reformers. Crowley’s red-light district was placed in the Black section of the city derogatively known as “Coontown.” Although the city had established a school for Black children, once the Crowley Ordinance went into effect, brothels sat right across the street from the school.52
The Storyville ordinance aimed to regulate where any “public prostitute or woman notoriously abandoned to lewdness” could “occupy, inhabit, live, or sleep in any house, room, or closet.” Storyville was bounded by Customhouse (now Iberville) and St. Louis and North Basin (now North Saratoga) and North Robertson streets.53 A second district was created several blocks away in a heavily populated African American neighborhood bounded by Perdido and Gravier and Basin and Locust streets.54 This second district was held in abeyance, but “vice” flourished there between 1897 and 1917 and well into the midcentury.
Several blocks away from “Black Storyville” was the larger vice district, aggressively marketed to the nation as a sexual playground. The District had become famous for its large mansions, wealthy madams, sex shows, sex across the color line (especially with light-skinned Black women, who called themselves octoroons), music, and gambling. Several light-skinned Black women ran successful brothels, presiding over a workforce of sex laborers, musicians, and servants. These women owned swaths of property inside the District and sometimes beyond. One such woman was Willie Piazza.
Facing mounting pressure from reformers and the federal government in 1917, in their attempt to prevent the closing of Storyville, the New Orleans City Council made a stab at cleaning up the District, not by closing the brothels but by banning women of color from living there. Ordinance 4118 C.C.S. was passed on February 7 in an attempt to racially segregate Storyville. “Colored” prostitutes, including light-skinned women like Lulu White and Willie Piazza, and dark-skinned women such as Carrie Gross, who enjoyed few of the luxuries of her lighter-skinned contemporaries, along with many others were ordered to move into Black Storyville. Piazza would not be able to live and run her business out of property she owned on 317 Basin Street; ironically, the area she and the others were being relocated to was already overpopulated.
On March 1, 1917, police officers sought to force Piazza, her employees, and boarders out of the house she owned. Piazza’s attorney filed an injunction to prevent the city from enforcing the ordinance. The Second Recorder’s Court found Piazza guilty and fined her for every day she would not vacate the premises. Piazza appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which “annulled, avoided and reversed” the lower court’s decision.55 In spite of her reputation, and being a Black woman at that, she won her case. She and Lulu White inspired other Black women to file lawsuits. Over twenty Black women sought refuge in the courts.
The court found that the city could issue ordinances to close houses of prostitution but had overstepped its bounds when it attempted to order segregated housing arrangements. As long as they were not plying their trade, prostitutes, the court decided, were entitled to live where they pleased. The owners of homes, even Black public women, could rent to whomever they saw fit as long as those boarders and renters were conducting themselves within the law.
While Piazza and other African American women waged their battle for property in the courts, the Million Dollar Baby Dolls staged their battles for identity and representation in the court of public opinion. In both cases, the women set precedents and left an enduring legacy. The gender performativity of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls not only transgressed the social norms for women; it was also a disavowal of heteronormativity. Middle-class Black women in the Victorian era aspired to a standard of “uplifting the race,” involving such activities as marriage, childrearing, chastity, and making contributions to the public good.56 But the women in the District were outcasts and as such they took liberties to renounce gender scripts that they could not conform to anyway. Their masculinized self-assertion was seen by reformers and city fathers as fostering a crisis of civilization. To save society, the women—not the men who sought their services—were viewed as needing to be residentially segregated, their movements circumscribed, and their behaviors monitored.
From the perspective of reformers and city fathers, women acting in ways that were unfeminine were disruptive to White male hegemonic rule. As such, the women in the District were considered bizarre, unattractive, unpredictable, dirty, and disgusting. They were referred to as “public women” or “women notoriously abandoned to lewdness.” They were deemed undeserving of attention unless they could be reprimanded harshly. And while they were largely unseen, except to be scapegoated as an immoral element of society, their solidarity and strong leadership qualities, which challenged the gender-polarized norms of separate spheres for men and women, were unremarked upon by reformers of the day and unappreciated by all. The Million Dollar Baby Doll Social and Pleasure Club resisted the pressures to behave with idealized feminine passivity. The Baby Dolls took feminine objects and used them in the reverse of what they had come to signify.57 The baby doll dresses offered a “tongue in cheek” or a “ha ha feminine” performance.58 When they masked, the Million Dollar Baby Dolls disrupted the gender script of female submissiveness, dependence, and chastity. Through performing gender “buffoonery,” they created a safe space for cross-dressing men. Men also masked in the short satin dresses with bonnets and bloomers and paraded with the wome
n.
Gender identities are not naturally occurring phenomena, but must be carefully maintained. They must be asserted and reasserted, spoken, performed, and reinscribed on the body.59 As they pretended to be “real” babies, these women offered a critique that femininity was not biological, but was instead a social construct. Their aggression, flirting, bucking, and competing postures challenged notions of gender authenticity. This is a legacy that has endured in this live art form.
IN THEIR OWN VOICE? THE MILLION DOLLAR BABY DOLL TRADITION OF SINGING AND CHANTING
Speaking of the New Orleans of his boyhood, about 1909, Danny Barker recalled that “all kinds of music” could be heard “all day.”60 A cappella singing by street vendors, organ grinding, brass bands jazzing it up for merchants advertising a product or the opening of their businesses, and relatives practicing their instruments at home were part of everyday life. “You heard all kinds of people passing by singing.” Just the sound of a band would evoke excitement, and people would rush to join the parade, only to discover it was “just people carrying a big sign, one holding the back pole saying ‘Bargain at Smith’s Butcher Shop,’ ‘Bargain at Vincent Domingo’s.’” Musical talent seemed to be ubiquitous. Some street peddlers “had beautiful voices, and they could sing what they had. Sing a sad song, or say anything foolish” such as, “Hey, mademoiselle,” “Venez ici,” by which Barker meant, “Come see Sam and me.” Those in various occupations found ways to market their wares and services by displaying distinguishing features. The junk man, for example, “had them bells he would ring. Them cowbells they used to put on a cow’s neck.”
Black women wearing wide-hooped skirts secured their baskets of goods on their heads. “It would be the blackberry lady or the strawberry lady or the pie lady.” And there were elderly women that sold calas. “Cala is a rice cake. It had rice and flour, and it looks like a round doughnut, like a brown biscuit. Everybody had a song.” Not only did these passersby have a song, they also had a story. “The junk man, he had a story. The milkman, he didn’t say nothing. The ice man, he had a story. He’d tell you, selling ice.”
There are other traditions that influenced the Million Dollar Baby Dolls’ music making. These have to do with ritual, namely, the Mardi Gras Indian song and chanting traditions. Another involves the rise of bawdy songs as part of the jazz canon and the African American word game called “playing the dozens.”61 Chanting consists of words and sounds that are either spoken or sung, often to simple melodies. The Mardi Gras Indians have a well-developed repertoire that accompanies their “practices” or weekly meetings of a neighborhood-based “tribe” to prepare for their coming out in costume for Mardi Gras each year. Jason Berry noted that Indian chants are accompanied by tambourines, sticks, and bottles, but not drums. Over time, these groups developed a body of chants whose aim is the lauding of the achievements of Indians and praising the spirit of rebellion.62 Popular Indian chants include “two poackaway,” which stands for “get out of the way,” or “jock-a-mo fee-no ai na-ne,” which references the meeting of tribes.63
The Black Spiritual churches of New Orleans, founded and shaped by Leafy Anderson, incorporated several spiritual dimensions, from Catholicism to Spiritualism to the symbolic healing aspects of Haitian and West African religious practices. Central to Anderson’s teachings was the compelling presence of “spirit guides” such as Black Hawk, the legendary Sauk Indian leader in the midwestern United States. Spiritual churches would have celebrations of such guides. Jason Berry recalled his participant observation in this way. During the course of the ceremony the congregation was led through chants to the Indian. They emphasized the role of Black Hawk as a watchman who would fight their battles and who “melded into a positive theme of reinforcement a common struggle for solidarity.”64
When African American anthropologist Irene Diggs, who studied music and dance in Cuba, evaluated the influence of African culture on the people of the African Diaspora, she highlighted the special nature of the African cultural innovation that had endured the middle passage.65 Culture was developed in Africa and in the Diaspora in ways best captured by terms like democracy, communalism, creative consultation, and collective elaboration. This was true of the 1950s-era Cuba that Diggs studied and remains true today among African American maskers in New Orleans.
To express themselves, African American Mardi Gras masking groups use costuming, parading, the music of brass bands, singing, chanting, and clapping. And they use dance. Diggs observed that “poetry, music, and dance are frequently united and with certain reservations, the music of Africa is the music of dance.” Moreover, “African people dance for pleasure and sorrow, for birth and death, for hate and love, for prosperity, for religious motives, and just to pass time.” And it was not so much that the music inspired the dance, but that the dance inspired the music.
African American women who originated the Baby Doll masking practice were dancers, and not only for paid employment. They were young adults in the historical era of the “New Woman”66 in which women were beginning to strive for personal autonomy. Dancing the jazz offered them a way to express their independence. Eventually, each neighborhood had its own group of Baby Dolls. They sang, clapped their hands, and danced with abandon on the streets as they walked around during Carnival.
Diggs taught that the role of song in African and African Diaspora culture was beyond entertainment alone: “They sing their jokes, their satire, hopes and disillusions. In song, they conserve their history, traditions, fables and mythology. Songs are frequently ‘editorials,’ critical daily life chronicles, or news commentaries.”67 Baby Dolls are on record for parading “in groups chanting in Creole patois over and over again. ‘Aye aye mo pé allé quitté Hey, hey, hey [I’m going to quit my job].’”68 They also celebrated their own bodies, chanting, “I got good boody, yeah, yeah!”
Like the African American actors who played stereotyped characters in early Hollywood films, the Baby Dolls have been largely dismissed from serious academic discussion. Why did certain songs become popular among various Baby Doll groups? One problem is that the majority of their songs were of a bawdy nature, and there is simply a paucity of information regarding these songs and chants. Another critical factor is the absence of Black researchers.
For example, compare the work of African Americans in constructing the history of Blacks in Louisiana in the Dillard University Negro project of the WPA era to Gumbo Ya-Ya, a book that downplayed Louisiana’s heinous slave-owning past and presented the bygone era as a paradise for those who lived through it. Robert McKinney was the only African American writer collecting data that found its way to Gumbo Ya-Ya and hence he was instructed to collect information on African Americans at the margins of New Orleans society. While it is a wonderful idea to include those who are pushed out of the mainstream, it is a problem because it constructs a skewed representation that supports an argument in favor of Black moral turpitude and intellectual inferiority. Ronnie Clayton provided a trenchant comparison of the two projects: “While Gumbo Ya-Ya tended to portray blacks in a stereotype role of buffoons, the Dillard writers intended to describe Whites in a jocular fashion.”69
A further problem was that Blacks were found to be more expressive to the Black interviewers than to White project interviewers.70 Indeed, during his visits McKinney was often accompanied by White co-interviewers and photographers. McKinney’s typed notes were filled with his own and his interviewees’ comments about the presence of Whites: “As soon as the camera-man and his ala Hollywood constituents reached Poydras and Saratoga streets the Baby Dolls jumped on them excitedly attempting to sell their wares. They broke to the white faces first because there is peculiar belief among Negro prostitutes that white men are not as tight as Negros.”71
Just like the Black actors in early Hollywood films who infused their stereotyped roles with a creative vision and were dismissed, ignored, derided, and publicly scolded by Black activists, the Baby Dolls were accomplished in a unique art form. Fr
om Stepin Fetchit and Louise Beavers to Sidney Poitier and Whoopi Goldberg, the point is not that they played stereotyped roles, but rather what they achieved within these roles. Film critic Donald Bogle notes that such “actors have elevated kitch or trash and brought to it arty qualities, if not pure art itself.”72 Bogle makes the case that “the past had to be contended with. It had to be defined, recorded, reasoned with, and interpreted.”73 He noted further that ignoring stereotypical performances neglects “the strength of performance and… denied black America a certain cultural heritage.”74 In 1940 Robert McKinney expressed similar thoughts about the importance of Baby Doll masking: “A large crowd was on hand, around Poydras and Saratoga Streets, the cradle of dope, to watch the Baby Dolls do their stuff amid a ‘glory’ that is somewhat shameful to an aristocratic eye but is good entertainment.”75
African Americans enjoyed coming up with euphemisms for sex. “Jass” first referred to sexual intercourse and then to music that invited men and women to dance together in sexually suggestive ways. The words “boogie woogie,” “jelly roll,” and “swing” were all infused with sexual connotations. Speaking of sex in displacement onto unusual objects, people, and places generated humor among listeners. Ribald and bawdy songs were used as commentary on non-sexual matters of urgent concern to people who shared similar values. Euphemism thus became satire, a form of expressive culture that African American music, chanting, and dance excelled at conveying.
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