Historian Lawrence Levine wrote that “no inquiry into the consciousness and inner resources of black Americans can ignore the content and structure of Afro- American humor.” Playing the dozens, also known as signifying or woofing, refers to a verbal sparring match in which insults to one’s relatives, especially to one’s mother, would defeat the opponent if he or she couldn’t muster a better response. Levine reports that Buddy Bolden and his band members when arriving at the bandstand would play the dozens with lines like “Is your mother still in the district catchin’ tricks?” Black scholars active in the Black power and civil rights movements identified girls as being especially good with the dozens.76
The Baby Dolls used their made-up lyrics in keeping with the signifying tradition. The Million Dollar Baby Dolls had standard songs and chants, including a few crowd pleasers. “Sure, we use to sing.… What we sang? We sang, ‘When the Sun goes down,’”77 and “When the saints come marching through I want to be in that number. I’ll tell you another song we used to sing that everybody liked.” That song is quoted in full in McKinney’s typed transcript of the interview.78 The song was called “You Dirty Man” with the lyric, “Your momma don’t wear no drawers.” It was set to a popular vaudeville tune. The lyrics are a combination of braggadocio about the woman’s sexual prowess, sexual endurance, and ability to sexually enslave a lover. It is at the same time a critique of the haughty man who seeks her favors and would then dare to judge her as a “public woman.” In a refrain that refers to the man’s mother not wearing any “drawers,”79 the lyrics point out the hypocrisy of a man judging a woman for being sexually free when his own mother may be the same way. In the hands of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls, it is a scathing critique of the sexual double standard and the dichotomy of good versus bad women. The song/chant appropriates the style of the dozens: “Hey you dirty [man],” the chant goes, “Your momma…!”
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT: MAURICE MARTINEZ
Maurice M. Martinez was born in New Orleans to Mildred Mouton Martinez and Harold Theodore Martinez. His mother owned and operated the first nursery school for Black children in the city. Martinez’s nursery school educated generations of middle-class children including such luminaries as the city’s second Black mayor, Sidney Barthelemy; Liberty Bank president Alden McDonald; and former Orleans Parish School Board member Gail Glapion. Mildred founded the school to shield her son from the racism of their time and to make education available to Black children who were being neglected because they could not enter White nursery schools.80 In 1976, Maurice produced the first documentary on the Mardi Gras Indian masking tradition, titled The Black Indians of New Orleans. This film explores the song, dances, costuming, and performativity of the tradition along with the influences from the Yoruba of West Africa and Native Americans.81 I will conclude this chapter with Martinez’s recollections about the Baby Dolls:
What can I tell you about the Baby Dolls? Many of them carried that reputation throughout the year. “There goes Ms. Baby Doll!” They always seemed to have time to stop, no matter how rushed they were. “How you doing child?” “Hello honey.” “I remember you. How’s your mama and them?” They valued the interpersonal relationship. They valued people over things. We didn’t have many things because of rampant poverty among African Americans.
There were two unemployment boards: one for whites and one for blacks. The one for blacks was for labor and low-wage jobs. The board for whites was for white collar jobs. Some of the guys in the army were teachers like me and they were telling me they were getting paid in the summer. I went down to the board and said I am here to see about getting paid. I am a GI and so they gave me a typing test. It was blatant rejection to your face and it was not uncommon to hear “Who let them niggers in here?” That goes right through you. You are trying to do the right thing, preparing yourself, studying hard, even taking up a weapon to defend the county, and you come back and hear that. That’s why I am proud of those with the courage to take it to the streets in costume, like the walking groups such as the Baby Dolls and the Mardi Gras Indians. They had a spirit that refused to be crushed.
The more risqué, raunchy groups came from Tremé from what I can gather. Those from the Seventh Ward didn’t wear the garter with the money, but they were still out there singing and enjoying themselves. Those in the Seventh Ward carried sticks, or it could have been a walking cane. It was useful if someone comes up to you. They were classy. They carried elaborate pursues and black patent-leather tap shoes.
In the male social and pleasure clubs, there was a subtle organization. The first line to hit the streets was a guard, and there would be four or five just moving along and one would be carrying drinks. Behind them would be the first masker in a dyed hat, orchid-colored suit, and alligator shoes; followed by the banner announcing who they are. “Look who is coming.” If you watch the second line, you could see people who were not masked. These were huge guys who served as protection. Same thing with the Baby Dolls. They had protection. You wouldn’t notice it; but if you go in and try to touch one of them you would be in big trouble. Same thing with the Indians, their protection carried the guns. If they needed it, it would come to them. The Indians carried decorated shot guns. There were skirmishes back then.
Every group that seemed disorganized was well organized. They moved along a route according to their feelings. For Zulus, one float would be at a barroom and the other float would be two blocks away. Things would be falling off. But there was organization in the disorganization. It was not organized according to a time schedule or route. For the Indian, if he decided he wanted to go this way or that he would and you were lucky if you could find him. That is a freedom of spirit that comes out of that; a spirit of joy.
Every year at Carnival, at a time when we were told that we were Mongoloids and inferior human beings, Allison “Tootie” Montana, the Baby Dolls and all others in costumes came out and said, don’t listen to the crap, look at me, come and see my beauty and rejoice with me. “I may empty your bedpans all year long, but today, I am the prettiest thing you are going to see.” It was a manifestation of pride and what I really intended to be. It made us forget for a moment the evil, the rejection, the job discrimination, and we could enjoy life.
My grandmother knew all the Baby Dolls. She made calas and they would come to get a drink, eat fried rice cakes, and when they saw one another they spoke in French. They sang and they were happy to see each other. When the children would come up, they would switch to English and you learned to be profane in two languages.
Baby Dolls were pretty women with pretty smiles. They were women who brought fun to communities that were suffering financially. They were not afraid to party and to get down. They flaunted their inner spirit against convention and against conformity to conservative ideology. They sang songs like “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and they imitated the vaudeville circuit’s use of standard show tunes turned risqué. In New Orleans, when movie theaters changed reels at intermission, there would be a stage show and beautiful ladies in short dresses would dance to a rhythm. The drummer was sending them a message, “Do you have good booty?” When he hit the bass drum, they would reply, “Yeah man.” They would get down and shake all the way down to the floor. A lot of that was carried to the street with the Baby Dolls.
The group that I remember with Alfred Glapion, Arthur Hubbard, and others who made up the kazoo band was a lady who was the Baby Doll. Her name was Ms. Lapersol,82 and she was in the Seventh Ward with her friends Ophelia and Rita. They were located on Villere near St. Bernard Avenue right around the corner from Big Chief “Tootie” Montana, and they came out from that area. Everybody belonged to a social and pleasure club or a mutual aid society. This was how we shared resources with one another and how people survived in an impoverished society that discriminated in jobs and professions. She was a member of two prominent groups in the Seventh Ward: the Original Paramount Club and the Orchid Girls. From that group those who wanted to be Baby Dolls would
come out; about eight or nine of them. They sang the “Saints” with the kazoo band, but what they liked best was a song composed by the black gay musician, Tony Jackson, “Pretty Baby.” That was their theme song; they loved it. And as they came from one block to the next block, they would repeat the performance because you would have a new audience in that block.
What did they do? They brought joy and love. When you look at the lyrics of “Pretty Baby,” you can hear that. They brought smiles. I will never forget looking up at this woman and she had on pink silk panties. Most of them had stockings and bloomers, but she had her legs out. She had on a pink garter with dollar bills and patent leather shoes.83 Some had taps, and when they hit streets that had hard surfaces, they would tap dance.… She came sashaying up to me.… She looked down at me and started singing “Pretty Baby, cuddle with me.” It made me feel so good inside. It brought out élan vital, the vital spirit that is within.…
She was a bombshell and that is what made me want to go out into the streets and look at the culture of my people. She had an infectious smile that penetrated. It is the kind of smile you get after you have a good orgasm. That kind of smile can carry you anywhere. It is an infectious, self-contained smile. You see it in my film the Mardi Gras Indians.… There is something in that that unlocks the strength and fortitude of black culture. They had the ability to laugh at agony and pain and to enjoy that inner feeling of having made something out of nothing in spite of the overwhelming odds of rejection.
…Everybody knew them. Some say they were tough women; but they were party girls. There is the story of one Creole woman whose husband did not want her to be a Baby Doll. She found a way. She sent him on his way early Carnival morning; then she snuck over to her girlfriend’s house, dressed, and went with them. In her last year masking, Ms. Lapersol came out in velvet, velvet buttons, and fur trim. They had lace trim on the satin. They would wear long underwear because it would be cold. They had the bonnets, rattles, pacifiers, and baby bottles.… These costumes were handmade, and they put the petticoats underneath to make the skirts stand out.
One year this same group, that had men masked as policemen, came out dressed as women. You had Baby Dolls and men dressed as women, and they went around to Big Rip and he had on a diaper with yellow mustard as if he had pooped. They had a ball. Singing and enjoying each other’s company and celebrating life.84
4
A New Group of Baby Dolls Hits the Streets
The [Zulu] King’s float winds through the streets, followed by black and white. Many of the Negroes are masked. Most of the women are Baby Dolls, with blonde wigs and white faces. Many of the men are Indians.
—Eleanor Early, A New Orleans Holiday, 1947
MARDI GRAS REVELRIES in antebellum New Orleans consisted of neighbors and friends hosting private and public balls and masquerade parties in their own homes, as well as taking part in informal street processions. Enslaved Africans and free people of color participated in Mardi Gras masking. Whether through dancing in Congo Square or through promenading on Chartres Street to visit “fancy stores,” or putting on “grotesque” disguises and wandering in merriment through the streets, on Carnival, Black people participated. Some may have appropriated the fete for religious purposes, while others may have used the celebration as an opportunity to resist social limitations.1 Women had much more license to participate in Carnival activities than they would later. Notably through the practice of the quadroon balls, free women of color attended masked balls where White men, would-be suitors, swelled the halls with their presence. Monique Guillory’s analysis of the system of plaçage and its attendant practice of the quadroon balls shows how free women of color seized control of the commodification of their own bodies to set their own prices. They were so successful that White women tried to “pass” as women of color to secure successful men to take care of them as lifetime partners or attended, risking their reputations, to check on their husbands. In her fascinating interpretation, Guillory attributes the success of the quadroon women not to their beauty but to their “mastery of whiteness.” These women were highly educated, could speak French, and often their mothers were property owners or successful in business. Their business acumen may have developed, she speculates, through the sale of their own bodies as their first, but most important, commodity.2
Beginning in 1857, the laissez-faire Creole style of Mardi Gras was threatened. White men from non-Creole backgrounds saw an opportunity to assert their power and control over a public they believed they were losing control over due to issues of “states’ rights” regarding slavery. The first krewe, an exclusive club who charged themselves with nighttime street parades and dominating the celebration with their social events, was founded and was to be followed by many others. The all-White, all-male, all-monied Mardi Gras krewes staged parades, held elite private balls complete with tableaux, and regulated the participation of women of their class by requiring them to attend these functions unmasked, while the members of the krewe were masked. Their greatest public statement came through taking possession of the street at night in a formal parade that consisted of themed floats and masked riders, purportedly informing the masses of great European literature and world mythology told in a way that highlighted their own superiority and refinement. Middle- and upper-class women began to have diminished opportunity to mask playfully on Mardi Gras and at associated events. Rather than grotesque masking, they began to wear stock character costumes and, eventually, the appropriate attire became evening wear. Women’s grotesque carnival costumes such as fabric male genitals hidden under flaps they might display to onlookers were especially threatening to social norms because, as Carolyn Ware notes, such practices afforded women the opportunity to “step into this unladylike role playing” and “provide[d] another vehicle for challenging ideals of decorum and beauty.”3
According to Karen Leathem, women’s masking held so much power that men felt threatened.4 Once masked, women could set up, trick, and test the fidelity and respectable behavior of husbands, brothers, and neighbors. In time, masking and class status became associated. It was observed in newspapers of the early twentieth century that only common people masked. Once the “better” class of womenreached adolescence, they turned in their play costume for fashionable attire. Black women aspiring to respectability followed suit.
These acts changed Mardi Gras traditions, relegating the working classes and Blacks to mere spectator status during nighttime parades and to being labeled as “promiscuous maskers,” meaning “common.” But krewe members’ attempts were not altogether successful. Women who worked in the legalized prostitution industry and women who earned their own incomes from the professions, such as doctors, were able to take to the streets, often in men’s clothing.
A notable example can be found in Robert Tallant’s Mardi Gras. He wrote that among the thirty thousand visitors to Carnival in 1870 was the first woman surgeon in the U.S. military, Dr. Mary E. Walker. She was reported to be “‘disgusted at how out-Heroed’ she was by women from Basin Street and other red-light districts, who like the famous doctor, were on the streets in male attire.”5 People don’t necessarily “change” their personalities to accommodate Carnival; they appropriate Carnival as a vehicle to express an aspect of their everyday identity. Dr. Walker regularly dressed in men’s clothing. Both Dr. Walker and the women from the red-light district can be said to have been upholding their reputations rather than striving to act with decorum.
The gender landscape was changing. The loosening of Victorian mores, women’s demands for education and the vote, their leadership in reform movements, and their participation in labor movements served as a major impetus for the return of women to street masking in the early twentieth century. At the same time, in spite of aggressive legal opposition in New Orleans and elsewhere, legal segregation based on race had been instituted throughout the city and the nation as a whole. Disenfranchised “revelers invested broader political and social meanings in the frolicsome
play, even if it was some inchoate sense of who could claim public space. On the streets of carnival, men and women acted out the ramifications of gender relations in the public sphere.”6
While upper-class women largely remained passive observers of Carnival parades, tucked securely away on balconies, women without connections to property owners were braving the dangerous streets, which brought them uncomfortably close to male strangers who were not at all averse to making sexual assumptions and even approaches, overt and covert. Women could mitigate their risk by not wearing masked attire, for masking was associated with loose morals. Prostitutes, Leathem concluded, were threatening to society because they signaled that gender roles were in flux and that women did not have to be bound by family or propriety to survive. What’s worse for city fathers was their fear that, if White women and Black men masked, Jim Crow was more of a challenge to uphold. Interracial sex would be more than possible as maskers passed for their socially constructed opposite race or gender. Masked “respectable” women could intermingle with prostitutes while watching parades on Canal Street, or worse, they would venture into Storyville to witness what they believed their male kin and husbands could see.
White men fought back using costuming and blackface. Noting the backlash, Leathem wrote that the men marched in clubs wearing “mammy” outfits and masked as “wenches and other grotesque images of African American women.”7 They lampooned the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club with a themed float titled “Originators of the Tango” with riders in blackface and performing simian movements. They made fun of suffragists and club women by “waddling” down the street in hobble skirts. In another themed float called “Modern Evil,” the men depicted “scantily gowned maidens” in modern attire with their “x-ray” features.
The "Baby Dolls" Page 10