The "Baby Dolls"
Page 11
Nevertheless, by 1910 there were women of all races and classes who engaged in raucous behavior at Mardi Gras. With the introduction of cabarets around 1910, women were coming into social contact with those who daily defied propriety. New Orleans boasted a “Tango Belt” close to the District that was a favorite dance spot for even the social elite such as professors from Newcomb College, the women’s higher-education institution. Popular dances like the tango caused outrage among moral authorities. One minister decried that “daylight” was not being seen between dancers.8 Leathem amusingly noted that one could hardly distinguish whether the dancer in costume performing the turkey trot was from Newcomb or Storyville.
Leathem concluded that as women hid their identities, they exposed their bodies, some in imitation of the prostitutes. Pushing the boundaries of respectability, some openly confronted dowagers of New Orleans with an acrobatics performance in short skirts tumbling to the sounds of a jazz band. Others behaved with abandon in rough salons. Fashionable women transgressed in good hotels by putting one foot on the brass rail of the bar; others went out in clingy attire with whips to fend off aggressors.
Three popular groups of Black women started parading during the Progressive Era. Of those, the Baby Dolls developed and sustained the most notorious reputation. Speaking of a 1947 Mardi Gras, Robert Tallant reported:
The Baby Dolls, the Gold Diggers, and the Zigaboos are groups of women maskers, loosely knitted together, who, like the Zulus, have become traditional parts of the Negro Mardi Gras. The Gold Diggers usually travel through the streets with male companions, who dress in masculine costumes that match those worn by the girls. The Baby Dolls and the Zigaboos always start out alone, but they never end the day that way.
…Baby Dolls possess a keen affection for Mardi Gras, and a lot of thought and planning goes into their costumes and make-up. To be a Baby Doll they are supposed to look as innocent as possible, which may be accepted as a perfect example of altering one’s personality, so they make their little skirts and bloomers out of chaste pink or virginal blue, the skirts pleated. They wear bloomers trimmed with ruffles and little bows. They wear waists or halters to match and bonnets that tie demurely beneath their chins. Their dusky faces, framed by long corkscrew curls of every shade, are heavily roughed and powdered. Some wear pink and blue socks, but most prefer long hose held up on their dark thighs with flashy, ruffled garters.
The Zigaboos are not quite so wicked a group and are not necessarily members of the same profession. They wear brief trunks and halters and fancy hats and often carry canes, [which] they use to effect when strutting through the streets. They walk “raddy,” too, and are great favorites with Negro men, especially the Zulus, who have a fine time calling out to them from the floats and occasionally deserting the parade for a few minutes of dancing or very public love-making. Throughout the day the Zigaboos pick up men and leave them, visit the bars and the night clubs that are always open. Like the Baby Dolls, they are usually drunk with sherry, gin and love by dark, and are not alone.9
One of the few existing artistic renderings, perhaps the only one, of the Baby Dolls was done by John McCrady. McCrady was born in 1911 and spent his formative years in rural Mississippi and Louisiana. Most of the work for which he is best known can be described by his charge from the Guggenheim Foundation “to paint the life and faith of the Southern Negro.”10 During his time, his work was considered by some Whites to be a portrait, and a sensitive one at that, of the everyday life of African Americans, especially those in rural areas. But African Americans apparently saw his work as patronizing, resulting in a scathing critique that interrupted his depictions of African Americans and shifted his focus. Nevertheless, his “Negro Maskers” appeared in the 1948 book Mardi Gras Day, by artists Ralph Wickiser, Caroline Durieux, and John McCrady. Each artist contributed a series of drawings capturing scenes of Carnival festivities. Though he did not title the work “the Baby Dolls,” it is an unmistakable representation of one of the three groups. His description bears this out: “Five Negroes, led by a masked woman, are going to see the Zulu parade even if they aren’t in it. One passes his hat. They will get paid for their fun.”11
“Negro Maskers,” drawing by John McCrady. From Ralph Wickiser, Caroline Durieux, and John McCrady, Mardi Gras Day (New York: Henry Holt, 1948). Reproduced courtesy Blake McCrady Woods and the McCrady Estate.
“A group starts out for the day,” drawing by John McCrady. From Mardi Gras Day. Repro duced courtesy Blake McCrady Woods and the McCrady Estate.
McCrady uses himself and his family to offer a drawing with a larger community context. In his work titled “A group starts out for the day,” nine revelers emerge from a shotgun house,12 a home that McCrady owned and lived in with his wife on Palmyra Street. Two are masked as a devil and an angel, while two others, similarly dressed, are masked as Cyrano de Bergerac.13 McCrady himself with his daughter Tucker and her cousin Kalma pose for a photograph. McCrady writes that one of the group yells, “Hurry up! We’ll miss Zulu.”14 The family still owns the home, according to McCrady’s grandson Blake Woods.15
THE SPREAD OF THE BABY DOLL MASKING PRACTICE
The Million Dollar Baby Dolls have come to embody the entire masking phenomenon. But they were just the beginning, and not the whole of the Baby Doll tradition. We can only speculate about the timing of their cultural impact on women in New Orleans. No one knows when Baby Doll masking crossed over and entered the mainstream African American community’s Mardi Gras tradition. As difficult as it is to locate an exact date for the beginning of the Baby Doll practice, I settled on the development of the tradition during the founding years of Zulu and the Black Indian organizing because the founding members of these groups knew each other and were negotiating their public presences. Beatrice Hill emphatically stated that Johnny Metoyer, a founding member of the Zulus, wanted the Baby Dolls to become part of that group, but she rejected the offer, preferring to have her own gang.16 This struggle for visibility and independent identity was undertaken by both men and women and exemplifies Sherrie Tucker’s point that “jazz participation became a way of being modern, of participating in new musical forms, new technologies (such as radio, motor vehicle travel), and new gender possibilities at once. These different relationships held by women of jazz in New Orleans co-existed in close proximity facilitated by migration (both out and in), travel, religious diversity, ethnic diversity (and changing definitions, identifications and legal restrictions).”17
But exactly when the Baby Doll masking tradition entered mainstream Black culture no one can know for sure. Miriam Batiste Reed believes the heyday of her mother’s masking was in the late 1930s. Born in 1927, Miriam has memories of her mother’s masking back to when Miriam was eight, around 1935. Several things are clear: Black women’s participation in the District had continued since the close of the formal vice district in 1917, and women from this occupational group continued to mask on Mardi Gras as Baby Dolls. What was also true was that many other groups of women who offered support services to that group of Baby Dolls, such as being their laundresses, were in close interaction with these women, especially about issues of dress and style, and they also masked as Baby Dolls with their own husbands, friends, and neighbors.
Moreover, men had long been masking as Baby Dolls in short sexy dresses. Black New Orleans culture liberally supported cross-dressing for men and women. Both during the Carnival season and on Mardi Gras Day and in the club scene, the fluidity of gender identities and sexual desire was in play. In the club scene, popular transvestite performers at the Dew Drop Inn, the famous musicians’ haunt at 2836 LaSalle Street, were reigned over by Irving Ale, whose stage name was “Patsy Vidalia.” Ale had been influenced by trans performers at the Black nightclub Caledonia around the late 1930s. It was in this fertile soil that “Little Richard” Penniman’s alter ego, “Princess Lavonne,” would be planted a decade later.18 In more sacred and less profane spaces, Leafy Anderson, founder of the Black Spiritual church m
ovement in New Orleans, hired jazz bands for social and religious purposes. Anderson also cross-dressed during religious plays that she arranged and starred in at her church.
Kenneth Leslie grew up in the Calliope Project19 in uptown New Orleans. This Third Ward neighborhood bordered the streets of Dorgenois, Roman, Martin Luther King Drive (formerly Melpomene), and Iroquois. When Leslie was ten (around 1961),20 he overheard his mother and her friends debating a heated issue concerning the politics of the Baby Doll maskers in their neighborhood. Elizabeth Russell, Janice Smith, and his mother, Clothilde Kennedy Leslie, were discussing the intrigue surrounding a new group of Baby Dolls and a controversial encounter on Rampart Street: “The older/original Baby Dolls thought these new Baby Dolls were prissy and not really representative of what the Baby Doll culture was all about. They understood the Baby Doll culture-of-old” as “a rougher group of women” who “got together to do what baby dolls did. A new group of women were more of what we think a lady would be like. Baby Dolls of old had a different way of carrying themselves. I knew nothing of the claims of prostitution, but maybe that is what my mother was talking about.”
The Baby Dolls were angry that another group of women was masking and that these new women were not seen as streetwise, or true to the older women’s image of what the masking tradition was all about. In their view, these interlopers were taking over the image they had so carefully constructed over the years, and “the older generation did not care for that. They were willing to fight or they had fought. Whatever went down, it did so on Rampart Street.” Ms. Leslie and her friends “knew what the Baby Dolls were about and they weren’t surprised that if someone came in to try to take their culture,… the Baby Dolls would have an uprising against them.”
PERFORMING FEMININITY: MALE BABY DOLLS TRANSGRESSING GENDER ROLES
Some of the women didn’t look so good and some looked like men.
—Kenneth Leslie, born 1951
Baby Doll groups included a few men who would parade dressed either in satin shirts and pants, in costumes such as police officers, or in the Baby Doll costumes. There may have been some gay men who paraded together as Baby Dolls. In addition, the Batiste family’s custom of parading as the “Dirty Dozen” band included throngs of young Black men who would borrow their female relatives’ clothes to mask as women. The band extended its cross-dressing tradition to playing local performances. Their attention-getting attire, combined with their musical strength, catapulted them to notoriety.21
Royce Osborn’s documentary All on a Mardi Gras Day contains one of the few detailed examples of African American men’s penchant for masking elegantly as women. On Carnival before integration, a great deal of male and female cross-dressing is said to have taken place. But the paucity of research on the subject requires stretching a bit to the musical world, where there is documented evidence of the “female impersonator” tradition at the legendary Dew Drop Inn. In 2011, Millisia White and I asked Tremé musician Lionel Batiste to try to identify or give context to the cross-dressed African American men in images from the 1930s and 1940s captured by WPA photographers. While he did not recognize them as Baby Dolls, the photos do provide evidence of the popularity of African American male cross-dressing, gender-bending, and transgressive homosociality.
“Street scene during Carnival of African Americans in costume in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the 1930s.” From the Collection of the U.S. Works Progress Administration of Louisiana, courtesy State Library of Louisiana.
Robert McKinney reported on the incident that probably led to the decline of Baby Doll masking on St. Joseph’s feast night. Recalling March 19, 1940, McKinney titled his essay, “Captain Jackson Keeps the Baby Dolls from Strutting Their Stuff.” He described the nature of the event in detail:
St. Joseph night was clear, slightly chilly, but perfectly swell for mirth, especially Baby Doll fun. This is the night that is usually a second Mardi Gras for a lot of people, i.e., Baby Dolls and their ilk. They mask and wave their hips, sing low down blues songs to the accompaniment of loud cornets, banjos, drums and other instruments. They frolic on the streets much in the same manner as they do on Fat Tuesday; their shimmies are strictly solid and always attract large crowds.
In their minds, they had built up St. Joseph night as “the biggest night we ever had”; they had re-pressed their long-waisted, pleated skirts of bright colors and had turned enough tricks to have green backs in their stockings. Nothing was going to stop the Baby Dolls, not even a storm. “There is always an inside.”
African American male maskers, photo taken by Joseph O. Misshore. From the Louisiana Weekly Photograph Collection, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.
Well, there was no storm, but something happened that was much worse, its effects are still being felt and promulgated. The Archbishop stepped into the picture and said there should not be any masking because it fell in the Lenten Season. He suggested April 2 instead. Like Jennie Watts said, “Who is the Archbishop? He ain’t none of our pappy,” and she is a Baby Doll whose attitudes about most things is definitely indifferent. Because the Archbishop made himself clear in the matter, Captain Jackson of the First Precinct sent out a word that there must be no masking, only a few Baby Dolls accepted his message; they promised to mask and were going to do so. They were so persistent the usually calm police captain became irate and contacted them himself. Baby Irene, some kind of dictator in Baby Doll affairs, stated, “The Captain says, ‘I don’t want no masking, and if any of you do, so I’m going put your black asses in jail.’ Cause, I personally wouldn’t give a fuck, but I don’t feel like going back to jail. I just got out.”
…There were only three masked Baby Dolls present: their rusty legs peeped from under short, satin skirts which were tight around their posteriors. Masking was very light among some of the Baby Dolls for the first time in twenty years. One of the more peppery Baby Dolls said she didn’t give a damn what the Archbishop said, she was going to mask, and she did so. This dishpan-faced Baby Doll must have been charged with a “weed” cigarette (she was certainly “togged” down in a short red skirt with a cowboy-like hat) because she left the scene literally walking on air, stating, “I’m going to the Tick Tock and I’m high as a kite.” Somebody chided, “You ain’t never get in no Tick Tock, that’s high class nigger winch.” The “chick” laughed, but changed her mind about going to the Tick Tock.
According to Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, in the nineteenth century “chick” was slang for a man. In the 1940s “chick” could refer to a male prostitute. It was only in the mid-twentieth century, from the 1950s onward, that “chick came to represent a term for women and the things women would be interested in, such as [a] ‘chick movie.’”22 The quotation marks around the word “chick” in McKinney’s typed transcript is evidence that the Baby Doll in question was probably a man.
Documented evidence of Black men in New Orleans doing drag or masking as women dates back to the 1920s. Marybeth Hamilton noted that the Black female-impersonation performative genre that emerged from Black working-class culture was widely appealing to all strata of African Americans and to interracial couples.23 Both were groups who attended the frequent and annual drag balls and galas from the 1920s through the 1950s. Their events also garnered the devoted attention of the Black press. It is almost unimaginable today to picture the Black press according significant cultural weight and fawning on Black gay culture, yet prior to integration, this indeed was their posture. Thaddeus Russell writes that
both Ebony, which began publishing in 1945, and Jet, founded in 1951, gave regular, prominent, and positive coverage of the drag balls in Chicago, New York, and Detroit, and through the early 1950s regularly featured articles on homosexuality. Jet claimed that drag balls were staged in “nearly every big U.S. Negro community.” The typical article on the balls in the magazines passed no negative judgments, and included several photos of drag queens dancing with and kissing men, as well as detailed descriptions of the performers’ o
utfits. The “female impersonators” were “dazzling,” “stunning,” “vivacious,” and “more shapely than [a] burlesque queen.”24
Black female impersonators were an exciting mainstay attraction for 1940s audiences that gathered at local bars and jazz clubs in New Orleans. Barred from White establishments, Blacks were not about to forgo the entertainments of the adult pleasure industries. Clubs like the Dew Drop Inn, Caledonia, the Club Desire, and the Club Tijuana regularly booked gender-bending acts. The most famous of these was the aforementioned Patsy Vidalia, born Irving Ale in 1921 in Vacherie, Louisiana. Patsy fancied herself as the “Toast of New Orleans,” and sponsored an annual gala that was considered an important social event.
THE PROCESSION: A RITUAL JOURNEY ON CARNIVAL DAY
Over time, the African American community developed a style of communication about its claims to self-definition through ritualized processions along public streets. Writer and cultural historian Kalamu ya Salaam describes these journeys as part of an aesthetic: “Unlike the Eurocentric tradition of a centralized place (museums, galleries, exhibitions, etc.) which the people go to in order to view the best artwork, the African tradition emphasizes literally moving the art through the community. Again, the tradition is ‘masked’ as a Mardi Gras parade which is both acceptable to the dominant society and within the means of the Black community.”25 In the early days of the Zulu parade, routes were not predictable but always included stops for varying lengths of time at spots in which there were either business relationships or historic significance to the paraders.