The "Baby Dolls"
Page 14
WHY BABY DOLLS DANCE TODAY
In the late 1970s, when her mother and father passed and some of the ladies that used to mask with them also died, Miriam Batiste Reed got together with her family as the Baby Dolls and the Dirty Dozen Kazoo Band. When the news got out that they were going to mask as Baby Dolls, about eighteen ladies came to mask with them. The Batiste family would fortify themselves for the journey with food and prayer. They would go from house to house, and some of those were set up to receive and honor them with food and drinks: “We use to come through Claiborne Ave and it was nice. We were also invited in our Baby Doll masking to WWOZ radio.… I did the talking about the Baby Dolls, how it started and who my family was.” Miriam Batiste Reed’s connection to the early Tremé neighborhood Baby Doll tradition makes her a sought-after figure on all things Baby Doll. She has taught subsequent maskers the meaning, the costuming, the accessories, the style, and the flair of the tradition. Filmmaker Royce Osborn arranged and observed one such workshop led by Reed: “She showed them how to walk: ‘You got to have a walk to you.’ You got to shake it a little bit.”13
In the 1980s, sixth-generation Tremé resident Merline Kimble gathered a group of friends to revive her grandparents’ Gold Diggers Club to mask as Baby Dolls. In recent years, they have masked on Carnival at the Backstreet Cultural Museum in New Orleans, in March on “Super Sunday” with the Mardi Gras Indians, and in August with the “Satchmo Salute” second-line parade. In the view of the city’s youngest Baby Doll, Deja Andrews, “Sometimes I like being a Baby Doll. I like it when I get paid. Some people say they don’t want to dress up in costumes because it is not Halloween. I like dancing. I am not embarrassed when people are looking at us parading. I feel happy; like I am in my own world.”14
In early 2000, Antoinette K-Doe garnered quite a bit of media coverage of her revival of the Baby Dolls. With the knowledge and assistance of Miriam Batiste Reed, K-Doe held a workshop at her Mother-in-Law Lounge, on North Claiborne Avenue. Reed taught the women how to make the satin Baby Doll outfits. Plagued by the image of the Baby Dolls as prostitutes, K-Doe went to great pains to distinguish her group of business owners and professional women from that stereotype. According to Eva Perry—founding member, K-Doe friend, and owner of Tee-Eva’s New Orleans Praline Shop—the way they mask “is clean.” Perry hands out pra lines as the Baby Dolls march. “I want to make someone happy and it is nice to give back to the community. Even some youngsters want to be a Baby Doll someday.” Their aim is to have fun and act as a social aid and pleasure club. They were the pallbearers at the funeral of Lloyd Washington, the last living member of the Ink Spots vocal group.15
Geannie Thomas (top right) and Miriam Batiste Reed (bottom right) were among the pallbearers at the funeral of Lloyd Washington. Photo graph by Angelo Coclanis, used with permission.
Antoinette K-Doe (left front) and Miriam Batiste Reed (right). Photograph by Angelo Coclanis, used with permission.
The charitable activities of Ernie K-Doe’s Baby Dolls are well-known. Their benevolent efforts include contributions to the New Orleans Musicians Clinic, feeding the homeless alongside the Sheriff’s Department on Thanksgiving, and countless appearances in nursing homes and other venues to promote the culture. At their core, they are entertainers. According to founding member Geannie Thomas, “When I met Antoinette, she got me into dancing, and the Mardi Gras thing and parades. Now, I am a rhythm-and-blues dancer.”16
New Orleans Society of Dance founder Millisia White grew up in the Sixth Ward and always wanted to become a Baby Doll. Her founding of a dance company coincided with the ravages of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. White was in the city during the flooding and reported, “We felt like everything was in jeopardy when Katrina happened.” Together with her brother, turntablist DJ Hektik, and her mentor, Eddie Edwards, they brainstormed over how to “connect the people.” They turned to “what has been constant since 1719. We have always been surviving extreme devastation of life and property. We wanted to resurrect the things that unified us—what makes New Orleans.” White noted that
wherever jazz went the dance went, but the dance is hardly mentioned and it is such an oversight. Baby Dolls always chanted. Chanting is just like Indian jive. I remember them with the tambourines, with a small band. They had homemade tambourines back then. They would always sing and dance, like church, like old time when they would second line. We have updated the traditional dance and music with bounce, New Orleans underground, or the New Orleans vernacular of hip hop. DJ Hektik laid tracks under our chants. When we perform, we incorporate the tambourine and the cowbell and upgrade it with bounce, and it is a way for us to introduce it to the new generation.17
The aim of Millisia White’s Baby Doll Ladies is to “put dance on the same platform as the music.”
We put the music, song, and dance together to do that. In 2007 we presented a proposal to the city and were awarded a small sponsorship to do shorts and info reels. My brother, DJ Hektik, was able to get the celebrities to join in. The celebrities liked the idea of the cultural resurrection and did not want to let the culture die. We want to shine light on all things being resurrected that are positive about the place. Holding true to our customs and culture, we started where we stood. We put on a floor show, a production benefit, and the city came out. We thought about what we could contribute; what could we resurrect. By means of videography performances, we informed the world about what Creole culture is all about: the artistry of it. In that way we served as that example of hope. If someone starts a band, we want to collaborate. We aren’t waiting. We are doing it with the means at our hands.18
Since the beginning of the jazz age, the music has changed to keep up with the changes in dance steps. So it is today. The Baby Doll Ladies incorporate bounce, a New Orleans expression of hip hop. Bounce uses call and response, Mardi Gras Indian chanting, and dance call-outs. Consistent with the “raddy” tradition, bounce dancing is very sexual.
A TOUGHNESS OF SPIRIT AND A JOY FOR LIFE
The interview Millisia White and I conducted with Merline Kimble, Lois Nelson, and Patricia McDonald on a Sunday afternoon in April 2010 transitioned from why the women masked and continued to breathe life into the Gold Digger tradition to how they had met life’s setbacks with a determined and steely will that they believed should be taught to other women in similar circumstances.19
When Lois Nelson performs her role as grand marshal for a funeral parade, she has developed a practice of dancing on the casket. Lois specialized in getting on top of the casket during the second-line part of the funeral. “They always ask me when they are rolling the casket, how can I dance on it. There is a certain way I grip my feet, my shoe that keep me from sliding.” Her motivation is to “do unto others” what she would like to have done for her. Nelson believes that this is the way the person wants to go and they way she wants to go. “Get on top of me, have fun, and then let me go.” Nelson’s teenage son, Darnell “D-Boy” Andrews, was murdered at the age of seventeen in 1995.20 Anthropologist Helen Regis witnessed the moving funerary tribute to a young man gunned down in what has become an epidemic of the loss of Black male youth, part of the vagaries of latetwentieth-century capitalism: a destructive masculine code of conduct and drug activity that satisfies greed, but that is also used for the mitigation of despair. Nelson recalled that when she stood on D-Boy’s coffin she “didn’t want to feel the emotion of crying. God had given me a time to be with him while he was living. Through his death was my time to rejoice.” Music is what got her through. Kimble recalled that Lois placed stereo speakers in front of her home and played an Anita Baker CD non-stop for a week. The community tolerated her public display of grief. Though she “drove the block crazy” with the repetition, no one complained.
Merline Kimble (in Baby Doll costume) at the funeral of Collins “Coach” Lewis, Mardi Gras Indian costume artist, August 13, 2011. Other maskers pictured are Bruce Sunpie Barnes, chief of the Northside Skull and Bones Gang (far right), and
Victor Harris of Fi Yi Yi (fourth from left). Photograph by Keith Weldon Medley, used with permission.
Gold Digger Baby Dolls at the Louis Satchmo Salute, an annual second-line parade in Armstrong’s honor. Photograph by Eli Prytikin, used with permission.
Reflecting on that time and the lessons she has learned from it, Nelson believes that the young people are oblivious to the effect the culture of violence will have on the people they leave behind. “Some mothers take it so hard. Some take it as days go by. There is nothing we can do about it. We can’t bring them back, but we can find closure. I don’t remember anything bad; I just remember the good times. Some mamas just crack up. They shouldn’t crack up. They should have something where the strong mamas can tell the weak mothers how to be strong. We are trying to tell children about other ways of solving problems and being successful in life besides petty comparisons about who has what and who looks better.” She longed for the time when music in Tremé was created out of the everyday occurrences of musicians living and working in the neighborhood. The children would get absorbed into their artistry, but that time has passed. Patricia McDonald, who has masked with the Gold Diggers and is an integral part of the Tremé community, added that she too had lost a son and that her way of managing the grief was to take ownership, so to speak, of his body: “I carried him in here for nine months and I carried him out. I was the pallbearer. They said, ‘You can’t do that.’ My mama said, ‘that is your child. You want to carry him, carry him. No one can tell you what to do with him. If you are strong enough, you carry him.’”
For the new-generation Baby Dolls of the New Orleans Society of Dance, lessons were learned following dislocation and relocation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane and its aftermath became part of their lexicon of expression. Kenethia “Lady N.O. Cutie” Morgan sees their dance as
A Skeleton and a Baby Doll. Photograph by Jeffrey Dupuis, used courtesy Millisia White.
New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies with D J Hektik at the Tremé Villa. Photograph by Virnado Woods, used courtesy of Millisia White.
part of what we do; we need that music to express who we are, not as an individual, but as a group. The Baby Dolls express ourselves through dance and have fun doing it. One of the songs we dance to is by Free Agents Brass Band called “Made it through that Water.” We all experienced Katrina, and we were all so glad to be back home. “We made it through that water, that muddy muddy water.” It was bad how they had us on that bridge. We want to show people how we live; why we did what we did. We almost lost our city. Some almost lost their minds living in and out of hotel rooms. We all survived and that is something the parade crowd can relate to. It is now cultural because we all experienced a tragedy and made it through.21
Similarly, Davieione (Beauty from the East) Fairley states that
you forget about the bad stuff and separate yourself from it. When we are masking and dancing, it is not about the bad stuff. We release the tension through dancing. That is where we get our energy and our motivation. We express ourselves to each other and the world. If we can go out there like we don’t have a care in the world and dance, we can rub off on someone else that is going through something. This is New Orleans where we speak to each other on the street. Imagine what we can do as a group when we are performing in front of thousands. We are like them. It is just that we are together and we say, “It’s OK to feel free.”22
So what, then, is the answer to the question, “Who is this Baby Doll, and why is she referred to as such?” Baby Dolls are people full of fun who invite the community to be at play as a vital cultural reaffirmation of their faith in their own abilities to soldier on and meet life’s unexpected challenges.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NO WORK, carried out in love, is performed in isolation. I thank Millisia White, founder and director of the New Orleans Society of Dance, for an amazing experience in collaborative knowl edge creation. Millisia and I met in January 2010 when she was sponsoring a fundraiser for the New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies. After we discussed the lack of research on the Baby Doll masking tradition, she was open to my suggestion of interviewing Baby Doll maskers for an article. I contacted David Johnson, editor of Louisiana Cultural Vistas magazine, to see if there might be interest in publishing an article about the Baby Dolls. Millisia and I interviewed numerous participants in April 2010. After I drafted an article, Millisia shared what I had written with those interviewed. This feedback was incorporated, and the article was published in the Fall/Winter edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas. Barbara Melendez, news coordinator at the University of South Florida, read a draft of the article, providing important critical feedback to produce a reader-friendly manuscript. I am grateful to David Johnson for accepting that piece for publication in LCV.
In August 2010, Millisia and I approached the historians at the Louisiana State Museum’s Presbytere to discuss the possibility of an exhibition to commemorate the centennial of the tradition, which purportedly began around 1912. We met with Charles Chamberlain and Karen Leathem. They were receptive, citing the compatibility of the exhibition theme with the mission of the museum. Both have expressed and demonstrated their enthusiasm for the exhibition throughout the planning stages. Millisia and I have continued to work on gathering the objects for display, building support in the community for the exhibition, and conducting background research. The exhibition is scheduled to open in early 2013. I would like to thank the Presbytere staff, who are working to make the exhibition a reality: Dawn Deano Hammatt, director of curatorial services; K. Whitney Babineaux, interpretive services director; Karen Trahan Leathem, Louisiana State Museum historian; Katie Harrison, museum special projects coordinator; Jennae Biddiscombe, who coordinates all exhibition-related artifacts for exhibits; Gaynell Brady, K-12 program consultant, who creates and implements gallery-based programs for school audiences; Beth Sherwood, who handles all rights and reproductions; Turry M. Flucker, former community program manager and LSM project director, Louisiana Civil Rights Museum; Patrick Burns, director of exhibits; Greg Lambousy, director of collections; Aimee St. Amant, who coordinates exhibition organization and artifact installation; and Wayne Phillips, curator of costumes and textiles and curator of carnival collections. Christina Barrios developed the exhibition website, which was made possible by a Community Partnership Grant from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Foundation.
Millisia and I developed a jazz dance curriculum that we call “Creative Movement from ‘Jass’ to ‘Bounce.’” This curriculum presents a historical overview of the music and dance that enslaved Africans and free people of color developed into the current art form that has become synonymous with New Orleans’s culture. The Baby Doll tradition is included as this practice incorporated New Orleans music and dance from its very beginning. We were honored to first share the curriculum with McDonogh 42 Elementary Charter School. I offer thanks to their former staff: Roslyn Smith, president, Tremé Charter School Board of Directors; Cynthia Williams, chief executive officer; Gail Lazard, principal; Carla Lewis, assistant principal; and Donna Stuart, guidance counselor. The art teacher, Aleta Richards, took on the responsibility of reinforcing the lesson and helped the students produce beautiful masks as a culminating activity.
In the summer of 2010 I worked with two University of South Florida undergraduate research assistants, Krysta Ledford and Zachary Cardwell. Zachary was matched with me by Dr. Linda Lucas, director of the National Scholarship Office at the University of South Florida. Krysta began working with me by way of a course she took with me, History of Feminism in the United States, and through the Office of Undergraduate Research. Krysta researched the biographies of photographers past and current who took pictures of the Baby Dolls. Zachary researched obituary and census information for Golden Slipper Social and Pleasure Club members, especially Louis Reimonenq. While I was at the University of South Florida, this work was supported, in part, by the University of South Florida System, Interna
l Awards Program, Established Researcher Grant, under Grant No. 0020650.
Several reference librarians assisted me in determining whether there were any existing drawings of the Baby Dolls done by Caroline Durieux, artist and director of the Louisiana Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration. I was looking for this source as cited by Jerry Brock in his article on time he spent with the Tremé neighborhood’s Happy House Social and Pleasure Club. It turned out that the drawing was done by John McCrady and published in a book co-authored by Durieux. The librarians are Natalie A. Mault, assistant curator, Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Shaw Center for the Arts; Bruce Raeburn, curator of the Hogan Jazz Archives and assistant dean of libraries for special collections, Tulane; Mary Linn Wernet, university archivist and records officer, Cammie G. Henry Research Center Watson Library, Northwestern State University of Louisiana; and Charlene Bonnette, head librarian for Louisiana Collection Preservation, Louisiana Collection, State Library of Louisiana. Charlene also helped with reproduction permissions for photographs of the 1942 Baby Doll celebration.
Matthew Martinez was instrumental in introducing me to Blake Woods, who oversees the John McCrady estate. Both Matthew and Blake were immediately supportive of this project. Blake gave me permission to reproduce the McCrady drawings. I thank Debra Mouton for asking her relatives to verify information regarding her mother, Neliska “Baby” Briscoe, and for sharing additional information from an interview/performance of her mother. As I searched for sources about Arnold Louis Reimonenq, family members Alden Reimonenq and Mark Reimonenq responded to my questions. Mark put me in touch with his aunt Elaine Gutierrez, who has conducted research on the Reimonenq family’s genealogy. She offered first-hand memories of her uncle. Ronnie Cressy Rephan, Rudolph Cressy’s daughter, provided a rich description of her father and her own memories of her rich relationship with Louis and Fannie Reimonenq. My efforts to discover who held the copyright for Bradley Smith’s iconic photos of the Baby Dolls taken on Mardi Gras day around 1938 brought me into contact with numerous people: Daniel Hammer, head of Reader Services, The Historic New Orleans Collection, Williams Research Center; Robert C. Ray, head of Special Collections and University Archives, Library and Information Access, San Diego State University; Wendy S. Israel, manager of editorial operations, Hearst Magazines; and Victor S. Perlman, general counsel and managing director, American Society of Media Photographers. Mara Vivat, who oversees Bradley Smith Productions, was able to provide copyright permission and to give additional information about how Smith interpreted the photographs. I was also assisted by Sharon Smith, Bradley Smith’s daughter; and Hannah Flom, Smith’s niece. Millisia and I interviewed Joycelyn Green Askew, a descendant of Olivia Green, who was a Baby Doll during the Jazz Age. It is through Joycelyn that we have one of the earliest representations of the costumes of the Baby Dolls. Joycelyn’s memories of Olivia helped to give us a picture of the women who were part of this tradition.