—Interview with Eva Perry, an Ernie K-Doe Baby Doll, April 25, 2010
One hundred years ago, when it would be Mardi Gras time, the women in New Orleans they would get dressed and go out early in the morning. The skull heads would come out, the Indians would come next, and then the Baby Dolls. The Baby Dolls would have flouncy clothes. Very short skirts, bloomers, lace stocking and garters on their legs. Back then they were hustlers; that’s what the Baby Dolls were. They went out to make money on a Mardi Gras Day. That’s why they went out early because they knew people were coming out to see the Indians. Men would put money in their garter and they made sure that dress was short enough for the men to see the garter and the men knew what they meant having that fancy garter on their leg. When we originated having the Baby Dolls we changed that thing around. We got all professional ladies and ladies who owned businesses. Antoinette K-Doe wanted to keep Ernie K-Doe’s name out there. We became the Ernie K-Doe Baby Dolls. We got with Ms. Batiste and learned the history and made the customs. But we would do it differently by doing the things for charity. We have functions amongst ourselves. We don’t raise money, we put money up. It is to keep the Baby Dolls alive, but we changed the actions of the Baby Dolls.
—Interview with Eva Perry, April 25, 2010
There’s a great story Antoinette K-Doe told me about (Ms.) Lollipop bringing her dress to Houston after Hurricane Katrina. You’re evacuating a hurricane, you’re lucky to bring your toothbrush, and she brought her Baby Doll outfit with her. Anyway, everybody at the shelter was depressed, so to cheer them up she decided to put on her Baby Doll outfit and second-line in the crowd. And somebody yelled out to her, “Hey lady, put some clothes on!”’
—Robert Florence, New Orleans Cemeteries: Life in the Cities of the Dead, quoted in Noah Bonaparte Pais, “Rally of the Dolls,” February 16, 2009, Gambit, www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/rally-of-the-dolls/Content?oid=1256917
SURVIVING THE STORM: RENEWING SPIRITS AND CREATING NEW TRADITIONS
The song lyric “We made it through the water, the muddy, muddy water,” by the Free Agents Brass Band, is a post-Katrina anthem. Along their parade route, the New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies perform to this selection. In fact, the events surrounding and following Hurricane Katrina are what propelled Millisia White and her brother DJ Hektik to create the dance company. The New Orleans Society of Dance uses aspects of New Orleans’s culture, music, dance, and costuming to inspire and encourage members of the community. Among the first to mask after Katrina were Lois Nelson and Merline Kimble, who reassembled the Gold Diggers. Adapting evening gowns for their masking, they demonstrated the resilience characteristic of the original Baby Dolls: out of nothing, create something.
After Katrina and we came back home, it was me, Pat, Deja, and Cinnamon. We all participated in the Armstrong parade celebration. We didn’t have fabric to make the satin dresses. There was nowhere for us to get anything so we dealt with what we had. Cinnamon had evening dresses. Pat became a grandma baby doll. We took the evening gowns and cut them and made them short. We took the part that we cut off from the evening gown and made the bloomers. We weren’t dressed like you see Wanda and Merline dressed, we were dressed more up-to-date. We sprayed our hats. Then we went back to the tradition and come out like we use to come out with the bonnet and the bloomers.
—Interview with Lois Nelson, Gold Digger Baby Dolls, April 25, 2010
Going through the experience of Hurricane Katrina taught me to submit to and praise God. The message I got is that we are hopeless, but we still thanked God in the midst of it. Some people can’t fathom how to sing and praise him in the midst of Katrina. That is where I pulled all of my cultural understanding and my spiritual together. I came back to New Orleans and that is what inspired the “Resurrection,” not just of the Baby Dolls, but my desire to promote New Orleans music, song, and dance in general. It was to be an example of hope. This is our testimony. We want people to share their testimony. What do you feel you want to resurrect about New Orleans culture? What is your contribution to the resurrection? We motivate and give people a reason why we should hold on to what makes us different and unique.
I wanted to take my experience to the next level and found a dance company. That is how the New Orleans Society of Dance was formed. It is typical for a dance company to have a face or a theme. We took our theme… from practices from “back in the day,” which is our birthright. We borrow from the idea and contribute to the idea. Everyone’s neighborhood had a group of Baby Dolls. It was womanhood personified. To do the tradition justice we consulted with the elders and, with the blessing of past generations of Baby Dolls, we cultivate it, upgrade it, and bring it to 2012.
—Interview with Millisia White, founder, New Orleans Society of
Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies, and “Lady Bee,” April 22, 2010
APPENDIX B
Some Known Million Dollar Baby Doll Participants
APPENDIX C
The Geographical Landscape of the Million Dollar Baby Doll
APPENDIX D
Million Dollar Baby Doll Slang Meaning
APPENDIX E
Charting the History of Baby Doll Groups
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Mary Ellison, “Charmaine Neville, the Mardi Gras Indians, and the Music of Opposi tional Politics,” Popular Music and Society 18 (1994): 19–39; George Lipsitz, “Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counter-Narrative in Black New Orleans,” Cultural Critique 10 (1988): 99–121; Maurice M. Martinez, “Delight in Repetition: The Black Indians,” Wavelength (February 1982): 21–25; Joseph Roach, “Mardi Gras Indians and Others: Genealogies of American Performance,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 461–83; Rosita M. Sands, “Carnival Celebrations in Africa and the New World: Junkanoo and the Black Indians of Mardi Gras,” Black Music Research Journal 11 (1991): 75–92; Michael P. Smith, “Behind the Lines: The Black Mardi Gras Indians and the New Orleans Second Line,” Black Music Research Journal 14 (1994): 43–73; Michael P. Smith, Mardi Gras Indians (Gretna., La: Pelican Publishing Co., 1994); and Kathryn VanSpanckeren, “The Mardi Gras Indian Song Cycle: A Heroic Tradition,” MELUS 16 (1989–90): 41–56.
1. GENDER, RACE, AND MASKING IN THE AGE OF JIM CROW
1. Roger D. Abrahams, Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Jason Berry, “African Cultural Memory in New Orleans Music,” BMR Journal 8 (1988): 3–12; Marcia Gaudet, “‘Mardi Gras, Chic-a-la-Pie’: Reasserting Creole Identity through Festive Play,” Journal of American Folklore 114 (2001): 154–74; Kevin Fox Gotham, “Marketing Mardi Gras: Commodification, Spectacle and the Political Economy of Tourism in New Orleans,” Urban Studies 39 (2002): 1735–56; Kevin Fox Gotham, “Tourism from Above and Below: Globalization, Localization and New Orleans’s Mardi Gras,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2005): 309–26; James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); Helen A. Regis, “Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,” Cultural Anthropology 13 (1999): 472–504. For more on the role of social and pleasure clubs in Mardi Gras traditions, see chapter 4.
2. Alecia P. Long, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004).
3. Laurraine Goreau, Just Mahalia, Baby: The Mahalia Jackson Story (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1984), 35.
4. In response to a statement by Dianne Rehm that “you’re also perhaps going up against a huge bank of scholars who are ready to pounce on you and say, you’re wrong,” Schiff quipped, “Well, you’re also going up against Elizabeth Taylor, which I would say is an even greater obstacle.” Elizabeth Taylor is legendary for her role in the Hollywood film Cleopatra, which takes many liberties with the facts of the actual woman’s life. For many, she has come to represent the icon
ic historic picture of who Cleopatra was and what she looked like. Of course, reality was much different, as Schiff learned in her research.thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-1109/stacy-schiff-cleopatra/transcript, Nov 9, 2010. The emphasis on the disreputable aspects of the Baby Dolls has hidden the art form, which includes costuming, chanting, and dancing.
5. Administrative Correspondence, Saxon to Alsberg, December 6, 1935; Saxon to John P. Davis, December 16, 1935, Reel 1, Federal Writers’ Project: Historic New Orleans Collection, hereafter abbreviated FWP-HNOC.
6. Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folktales of Louisiana (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 2006), 1–26; Robert Tallant, Mardi Gras… as It Was (1948; Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1994), 230–41. All of my quotations of Beatrice Hill and other women associated with the sportin’ life of the Million Dollar Baby Dolls are taken from the reports of Robert McKinney. McKinney’s interviews are to be found in Robert Tallant’s papers located at Northwestern State University of Louisiana’s Watson Library in Natchitoches.
7. Polk’s New Orleans City Directory; 1908 Orleans Parish Grooms’ Marriage Index, “G through N,” June 2004, files.usgwarchives.net/la/orleans/vitals/marriages/index/groom/1908mggn.txt.
8. Leland University Catalogue: Thirtieth Annual Session, n.d. books.google.com/books?id=e_sSAAAAIAAJ&q=leontine#v=snippet&q=leontine&f=false (see page 34).
9. Some of his articles for the Chicago Defender are: “Xavier Accepts Bid to Play Chicago Bears,” December 14, 1935, national edition; “Creole Chatter,” August 22, 1936, national edition; “Walter Barnes Goes to New Orleans,” March 6, 1937, national edition; and “No Separation of Race at 1938 Eucharistic Congress,” September 24, 1938, national edition.
10. David A. Taylor, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 147–48.
11. Orleans Death Indices, 1937–1948, State of Louisiana, Secretary of State, Division of Archives, Records Management, and History (Vital Records Indices, Baton Rouge, LA).
12. “An Online Story of Jazz in New Orleans,” Jerry Jazz Musician, www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mainHTML.cfm?page=hentoff-no-4.html (accessed July 18, 2010).
13. Mick Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 93.
14. Hollis Lynch, The Black Urban Condition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 293. For more on shake dancing, as well as other characteristic forms of New Orleans dance, see chapter 2 of this book.
15. Burns, Keeping the Beat on the Street, 93.
16. Saxon et al., Gumbo Ya-Ya, 15
17. Samuel Kinser, Carnival American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 135.
18. Eddie “Duke” Edwards, interview by the author, April 2010, Edgard, La.
19. Nickname for Storyville.
20. Ronnie Clayton, “A History of the Federal Writers’ Project in Louisiana,” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1974, 253.
21. Ann Cook was born in 1886 and lived in Back o’ Town. Ann sang the blues in the District in the brothel owned by Willie Piazza, a woman of color. Some women of color who were madams also played the cornet or sang opera to the accompaniment of Black male jazz legends such as Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton. For more on these dual roles, see Sherrie Tucker’s work on women and New Orleans jazz.
22. Danny Barker, Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville (Oxford, U.K.: Bayou Press, 1998).
23. Hidden History: Unknown New Orleanians, an exhibit curated by Emily Epstein Landau, mounted by the Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library, permanently on-line at nutrias.org/exhibits/hidden/hiddenfromhistory.htm.
24. Stephanie Stokes, “New Orleans’ Iconic Street Tiles Are Falling Victim to Repair Crews,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 21, 2009, blog.nola.com/news_impact/print.html?entry=/2009/06/olibbp102top2_0622aaa01_y8tile.html (accessed March 15, 2010).
25. Bureau of Identification, Department of Police, Tulane Ave. and Saratoga St., New Orleans.
26. See Keith Weldon Medley, We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 2003).
27. Dale A. Somers, “Black and White in New Orleans: A Study in Urban Race Relations, 1865–1900,” Journal of Southern History 40 (1974): 19–42.
28. Ibid., 36.
29. Craig L. Foster, “Tarnished Angels: Prostitution in Storyville, New Orleans, 1900–1910,” Louisiana History 31 (1990): 395.
30. Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954), 95,
31. Roger Abrahams, “Christmas and Carnival on Saint Vincent,” Western Folklore 31 (1972): 289.
32. I have substituted the terms “black women,” “black men,” and “bottoms” for terms or phrases in the original that seem inappropriate to reproduce here.
33. Jason Berry, The Spirit of Black Hawk (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995); David C. Estes, “Across Ethnic Boundaries: St. Joseph’s Day in a New Orleans Afro-American Spiritual Church,” Mississippi Folklore Register 6 (1987): 35–43; Andrew J. Kaslow, “The Afro-American Celebration of St. Joseph’s Day,” in Perspectives on Ethnicity in New Orleans, ed. John Cook and Mackie J-V Blanton (New Orleans: Committee on Ethnicity in New Orleans, 1979), 48–52; Ethelyn G. Orso, The St. Joseph Altar Traditions of South Louisiana (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1990); Kay Turner and Suzanne Seriff, “‘Giving an Altar’: The Ideology of Reproduction in a St. Joseph’s Day Feast,” Journal of American Folklore 100 (1987): 446–60.
34. Sylvester Francis, owner and curator of Backstreet Museum, suggests that the Sicilian American celebration of St. Joseph stems from the communal protection they found in his miracle. When they were hungry, embattled outcasts in their own country, St. Joseph rescued them. They return to this collective memory annually to give thanks. The Black Indians of New Orleans assert that their masking is in recognition and gratitude for the Native American people sheltering the enslaved of the region.
35. The Bernheim Bros. company had officially established the label in 1879. The initials were taken from the founder, German-born Isaac Wolfe Bernheim; “Harper” was borrowed from the name of a well-known horse breeder, F. B. Harper. The popularity of the brand could have stemmed from the awards it won at the 1885 New Orleans Exposition. (From Robin R. Preston’s pre-Prohibition website for collectors of shot glasses, www.pre-pro.com/midacore/view_glass.php?sid=RRP1813.)
36. Another colorful example of liquor marketing by an African American in New Orleans was Nathan Johnny King, an employee of F. Strauss & Son, a wholesale liquor dealer. His imaginative and aggressive marketing of “Old Crow” to African Americans earned him the moniker of the “Old Crow man.” See Keith Weldon Medley, Tan Mardi Gras, Mardi Gras Guide (Mandeville: Arthur Hardy Enterprises, 2008), 70–73.
37. This is verified by noted musicians such as George “Pops” Foster in his Autobiography. According to Foster, the “best whiskey was I. W. Harper, Murrayhill, and Sunnybrook.” These drinks “cost ten cents in the tonks and 20 cents in the cabarets.” “Long after I left New Orleans guys would come around asking me about Storyville down there. I thought it was some kind of little town we played around there that I couldn’t remember. When I found out they were talking about the red-light district, I sure was surprised.” Tom Stoddard and Pops Foster, The Autobiography of Pops Foster: New Orleans Jazz Man (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corp., 2005), 41.
38. Saxon et al., Gumbo Ya-Ya, 14. In one of the few traces of Black women speaking for themselves, we find that Black men did have an affectionate term for them, and that was “baby doll.”
39. Ibid.
40. Jessica Benjamin, “An Outline of Intersubjectivity: The Development of Recognition,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 7, supplement (1990): 33–46.
41. Judith Teicholz, “An Improvisational Attitude: Transforming Painful Patterns through Dyadic Pla
y in Psychoanalysis,” lecture, Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society Scientific Meeting, March 6, 2010.
2. WOMEN DANCING THE JAZZ
1. Credit goes to Eddie “Duke” Edwards for coining and promoting this expression.
2. Frank J. Gillis and John W. Miner, Oh, Didn’t He Ramble: The Life Story of Lee Collins as Told to Mary Collins (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974).
3. Robert McKinney, Federal Writers’ Project (1939), Box 423, Federal Writers’ Project, Cammie G. Henry Research Center, Watson Library, Northwestern State University of Louisiana.
4. Improvised, made up by the performer. Value in “hot” music is placed on playing and dancing what one feels, thinks, and experiences.
5. Danny Barker, interview by Michael White, July 21–23, 1992, Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, www.smithsonianjazz.org/oral_histories/pdf/joh_DannyBarker.pdf (accessed September 19, 2011).
6. Lawrence Gushee, “The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal 14 (1994): 1–24.
7. Reid Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 158. The tradition of the second line is discussed later in this chapter.
8. Danny Barker, A Life in Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 58.
9. To rag a tune is to enhance a single note of the melody with many dots and quicker-paced notes, which adds syncopation. A display explanation of syncopation at the Old U.S. Mint in New Orleans highlights the aim of the musical technique: “Syncopation in jazz music is what makes you want to get up and dance. Rhythmically syncopation can occur before the beat or slightly after. Syncopation adds an element of surprise by adding an accent where you wouldn’t expect it.”
The "Baby Dolls" Page 17