Miss Anne in Harlem Read online

  Dedication

  For Steve

  Epigraphs

  MISS ANNE: “A White Woman.”

  —Zora Neale Hurston, “Glossary of Harlem Slang”

  ANN; MISS ANN: Coded term for any white female. [e.g.] “His mama washes clothes on Wednesday for Miss Ann.”

  —Clarence Major, From Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang

  ANN: (1) A derisive term for a white woman. . . . Also “Miss Ann.”

  —Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk

  MISS ANN and MISTER EDDIE: Emancipated bluebloods.

  —Taylor Gordon, Born to Be

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  A Note to the Reader

  List of Illustrations

  “A White Girl’s Prayer” in “The Poet’s Page,” The Crisis

  Introduction: In Search of Miss Anne

  Part One: MISS ANNE’S WORLD

  Chapter 1:

  Black and White Identity Politics

  Chapter 2:

  An Erotics of Race

  Part Two: CHOOSING BLACKNESS: SEX, LOVE, AND PASSING

  Chapter 3:

  Let My People Go: Lillian E. Wood Passes for Black

  Chapter 4:

  Josephine Cogdell Schuyler: “The Fall of a Fair Confederate”

  Part Three:

  REPUDIATING WHITENESS: POLITICS, PATRONAGE, AND PRIMITIVISM

  Chapter 5:

  Black Souls: Annie Nathan Meyer Writes Black

  Chapter 6:

  Charlotte Osgood Mason: “Mother of the Primitives”

  Part Four: REWARDS AND COSTS: PUBLISHING, PERFORMANCE, AND MODERN REBELLION

  Chapter 7:

  Imitation of Life: Fannie Hurst’s “Sensation in Harlem”

  Chapter 8:

  Nancy Cunard: “I Speak as If I Were a Negro Myself”

  Epilogue:“Love and Consequences”

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographic Insert A

  Photographic Insert B

  About the Author

  Also by Carla Kaplan

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Illustrations

  “A White Girl’s Prayer” in “The Poet’s Page,” The Crisis

  Fania Marinoff in Harlem

  “Harlem After Dark” cartoon

  Amy Spingarn

  Opportunity awards invitation

  Tourist map of Harlem

  Harlem street scene

  Newspaper composograph of Alice Jones Rhinelander at her 1925 trial

  Etta Duryea

  Etta Duryea and Jack Johnson

  Miguel Covarrubias cartoon

  Libby Holman and Gerald Cook

  Harlem street scene

  Blanche Knopf in drag

  Libby Holman

  NAACP benefit program, close-up

  Mary White Ovington

  Helen Lee Worthing and Dr. Nelson

  Nancy Cunard, dancing

  Lillian Wood and the Morristown College faculty

  The Franklin sisters

  Morristown College memorial bust

  Morristown College for sale

  The Schuyler family at home

  The Cogdell family home in Granbury, Texas

  Josephine Cogdell and the family cook

  Josephine Cogdell as a pinup girl

  John Garth, self-portrait

  Josephine Cogdell as an artist’s model

  Josephine Cogdell Schuyler

  Josephine Cogdell Schuyler on a Harlem rooftop

  Ernestine Rose

  The Schuylers at home, reading

  Josephine Cogdell Schuyler’s scrapbook

  Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, photographed by Carl Van Vechten

  Opportunity cover

  Detail of program for Annie Nathan Meyer’s Black Souls

  Annie Nathan Meyer

  Program for Black Souls

  Charlotte Osgood Mason

  Charlotte Osgood Mason

  Cudjo Lewis

  Miguel Covarrubias cartoon

  Nancy Cunard, holding Negro

  Fannie Hurst at her desk

  Fannie Hurst’s apartment

  Fannie Hurst

  Nancy Cunard, 1924

  Nancy Cunard, with John Banting and Taylor Gordon, 1932 press conference

  Nevill Holt

  Nancy Cunard

  Nancy Cunard, with a mask from Sierra Leone

  Nancy Cunard, solarized by Barbara Ker-Seymer

  Ruby Bates and the Scottsboro mothers

  “A White Girl’s Prayer” in “The Poet’s Page,” The Crisis

  Toward the end of the 1920s, the NAACP journal, The Crisis, began to transform its “Poet’s Page” into a forum for white views of race, ranging from verses in the minstrel tradition to radical antiracist odes, often printed on the same page and without editorial comment. Although extreme, “A White Girl’s Prayer” spoke for many who longed for the exotic utopia they imagined Harlem could offer, just as Nancy Cunard’s “1930” voiced the belief of some white women that they could speak for, or as, blacks.

  Introduction: In Search of Miss Anne

  There were many white faces at the 1925 Opportunity awards dinner. So far they have been merely walk-ons in the story of the New Negro, but they became instrumental forces in the Harlem Renaissance.

  —Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance

  You know it won’t be easy to explain the white girl’s attitude, that is, so that her actions will seem credible.

  —Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven

  Fania Marinoff in Harlem.

  I did not set out to write this book. Some years back, in the course of writing Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, I needed, but could not find, information on the many white women Hurston knew and befriended in Harlem: hostesses, editors, activists, philanthropists, patrons, writers, and others. There was ample material about her black Harlem Renaissance contemporaries: “midwife” Alain Locke; leading intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois; educator Mary McLeod Bethune; activists Walter White and Charles S. Johnson; actors Paul Robeson, Charles Gilpin, and Rose McClendon; and the array of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists from the cohort with whom she edited the radical journal Fire!!—Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and John Davis—as well as satirist George Schuyler, novelists Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, and poets Claude McKay and Countée Cullen, among others. The white men associated with the Harlem Renaissance—writer and honorary insider Carl Van Vechten; writers Sherwood Anderson and Waldo Frank; playwrights Eugene O’Neill, Paul Green, and Marc Connelly; editor/satirist H. L. Mencken; activist Max Eastman; folklorists Roark Bradford and John Lomax; German artist Winold Reiss; anthropologists Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits; philanthropists Arthur and Joel Spingarn and Edwin Embree—also proved easy to research. But the white women were a problem. It seemed that there was virtually no information available about some of them. Many, such as Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy patron known as the “dragon lady” of Harlem, were described with the same few sentences in every source on the Harlem Renaissance, sentences that I eventually learned were wrong (although not before I too had committed some of them to print).

  We have documented every other imaginable form of female identity in the Jazz Age—the New Woman, the spinster, the flapper, the Gibson Girl, the bachelor girl, the bohemian, the twenties “mannish” lesbian, the suffragist, the invert, and so on. But until now, the full story of the white women of black Harlem, the women collectively referred to as “Miss Anne,” has never been told. White women who wrote
impassioned pleas such as “A White Girl’s Prayer” (see frontispiece) about their longings to escape the “curse” of whiteness have rarely been regarded seriously.

  Some believed they should not be. The press sexualized and sensationalized Miss Anne, often portraying her as either monstrous or insane. To blacks she was unpredictable, as likely to sentimentalize a “gleeful,” “trusting,” eye-rolling “pickaninny,” as Edna Barrett did on “The Poet’s Page,” or to claim that she could speak for black desires to murder “Crackers,” as Nancy Cunard did there also (see frontispiece), as she was to question or criticize her own status. And so, blacks did not necessarily welcome her presence either, although they often sidestepped saying so publicly or in print. Miss Anne crops up in Harlem Renaissance literature as a minor character—a befuddled dilettante or overbearing patron whose presence in cabarets or political meetings spawns outbreaks of racial violence. Occasionally, she is caricatured in black newspapers, as in this cartoon image of white women flocking to throw gold, jewels, and cars at one sexy young black man, known in those days as a “sheik.” Relying on these stock characters, we might believe that she was found only in cabarets, drinking and “jig-chasing” (pursuing black lovers), or enthroned on New York’s Upper East Side, bankrolling black writers. Historians and critics such as Kevin Mumford, Susan Gubar, and Ann Douglas dismiss these women as “slummers” guilty of “sinister . . . vampirism” and pronounce their incursions into Harlem undeserving of serious inquiry. Even Baz Dreisinger’s recent Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture, the only book of its kind on this subject, mentions just one woman, the journalist Grace Halsell. There are a few individual biographies of these women. These biographies typically dispense with their time in Harlem in a few pages, although it was often the most important and exciting period of their lives.

  A bevy of sex-starved white women showering riches on one lone “sheik” (Harlem slang for a hip black man).

  Some still believe that Miss Anne’s story should remain untold. Often dismissed as a sexual adventurer or a lunatic, Miss Anne may be one of the most reviled but least explored figures in American culture. Miss Anne in Harlem aims to see what can be understood now about this figure’s unlikely, often misunderstood, choices. What can we resurrect about her lived experience of “identity politics,” and how might that be relevant today? What context gave her choices meaning? Why have so few questions been asked about her actions? Could we reconstruct her own view of what she was doing in Harlem without first imposing judgment? One problem with dismissing these women out of hand is that so many of the principal engineers of the Harlem Renaissance sincerely loved them, even if their efforts to become “voluntary Negroes” and speak for blacks also made them nervous.

  Sometimes it seems as if Miss Anne engineered her own erasure from the historical record. Some of the most influential white women in Harlem—such as NAACP founder Mary White Ovington, Harlem librarian Ernestine Rose, and philanthropist Amy Spingarn—believed that they were most effective when they drew the least attention to themselves. Some of Harlem’s white women destroyed their own papers. Laboring still under the dictum that a lady’s name should appear in public only upon her birth, marriage, and death and that all other notice of her was unseemly, many of them went to great lengths not to be mentioned. Some of their papers were destroyed by disapproving family members. Some were thrown in with those of their husbands or the famous men with whom they worked. Some of their records remain unprocessed to this day. This lack of materials reflects both the history of gender and the gendered history of Harlem.

  It was one thing for white men to go “slumming” in Harlem, where they could enjoy a few hours of “exotic” dancers and “hot” jazz, then grab a cab downtown. But it was another thing altogether for white women to embrace life on West 125th Street. Epitomizing everything that was unrespectable at a time when social respectability meant a great deal more than it does now, a white woman who embraced Harlem risked extraordinary disapproval, even ostracism. In the 1920s, short of becoming a prostitute, there was no surer way for a white woman to invite derision than to eschew her whiteness or be intimate with a black man. The ease with which Miss Anne’s embrace of black Harlem has been dismissed as either degeneracy or lunacy, rather than explored as a pioneering gesture worthy of attention, indicates how fundamentally she challenged her era’s cherished axioms of racial identity, axioms often held on both sides of the color line, and still valued in many circles today.

  The “race spirit” of the Harlem Renaissance was militant rebellion, born from the galvanizing return of Harlem’s triumphant 369th Regiment of the American Expeditionary Forces (also known as the “Harlem Hellfighters”), at the end of World War I. Du Bois’s best-known essay, “Returning Soldiers,” calls on other “New Negroes” to “return from fighting” and “return fighting” the enemy at home. It echoed Claude McKay’s often-reprinted poem “If We Must Die,” admonishing “far outnumbered” black men that however “pressed to the wall” they might be, they should die “fighting back.” That spirit was echoed in such essays as W. A. Domingo’s “If We Must Die,” published in The Messenger in 1919, which noted that “The New Negro has arrived with stiffened back bone, dauntless manhood, defiant eye, steady hand and a will of iron.” This fighting spirit buttressed the “race pride” that Alain Locke called “the mainspring of Negro life.” And it largely precluded the white Negrotarians flooding Harlem. To some extent, white male philanthropists could fight their way in—if insider status was their goal—by modeling themselves after white abolitionist militants such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison. But with the rare exception of a few antilynching activists, white women could do no such thing. While it seemed to some Harlemites that “Negrotarians . . . came in almost infinite variety,” many of the most devoted white female activists found themselves at sea.

  Caught between a militancy they could not model and a desire not to seem like primitivist interlopers, white women philanthropists had to tread carefully to get their bearings in Harlem. The most effective among them, especially in the early years of the New Negro movement, tended to build on such foremothers as the female abolitionists or the New England schoolteachers in southern freedmen’s schools. For the most part, though, Miss Anne was a singular figure who kept other white women at bay and struggled to make a place for herself in Harlem alone.

  Often, they went to remarkable lengths to draw attention away from themselves. Amy Spingarn, daughter of a wealthy manufacturer, always allowed her husband, Joel, and his brother, Arthur, to take credit for her civil rights work, though it was her money that paid for all the prizes and philanthropy given in their names.

  Amy Spingarn.

  Sometimes Miss Anne was asked what she was doing. “I have found since I have become known in radical Negro work,” Mary White Ovington wrote, “that colored people, under their pleasant greetings, are thinking, ‘Why did you take up the Negro cause?’ . . . I try to answer, but it takes a long time to explain.”

  Taking that time is the work of this book.

  Many of the women in this book were once famous. One was America’s highest-grossing writer (now largely unread). Two were the subject of lengthy New Yorker profiles. Another was the target of endless society stories and Movietone newsreels. Others appeared frequently in newspaper accounts. One was so infamous in Harlem that her name was hardly uttered, because she strictly forbade it. But trying to capture these women can be like looking at images drawn in invisible ink. Sometimes Miss Anne seems to vanish the moment she is spotted. One of these women, Lillian Wood, has been miscategorized as black for almost a hundred years. A white identity seemed so unthinkable, given her choices, that her blackness has always been assumed. She looked toward Harlem from the South, where she had all but disappeared into a small black college.

  Almost all histories of the Harlem Renaissance begin with two of the first literary celebrations to bring together Harlem intellectuals and white publishers, e
ditors, and philanthropists: the Civic Club and Opportunity awards dinners of 1924 and 1925 sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the National Urban League’s journal. I thought I would begin my search for Miss Anne there. I was sure I would see these women in photos of those important inaugural interracial galas, and I hoped that photo captions would help me identify them and the roles they played there as judges, patrons, writers, hostesses, and friends. But no photos of the dinners survive. And in the myriad written descriptions of the events, two of the most celebrated in New York’s social history, white women are mentioned fleetingly at best, though they did attend in large numbers.

  The Civic Club dinner on March 21, 1924, connected the cream of New York’s literati to the Harlem Renaissance’s advance guard, creating interracial networks the movement would depend on for years to come. As Opportunity reported, it was a chance “for many of the contestants to meet in person many of those who were making American literature.” The evening was a fantastic success, providing whites with a wealth of cultural material and blacks with needed social resources. In fact, the Civic Club dinner became so legendary that it soon proved necessary to host a second, larger dinner, on May 1, 1925. Taking place downtown in the Fifth Avenue Restaurant, this was the premier interracial cultural event of the year. It was “a novel sight,” according to the New York Herald Tribune, with “white critics whom everybody knows, Negro writers whom nobody knew—meeting on common ground.” “Novel” it may have been. But in almost every other way, the Herald’s reporter missed the mark. The gathering in those white, gold, and mirrored rooms was not Old New York’s hidebound version of Who’s Who. This was a new social order, one in which the “Negro writers” were well known indeed. They were the reason Greenwich Village, Midtown publishing, and uptown university types were there. Harlem was already “hot.”