Miss Anne in Harlem Read online

  Journals such as Opportunity often used African arts.

  “Common ground” was not equal ground, however. Of the nearly two dozen contest judges, eighteen were white, as were all the section heads for each competing literary genre. The dinner was free for most of the white attendees, who were designated as “honorary” invitees. But black attendees, or “supporting” guests, as they were called, were charged handsomely for their chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas. One black award winner, Brenda Ray Moryck (a granddaughter of the editor of The Colored American, the most important antebellum weekly in the nation), reflected on the “paradox” of treating whites as experts on black culture when “colored people always have known [more about whites] and always will . . . than they will ever know about the black race.” Men and women were not in the same position either that night. Most of the white women who went to Harlem did so with limited cultural capital. Their funds were rarely their own, siphoned, sometimes surreptitiously, from their fathers or husbands. For every well-connected white publisher, editor, or producer—such as Carl Van Vechten, editor John Farrar, or literary critic Van Wyck Brooks—seated comfortably at one of the room’s round white tables and keen to acquire protégés, new authors, or clients, there was an equally keen white woman with fewer resources at her disposal.

  Admittedly, what Miss Anne wanted was often hard to pin down. The dozens of white women who attended that night were as divergent a lot as those who published their pieces on “The Poet’s Page.” Some were primitivists, such as Edna Barrett and the writer and translator Edna Worthley Underwood, who thought black people were “a new race differently endowed” that could help restore white culture and art “because joy—its mainspring—is dying so rapidly in the Great Caucasian Race.” Others were activists squirming in their high-backed chairs whenever such things were said. Some came looking for friends or collaborators. Others sought the thrill of being rebels. Many came to escape the social conventions that awaited them at home: lectures, calling cards, concerts, and whist. Most wanted to be members of something meaningful, to be part of a group. Some may have shared the hopes of a white woman named Sarah N. Gelhorn, who wrote in to the radical black weekly Chicago Defender, “I have sometimes dreamed of a band of justice-loving white women.” When journalists bothered to mention the white women of Harlem, which was not often, they tended to lump them together, assuming that all of them were motivated by prurient sexual or primitivist sentiments. That created friction between the women that often led them to avoid one another.

  But surely they did not eat their dinners in silence. Whom did they talk to, and what did they say to one another that night? We do know, even if they could never have predicted it, that they had a profound impact on the “New Negro Movement,” as it was most often then called, and on its understandings of race. Whether as hostesses, patrons, comrades, lovers, writers, or—most intriguingly—as white women passing for black, these women went to Harlem to participate in its renaissance, often with the pioneering notion that they could volunteer for blackness. By making themselves socially unintelligible and courting ostracism, they confounded available categories and introduced many of our own critical ideas about the flexibility or “play” of social identity, often with unhappy outcomes. A period’s most peculiar and confounding figures often offer the greatest cultural insights. Miss Anne was one of the culture’s most confounding. We now understand identity as relative, constructed in response to what it is not. Miss Anne’s mere presence in Harlem helped make that relativity visible. Hence, by simply showing up, she helped construct what blackness and whiteness both meant at an especially volatile moment in the country’s racial history. Miss Anne complicated her culture’s notions of identity, in other words, whether she set out to do so or not.

  These women were struggling with some of the most vexing problems of their day. Each was there upsetting the apple cart for her own reasons. But together they gave expression to many of the social ideas most salient now: the understanding that race is a social construction and not an essential aspect of our being; the notion that identity is malleable and contingent; the theory of whiteness as social privilege; and the awareness that blackness and whiteness, as social categories, are not constructed identically or even symmetrically but demand different analyses. Whatever their intentions, these women were precursors of some of our most cherished nostrums. All of them used race to expand the cultural roles available to them as women. As an NAACP official, Mary White Ovington, born in 1865, could travel, and she spent a great deal of time in the rural South, staying in black people’s homes and speaking at black churches. Among her close friends she counted both W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, two of the most intriguing and expansive intellectuals of the century. She could write. She was the author of two plays, a major sociological study of race, two autobiographies, three children’s books, a group biography of black America, and an important, innovative novel about passing called The Shadow. She could also give public speeches. In Harlem, Ovington noted, “I did what I wanted to.” Today, we have a term for Ovington’s linking of gender and race: it is “intersectional.” Miss Anne pioneered “intersectionality.” “Performativity”—the subversion of social roles through exaggerated performances that reveal their social codes—Miss Anne also pioneered. Her experience of identity politics was often a kind of tragic performativity that exposed the codes of whiteness even as it also revealed that getting outside our identities may not always be a desirable sort of social freedom.

  I am not claiming that these women were trying to be precursors. They were just trying to get by where (they were told) they did not belong. This means that their missteps are as important as their conscious efforts to dismantle racial thinking—maybe even more so. Miss Anne was as much a product of her time as she was sometimes way ahead of it. For her, the line between Negrophobia and Negrophilia was always shifting. Her desires were chaotic and contradictory. And that is the point of reconstructing them. Miss Anne pushed the idea that identity is affiliation, allegiance, and desire—rather than biology or blood—farther than almost anyone else in her day, sometimes even farther than she meant to. She was a disconcerting figure who sometimes made both herself and others miserable. Reconstructing her life enables us to watch her tumble into important insights, which, more often than not, is the way insight occurs. Miss Anne’s situation was so unique that it would have been almost impossible for her not to develop original ideas, such as her simultaneous rejection of racial essentialism and “color-blindness.” Her insistence that race is a constructed idea, but one we cannot afford to ignore, is an important double insight, one that we could stand more of today.

  This is a book informed by theory and cultural studies. It could not have been written without the provocative insights of critical race theory, identity theory, whiteness studies, and contemporary feminism. But it is not a work of theory. It is, rather, chiefly a set of untold stories, biographies that sometimes reveal the salience of our theories about who we are and sometimes take those ideas in other, unexpected, directions. My interest is, finally, more in the questions these stories allow us to ask than the judgments they encourage us to draw. It is a central tenet of critical race theory that “racism is ordinary,” occurring across myriad social moments we might take as neutral or unrelated to race. Part of what Miss Anne’s stories can teach us is that antiracism can also be ordinary, found in some of the most unexpected places and made manifest, however imperfectly, by some of the most unlikely social actors.

  I am not interested in claiming heroic status for these women. Nor do I see them all the same way. Their motives and their contributions cover the gamut from dreadful to honorable, with much in between. Nor do I say that they were more important than the black intellectuals and artists who led the Harlem Renaissance. But that story has already been told.

  Without knowing Miss Anne’s story, it is hard to spot her legacy. Yet that legacy is all around us today. When Tom Hayden and Jane Fond
a, for example, recently remarked to the writer Hilton Als that they were “especially happy” that their son’s marriage to a black woman would contribute to “the peaceful, nonviolent disappearance of the white race,” they were channeling one of Miss Anne’s signature ideas—that interracial intimacy could end race categories.

  In myriad ways we still struggle with Miss Anne’s questions. Can we alter our identities at will, and, if so, how? What, if anything, do we owe those with whom we are categorized? Does freedom mean escaping our social categories or instead being able to inhabit those that don’t seem to belong to us? The white women of Harlem lived those questions every day, with varying degrees of awareness and varying degrees of success.

  Miss Anne’s story also redraws maps and time lines of the 1920s. Scholars such as George Hutchinson have made a strong case for seeing the Harlem Renaissance as interracial. Until we write Miss Anne back into that interracial history, however, its true texture cannot be clear. The Renaissance has long been understood to have ended when the Harlem “vogue” became economically unfeasible after the stock market crash. However, many of the white women of Harlem found their way into their cultural and political work only when the prominent white men abandoned that field. Seen through their eyes, the Harlem Renaissance extended well into the 1930s. So with the map of bohemian New York: Miss Anne might have gone to Paris’s Left Bank or New York’s Greenwich Village; she chose Harlem instead. Her forays into Harlem connected those regions to one another with filaments that are otherwise unseen.

  By the time I finished my search for Miss Anne in Harlem, I had more than five dozen names. While the first two chapters of this book provide brief profiles of a number of these women, I focus thereafter on the half dozen figures who best exemplify the range of ideas white women brought to Harlem (or, in Lillian Wood’s case, to black communities) and the range of strategies they used to make themselves a place there. In part, I chose women who left enough of an archive to make such a reconstruction possible. Three of the women proved especially exemplary of the continuum that stretches from primitivism to antiracism as well as the ways in which white women tried to fit into Harlem. Their stories I tell at greatest length to try to answer the question of what took them to Harlem in the first place and where their unusual idea that they could volunteer for blackness might have come from. Of those three, Charlotte Osgood Mason was widely understood to be a malignant force in Harlem yet was beloved by many Harlemites; Nancy Cunard was dismissed as a bed-hopping Communist and rarely treated seriously, yet she was enormously effective; and Josephine Cogdell Schuyler some historians consider “boring,” though to me she seems anything but. All three dreamed—quite literally—of Africa, at a time when people paid much more attention to their dreams. And all three followed their African dreams into black New York. Some of the white women of Harlem were most important for one specific thing they contributed—usually a book that had a big impact. Between the longer stories of Mason, Cunard, and Schuyler are shorter chapters on three of those game-changing contributions: Let My People Go by Lillian E. Wood, Black Souls by Annie Nathan Meyer, and Imitation of Life by Fannie Hurst, all of which were written within a few years of one another, with an eye toward making a statement on race and making an unusual reputation for their writers. Three of the women in this book were young in their Harlem years. Three were old enough to have been those young women’s mothers. Thus, they comprise two generations of rebellion and experimentation.

  All six of these women had influence and impact. Wood and Meyer wrote works that, while forgotten today, were watersheds in their day. Schuyler married one of the most important figures of the Harlem Renaissance and became a Harlem voice in her own right through her writing. Mason was Harlem’s most influential patron. Cunard edited the most comprehensive anthology of the era. And Hurst remains famous today largely because of her one novel about blacks, Imitation of Life.

  To highlight some of the key themes that bring these women together and that animated their own interests in Harlem, I have grouped them into three parts: “Choosing Blackness: Sex, Love, and Passing”; “Repudiating Whiteness: Politics, Patronage, and Primitivism”; and “Rewards and Costs: Publishing, Performance, and Modern Rebellion.” These headings are by no means exclusive. To one degree or another, Miss Anne was always choosing blackness, repudiating whiteness, and experiencing the rewards and costs of those choices. So the headings bleed into one another, proving relevant, at different times, to each of the six women whose story this book tells.

  It is important, I believe, to try to let Miss Anne speak for herself, to reconstruct her reasons for being in Harlem and her ideas about race, rather than simply passing judgment on her for crossing lines she was told to stay behind. This book’s six biographies are an effort to hear what Miss Anne had to say.

  It is also important to understand the context in which Miss Anne’s social experiment became meaningful. “Miss Anne’s World” sketches two related axes of that context: the official view of race and the unofficial view that many lived and breathed. Many who were deeply committed to the position that race was a social construction were nevertheless also deeply attached to the very notions of blood and essential being that, in public, they decried. This racial erotics—simply put, this love of blackness—nourished the cultural explosion that made Harlem America’s black “Mecca.” Miss Anne’s love of blackness, however, was like a too-large spigot into that nourishing wellspring, bringing to the surface challenging desires for belonging and threatening, some feared, to drain Harlem dry. “Miss Anne’s World” aims to provide a sense of the tensions that the women in this book experienced and to suggest how their efforts were viewed in their day. It provides the context in which their isolation and loneliness—as well as their longing to belong—took shape and took on meaning. It allows us, I hope, to understand what we are hearing when we listen to Miss Anne.

  A Note to the Reader

  It is conventional for biographers to use either first or last names for their subjects, depending on whether the focus is on a subject’s private or public life. Not surprisingly, women are more often referred to by their first names in biographies than are men. In this book, I have tended to use last names when referring to those aspects of my subjects’ lives that were public—such as their writing careers—and their first names when I am writing about their personal lives. However, some of the women I write about, such as Charlotte Osgood Mason, maintained such strong public fronts in all aspects of their lives that I have found it impossible to refer to them by their first names. Conversely, some of the women in this book, such as Nancy Cunard, were so adamant about erasing the line between public and private that I have found it impossible to treat them with the distance that last names confer.

  This biography relies on a great deal of original archival material in the form of letters, journals, diaries, and notebooks. In all cases, I have left original wording intact and refrained from any corrections of spelling, grammar, or accuracy in these women’s papers. The indicator [sic] is used as sparingly as possible and only when not to do so would create significant confusion.

  Part One

  Miss Anne’s World

  Tourist map of Harlem.

  Chapter 1

  Black and White Identity Politics

  The black-white relationship has been symbiotic; blacks have been essential to white identity (and whites to blacks). . . . Black Harlem could not be left alone, for in a sense it was as much a white creation as it was black.

  —Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance

  Harlem street scene.

  Taxonomic Fever: Identity Frenzy in the 1920s

  The 1920s were both a propitious and a peculiar time to undertake race-crossing and experiment with what we now call the “free play” of identity. When it came to race, the Jazz Age was a bitter, brittle time, one of the most conservative in our history. On either side of “the color line,” being seen as a “race traitor” was perilous.

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sp; The newspapers made that peril clear. If you were in your kitchen on an autumn day in 1925, drinking coffee and leafing through The New York Times, you’d see images of a high-spirited America proud of its prosperity and pleased with the status quo. Advertisements for clothes, bath products, appliances, homes, and cars depicted well-heeled executives hopping out of gleaming roadsters to join beaming families on their substantial, maple-shaded front porches: a Main Street of solid middle-class houses right out of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Advertisers painted a world in which consumers were white; young women were wives; and young wives were “General Purchasing Agents”—pearl-stranded domestic executives streamlining their family’s communications and purchasing, hygiene, education, and leisure. Seen from this glowing perspective of growing postwar consumerism, the twenties look strangely complacent, rather than rebellious.

  Most of us have been taught that the 1920s were when Americans suddenly broke free of taboos and conventions, flinging the old order aside to drink and dance their way to tomorrow in one great “roar.” But race was not like the artistic, sexual, civil, and stylistic norms Americans were then challenging. Racial norms were a line that even most radicals dared not defy.

  One case in particular made the costs of such crossings clear. Everyone in Harlem was mesmerized by it. So were many other readers in New York and across the nation. In 1924, Leonard Kip Rhinelander, the heir to the Rhinelander fortune, shocked his family, and the country, by marrying Alice Beatrice Jones, a young woman who did laundry and domestic service. Within weeks, however, he gave in to family pressure and allowed his father to file for annulment on the grounds that Alice had deceived him into believing she was white when she was, in fact, a “Negro” under the law. Called “the scandal of the decade,” the ensuing trial was one of the most sensational, and closely watched, in U.S. history.