Tag: Blues

Amiri Baraka, “Legacy”

Baraka, Amiri. “Legacy.” Poetry Foundation,

poetryfoundation.org/poems/42557/legacy-56d221281526a

Summary and Discussion of Work
Legacy discusses the many different situations that may be described in blues songs, from the homeless man sleeping outside or wandering in the littered back alleys and deserted streets of the early morning hours in the south to getting drunk and traveling from town to town, finding each the same as the last. Blues itself, intended to deal with the complex and often contradictory or ironic realities of black life, offers Baraka a laundry list of options to discuss living conditions and life experience in the South. The subtitle of the work, “(For Blues People),” indicates that this poem is specifically for those who need to hear the message Baraka is conveying: the poem is for those people who are living in the conditions he describes as well as those who are experiencing life the way he describes in the poem. Starting the poem with poverty-stricken living conditions, he asserts that life is lonely and unable to offer much to the blues people than the wandering and possessionless life that they already have.

True to the blues tradition of travel, the narrator describes a person riding out to another space, but the rider still remains in a nowhere space or a twilight space: everyone around is sleeping, and the rider goes unnoticed as they ride through the space toward some supposed better spot or end, whether it be good or bad (represented by the sea). This is similar to the blues songs, which affirm living and state that it is worthwhile, but offers no real scapegoat for the conditions; Baraka’s narrative does differ slightly in that the sea represents some form of hope or greater option, but fits in with the idea that the point of travel was to find better life and hope for it, and then come to find that it is no different than the last space they exited.

 

by bluesyjune

Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. U of Missouri P, 2001.

Summary of Work
This autobiography of Langston Hughes’s life details some of his life experiences from his early twenties into the end of his twenties and the beginning of the Great Depression. When he was a child, his parents split, and he lived with his mother for a time. He remembers having his parents try to get back together in Mexico, but that was the year of the great earthquake in Mexico City, and so his mother got scared and they went back. He was sent to live with his grandmother in Kansas and to go to school, and she was a proud woman who would never do service jobs for white people to earn a living. When she died when he was just before his teenage years, he went to go live with his Aunt. During this time his Aunt took him to a Christian church, where they were praying over people to be saved. Everyone had gone up but him, because he believed he would get to see Jesus in the flesh, and he did not want to be dishonest about coming to Jesus. Finally, filled with guilt that he is the only one who hasn’t been saved, he comes to the front at the alter, and his Aunt is overjoyed. That night, he cries over having lied. His mother remarried, and he liked the man. Hughes was elected the poet for his school (it was integrated) because people made assumptions that all black people had rhythm and could dance, so they must be able to write poetry. He wrote his first poems there. He admits that his entire life, he rarely majorly edited poetry once it was down on the page. He also admits that most of his poetry and other work was written when he was miserable or unhappy rather than when he was happy.

In his late teenage years, his biological father wrote to him that he wanted him to come down to Mexico. His mother was upset about it, but he went anyway. There, he found out that his father was considered very American because all he cared about was money, but he was wiser than other Americans that came to Mexico because he was interested in keeping and saving his money. He hated Mexicans and many black people, and all poor people. Hughes was fairly miserable his first year there, because his father was always trying to force him to hurry places, and because he had to do bookkeeping and was no good with numbers. He got so angry at his father that it made him physically ill and he couldn’t eat for weeks, which landed him in a hospital that cost his father $20 a day to keep him there. After he was feeling better, his father sent him back to the US.  But the next time he went down to stay with his father, he spent more time to learn Spanish and became better friends with the Mexicans in town. A German woman also stayed with them (she later became his father’s wife), and she made the space more pleasant. His father expressed that he wanted to send him to college somewhere in Europe and have him come back to Mexico to be an engineer, but Hughes said he wanted to be a writer and did not want to go learn things he was no good at. His father told him that writers made no money and that if he was going to pay for college, Hughes would go where he wanted him to. He would also not be allowed to leave Mexico until he agreed to his father’s wishes.

So in order to escape, Hughes started tutoring Mexican children so they could speak English. Word spread that he was good at his job, and soon he was able to raise his rates and take on as much work as he wanted. He also got offered two jobs at colleges to teach English, and he took both jobs because scheduling worked for him. While working these jobs, he is lucky to narrowly escape death because a man who the German woman’s relation was working for thought that the German girl was sleeping with Hughes, and he, enraged, came to the house, shot the girl in the head three times, and went in search of Hughes to kill him, but couldn’t find him because he wasn’t home. The girl miraculously survived, and the man was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Hughes had made quite a bit of money, and he started thinking that he did want to go to college, but in NYC at Columbia. He and his father fought about it, but eventually his father agreed to send him there. On the train to New York City, he was mistaken as Mexican and when he said he was black, white people in the South would not serve him. He remembered the struggles of living as a black man in the US, and contemplated why it was so difficult for white people to interact with black people in the US when it was so easy for them to do so in other countries. He spent a year at Columbia, only to find he really disliked college, and so he quit and started looking for a job. But his father at that point had cut him off, his mother was looking for work and struggling, and he could not find a job that would take him, even if it were available, because he was a black man. He finally found a job working at a shipyard, and in the meantime he was having some of his poetry published by Crisis magazine. Alain Locke wanted to meet him and he had met several major figures of the New Negro movement, but he told Locke no because he was nervous and because he knew that Locke wouldn’t be able to get his way around the docks very easily and it could kill him if he weren’t careful. Before Hughes sets off to sea on his first voyage, he tosses all his books from college into the ocean, ridding himself of their weight both literally and figuratively.

Hughes set sail to Africa eventually and landed in many ports to find that the Africans did not consider him a black man because his skin was more brown than black. This astonished him, and he also saw the terrible effects of colonialization. He recalls having to watch a prostitute and a young girl coming on board in hopes of receiving money, and receiving no money but being forced to have sex with all the men on board who were interested, which was a group of about 30 men. He tired of this type of exploitation as well as the economic exploitation. As they were about to leave, he bought a red monkey, and many of the other soldiers did as well. There were adventures on the ship with those monkeys getting loose and winding up drowned or in missionaries’ beds or in the masts, but eventually all were caught. There were also many more antics and debauchery, and all the men were fired upon returning to the US. Hughes made his way to Cleveland, where his family was staying, and found himself penniless in order to make it there with the monkey, named Jocko, who he had bought for his younger brother. His mother was very upset to have it in the home, but his stepfather and brother liked it, so the monkey stayed. Then his stepfather’s mother came to town, and his mother had an ally to protest about the monkey. Then when his stepfather had the monkey out on the town one night and it got scared and destroyed the carpeting of a pool table, it cost them 25 dollars to have it replaced, and his mother was furious. Not long after Hughes left to go back to sea, she sold the monkey.

His second voyage, he got off to stay in Paris, but found himself unable to get a job because he was not a musician, dancer, or performer. He makes friends with a Russian dancer who got sick and whose company had dissolved, and who had no money. They share a cheap room, and she finds a job before he does. He finally gets a job as a doorman and then, through someone who liked his poetry, found a job as a dishwasher and then a cook. When the club he is working at goes nearly bust, they tried to fire the head cook, and he brought out a knife and threatened everyone, and they let him stay. And when they tried to fire Hughes, he threatened them again, so he got a job as a waiter. During his time there, he saw many fights and other antics. The Russian lady got a job at La Havre, and she leaves him, very sad. He then falls in love with a girl named Mary, who is very well-to-do. But when her father finds out what she’s been doing, first she is very chaperoned, and then she is forced to leave. Soon after that, he spends some time with Alain Locke, who is in town, and then when one day he is waiting on a famous poet, he shares his work. The poet “discovers” Hughes, and then he became wildly popular and many people came to the club looking to get a photo with the poet. He has more poems published but is never paid for them.

When the club had to close down for refurbishment and because of lack of business, he goes with some Italians to see Italy. He has enough money to enjoy his time, and Locke is also there and takes him to Venice and they enjoy their time. However, while in Genoa, he has his passport and all his money stolen, and the US embassy and consulate refuse to help him, so he lives homeless and in poverty, unable to get a job that will pay him enough to either get back to France or to find safe passage to America. He finally gets passage as a workman on a ship bound for NYC, and he is nearly kicked off in Spain for being late back to the ship, but he makes it back to the US with a quarter more than he had in France when he first landed. He makes his way to Washington, where his relatives are, and they want him to work in the Library of Congress, but it has too many needed qualifications and Hughes needed work, so he started working doing wet wash laundry for twelve dollars a week. His mother and the relatives had a dispute, and so he found them different accommodations, and they struggled to make ends meet. Carl Van Vechten contacted him and helped him publish a book of poetry at this point, but the elitist community would not welcome him or his mother because they were poor.

He makes his way back to Harlem in hopes of going to college, but he can’t get a scholarship. He talks of meeting Van Vechten and Jean Toomer, who could pass as white and refused to be labeled a “Negro Artist” much to critics’ dismay. He also met Zora Neale Hurston, who he had a good relationship for years until a dispute over a co-writing project. He speaks of Vechten and his parties, the decadence of the Harlem Renaissance and how the area was a victim of its own image. Hughes finally makes a bit of money off of some poetry, works as a personal assistant for a time, gets patronage to go to college at Lincoln, and visits and explores the South and takes a short voyage to Cuba and Jamaica, which he liked very much and would have kept doing if he hadn’t had to go back to college. During his final college years, he wrote a survey of the issues of the color line at Lincoln college, where all white professors taught a nearly all black student body. The founder of the college came up to him at graduation to tell him that as time passed, he would see that there was no way for him to do what he did in founding the school unless he could have had white patronage and made concessions. Hughes disagreed with him.

Around this time, he also received patronage to write and finish his novel Not Without Laughter, which he wishes would have been better because it is about the best of his family members. He receives a major literary award for it. He tries to write other things, but the white patron dislikes his work, and finally they part ways, and it makes him sick like he was with his father. He remembers all the decadence and security he experienced and remembers seeing the other people in the street starving because of the depression, and he remembers the disgust the white chauffeur had over being forced to drive a black man places. He went to the doctor to see what was wrong and spent a lot of money doing it, was told first he had a Japanese tape worm, and then told by a white doctor that he had no such thing. Then he got tonsillitis and had to have them out, using up the last of his money from the Park Street patron. After that, he immediately got better from his illness brought on by anger over the patron. It is during this time that he had his dispute with Hurston over the play they had been working on, and while it had been in production, it had to be shut down over the dispute. After that he went to Haiti and decided that he would make money writing for a living, and at the time of writing the autobiography, that is what he had done successfully.

Discussion of Work
This book gives an adventurous story about Langston Hughes’s life during his twenties. Its major dealings in terms of themes that cut across works of African American writing are the color line, economic oppression and poverty, travel narratives, and artistry, particularly writing and music. Hughes regularly comments on the struggles of being a black man, particularly when it comes to finding housing or a job. While he knows that other races are discriminated against, he knows they also have an easier time finding work, which makes all the difference. And he struggles with the knowledge that many of the black elite are not interested in changing the situation because they feel that there can be no progress unless they tell the white people what they want to hear. He states that while the Harlem Renaissance was happening, the majority of the black communities in America felt nothing change in their situation or economic or social standings. Economics and travel go hand-in-hand for Hughes, who travels in order to get money, which he can never keep as he comes back to the US, or even as he simply travels from one country to another. Job opportunities do not change, and while he doesn’t experience the same type of color prejudice, he does experience it in that the natives of the countries he visits dislike him for being a threat to their jobs.

Artistry is the other large portion of this narrative. He shows several of his poems and discusses when he wrote them and why. Much of his work was strongly influenced by blues songs and structures, which can be seen throughout much of his poetry with the AAB writing format, just as many blues lyrics are written. He also talks about how dance and music were a rich part of many black people’s lives, specifically citing the many rent parties and house parties he went to, some of which were certainly to help pay people’s rent, but others which were just hosted to be hosted. He provides several examples of printed up tickets for these events. He states that these parties were the spaces where he liked to be because black artistry was not put on display for racist white audiences. His understanding of what it is to be a black man or a black person in general is changed and given more value in an all-black space.

However, he also discusses the problems that come with the assumptions that all black people have rhythm and can dance and sing: he could not dance or sing, and those were almost the only jobs available to him in Europe and even in the US. The stereotype led to success for some, but not for long for many: once they were injured or could no longer work or could not work the grueling schedules or create enough new material, they often died in poverty. It ultimately narrowed black people’s options and avenues for success, even as it provided a rich culture and outlet for many. In discussion of his own work, he also talks about how a narrow view of what black artists should create doomed his work Fine Clothes to the Jew because critics and general public readers alike felt that the dialect and blues structures should not be used in his art: white people saw enough of that elsewhere, and writing was supposed to highlight the best to show people that black artists were capable of high art. The strict rules placed upon what a black artist could write or create further limited what people read, and who could be successful in the field of art.

by bluesyjune

August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Wilson, August. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Plume, 1988.

Summary of Work
Set in Pittsburgh during the Great Migration, the play’s central focus is on the characters living and coming and going from the boarding house Seth and Bertha Holly run, a boarding house they inherited from Seth’s father, a Northern free black man. Bynum, a boarder at the house, is performing a sacrificial ritual on a pigeon in the backyard when the play opens, and Seth is upset because he doesn’t approve of the voudon rituals being done at his house. Still, Seth sits and watches Bynum while he waits for Rutherford Selig to drop in. He buys metal from Selig to make pans with, and then when Selig returns, he sells the pans to Selig for him to then sell to other customers. While Seth would love to start a pan selling business, he cannot because he cannot obtain the capital needed to start it unless he offers his home as collateral, a price he is not willing to pay.

When Selig comes by and sells metal to Seth, Bynum comes back in. He hires Selig to find the “shiny man,” because he knows Selig can track and find anyone. But when Selig asks for more details about the man so he can actually go about the task of finding him, Bynum refuses, saying only that he had a mystical experience where he saw a shiny man who led him to his father, and then Bynum’s father taught Bynum a song that gave him the power to bind people together (hence his name). Selig leaves with the information, and those present are doubtful that Selig will be able to find such a person given Bynum’s description.

After Selig leaves, Jeremy Furlow, another boarder, comes back from jail. Seth warns him that he will not allow him to stay in the home if he keeps up his behavior, but Bynum offers Jeremy the idea of entering a guitar contest. Jeremy states that he doesn’t like the idea because of a bad experience, and instead starts talking about perhaps meeting a woman that isn’t desperate and clingy as a way to solve his problems. Just then, another boarder, Mattie Campbell, comes looking for Bynum to have him bring her beau back, but he tells her that she needs to learn to let him go. Seeing the situation, Jeremy starts flirting, and they decide to go out on a date.

When those two exit, Harold Loomis enters with his daughter, Zonia. They are looking for his wife, Martha, and they need a place to stay for a time. When Bynum hears about the situation, he tells Harold he should talk to Selig, because he can find anyone. But Seth is worried about the situation because Harold is agitated; Seth thinks he knows who Harold’s wife is: Martha Pentecost. He doesn’t say anything and decides to mind his own business. Still, Bertha and Seth start talking about the situation, and they decide that Martha had in fact come to stay at their boarding house years previously when she was looking for Bynum, and that she had moved out to go with the church to another town about a year previous. When Selig comes to do his regular business with Seth, Loomis pays Selig to find Martha.

Meanwhile, things are going well between Jeremy and Mattie, and he asks her to move in with him. But then Molly Cunningham comes to the boarding house in search of a room to rent, and Jeremy becomes infatuated with her, threatening to destroy his relationship with Mattie.

That evening, the whole household except Harold are conversing and they get patting juba. Jeremy brings down his guitar to accompany the rhythmic clapping, patting, and dancing. Harold comes in furious, shouting at them to stop, but becomes paralyzed suddenly, having seen a vision because of the religious power present within the history of the juba dance. Bynum acts as a mediator, helping Harold to reveal the vision of bones rising out of the water and walking on top of the water, then sinking to create a wave that washes up the bones onto the shore. The bones become African Americans. Harold is one of the bodies that has been washed to shore and given flesh once again, and Bynum tries to get him to stand and walk. Harold cannot, and he collapses.

Seth, scared by the behavior, tells Harold that he must leave, but he tells Seth that they are paid up through Saturday, and they will not be leaving until then. Molly is also downstairs complaining to Mattie about having to work for other people. She doesn’t understand why Mattie is working if she’s with Jeremy and he can support her. As Mattie leaves, Jeremy enters, having lost his job for refusing to pay a white man what he asked. He is upset over the exploitation of not just himself but of all black workers, but Seth tells him that he needs to get over it and go back to work because he needs the money. Jeremy, not listening, grabs his guitar and says he will go on the road to find a better situation. He starts flirting with Molly after that, and he convinces her to leave town with him for a better life.

In the afternoon, Bynum is singing a song about Joe Turner, the white man who illegally enslaved African-American men to exploit their labor. Harold hears the song and tells him to stop singing it because he doesn’t like it, and Bynum uses it as an opportunity to learn about Harold’s past. He tells Bynum that Joe Turner is the man who kidnapped him and forced him to work for seven years, stealing him away from his newborn child and his wife. During those years, Martha left his daughter with her mother and disappeared, and he has been looking for Martha ever since he got out of bondage.

Mattie, meanwhile, is upset over Jeremy’s leaving, and Bertha tells her she should just forget about him. Harold is attracted to Mattie but is unable to talk to her about it. Zonia is playing in the backyard, and she meets a neighbor boy named Reuben. They talk about how Zonia and Harold are looking for Martha, her mother, and as they are playing, Reuben talks about his friend Eugene, and how he always kept these pigeons, the ones that Bynum keeps using for ritual sacrifice. He has come to free the pigeons, because it is what Eugene had asked him to do, and he feels he must do it to honor Eugene.

On Saturday morning, Zonia and Harold are scheduled to leave, but Martha arrives just in time to catch them. She and Harold talk about their lives and her decision to leave because of how difficult her life had become after he had been imprisoned. Harold tells Zonia that she must now go with her mother, and Martha thanks Bynum for his help in the process. Then Loomis gets angry at Bynum, blaming him for his life and his predicament, and he slashes his own chest in frustration as he mocks Martha’s religion. Then he walks out. Mattie realizes that she is bound to Harold, and she runs after him, and Bynum finally recognizes Loomis as his “shiny man.”

Discussion of Work
This work tells stories about several important historical narratives in African American history: re-enslavement and oppression, migration, and religion, music, and dance and their interconnectedness. The play’s name itself centers the play around the re-enslavement and forced labor of African American men. Readers and viewers alike are forced to see and contemplate the oppression and disadvantage that black people of that time had: if they aren’t re-enslaved like Loomis was, they are disallowed to build businesses and progress, exploited and unfairly compensated for their labor, and forced into less than favorable economic situations. The unfavorable and oppressive situation in the South leads to a migration North in hopes of better treatment, only to find similar hardships once there.

Yet despite all this hardship, the play demonstrates how important it is to understand that for all the economic poverty and oppression, there is a rich cultural life that is lost when only looking at the economics and social politics of the time. Martha represents the Christian influence and importance of the Church in black life, and Bynum represents the still powerful and relevant religious beliefs evolved in the African Diaspora. The two are not opposites of each other, as white Christianity would have us believe, but intertwined and both important in the religious understanding of the characters. Bynum serves as a practitioner who can not only bind people’s souls together (like Martha’s and Zonia’s), but can walk people through difficult portions of their lives and bring them understanding through his suggestions. Dances like the juba, which were originally sacred in origin and then moved into the secular sphere, still have both functions in the African American cultural experience and understanding. The dance then becomes the central turning point scene for the entire play.

Response for Future Use in Dissertation
August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone lives and dies by the songs within the souls of its characters. The song in Bertha’s soul is a home full of laughter and love; the song in Seth’s soul is order, propriety, and creation; and the song in Bynum’s soul is the religious power of binding people together, and bears the great responsibility of helping people find their way in this life and the next. Each of these individuals play an important part in helping Herald Loomis, a man who has lost his song, and therefore his purpose in life, come to understand that his life will only have meaning if he finds his song, his desires and drives, within himself again.

Herald Loomis is a wanderer, a man whose life experience and values are difficult to grasp at any given moment in the play. While from the very beginning he states that he and his daughter are looking for his wife, readers feel uneasy about the reasoning behind this search. Loomis does not move, does not seem to be searching for his wife, but instead waiting for her to arrive; he does not engage in conversation with the others at the boardinghouse, eats his meals alone, and rarely speaks to his daughter except for to tell her to behave. With no growth or movement in his body, and no music in his soul, he seems a dead man in comparison to everyone around him[1].

The Juba scene, then, can be said to be the turning point of the entire play for Loomis, because it is at that point that he realizes he is a dead man, and must do something about it. Juba, as music and dance, is closely related to the Ring Shout, and utilizes religious themes while participants shout, chant, and move in a circle as they dance different movements. Juba needs no instruments: the rhythm of Juba is often patted on the body, as well as on readily available objects. The music for Juba quite literally comes from the movement of the body, offering a direct connection to religious figures through the medium of drum-like music. While the context of Juba does not always have to be religious, in this scene, it is apparent that Wilson intends it to be a religious ritual of spiritual awakening.

Our main cue to know this will be a spiritual awakening is that Bynum, the conjure man of the group, calls the dance, and the others participate in the creation of the music. Wilson writes stage directions for the actors to “include some mention of the Holy Ghost,” and that “It should be as African as possible, with the performers working themselves up into a near frenzy” (52). We are meant to recognize the religious connotations as these characters lose control of themselves and give themselves up to a higher power, which Bynum calls upon through his chanting as he presides over the group. Yet the spirit coming to visit the participants is not a Loa or an Orisha, as might be expected, but a soul Bynum needs to help free from the bondage of past slavery.

Loomis loses his mind as he comes into the room, screaming that the Holy Ghost will burn them up, and then dancing around the room with his pants down as he speaks unintelligibly, as if taken over by spirits. As he gains enough control of himself to try to leave the room, he has a vision of himself, all bones rising up out of the water, sinking down, and then being pushed by a wave onto the beach, the bones now covered in flesh, waiting to be brought to life and stand, yet unable to (53-5). Bynum guides him through this journey, pushing him to realize that he is accountable for his lack of movement, and he must find a way to put himself together and move forward with all the other black figures he sees moving along the beach. “I got to stand up. Get up on the road,” he says, but when he tries, he collapses, his legs unable to bear his weight (56). The change has begun for Harold Loomis and he knows it needs to happen, although he has been resistant to it. His soul has been dead for too long, and he cannot stand up, because he is not strong enough, and he must start to slowly rediscover his soul’s song in order to move again.

Bynum from then on meddles with Loomis through music, singing the song “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” to pull out the story he knows is the story of so many men: taken prisoner for no reason, forced to work in a chain gang, and set loose seven years later, having lost song, spirit, and all material goods in life. Still, Loomis refuses to recognize his value, his calling, and his song. It is not until the very end when not Bynum, but Loomis’ wife Martha, coaxes Loomis’ song out of him as she quotes scripture to him and he, in musical form, responds to each line of scripture she quotes.

Wilson states in the stage directions that what Loomis has learned is his song, “the song of self-sufficiency” (93), and having found that song, he finds himself freed of all his past as he accepts responsibility for himself. Once he came to understand how his song was meant to respond to the call of life’s experiences, he learned how to get up, walk, and respond to life’s challenges, joys, and beautiful moments. The call and response of blues music allows Loomis to reconnect with life in a way that no other medium had allowed him to after the trauma of enslavement. Blues music, then, is the key to processing, coming to terms with, and moving forward from the injustices of life as a black man in the racist South, and a prejudiced America.

[1] Delroy Lindo, at the 10th Anniversary August Wilson Conference in Washington, DC, spoke of the genuine struggle it was for him as an actor to feel he could find the motivations for Herald Loomis. He said that while the director felt that Lindo was a good fit to play the role, Wilson, never satisfied and always looking for the best actors, kept auditioning for the role of Loomis until just before opening, hoping that there might be someone who could capture his character better. But he did not tell Lindo he was doing so; Lindo only found out through the director. Frustrated at the difficulty of the character and angry at Wilson for seemingly not trusting him with the role, he worked harder. Yet he said he never found the motivations in rehearsals. It was not until he got on stage to perform that he felt he had understood and become Herald Loomis. The power to perform in order to find oneself, then, cannot be overstated for this character.

by bluesyjune

Thomas F. Defrantz, Editor, Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance

Defrantz, Thomas F, ed. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African

American Dance. U of Wisconsin P, 2002.

Summary of Work
For the purposes of my comprehensive exam list studies and dissertation research, I read chapters 1 – 7 of this edited collection. The work broadly covers how African American dance has been perceived and performed from slavery to near the present day. Thomas F. Defrantz starts off the collection by briefly discussing the struggles of terminology for African American dance. He states that he will use the term black dance or black vernacular dance in spaces where there are only people of color present, but always uses African American dance to refer to the same thing in mixed cultural groups. The reasoning is complex, and largely revolves around the history of the term black dance: it was often used as a pejorative, a term that meant it was lesser than European dances like ballet. White dance critics did not understand the cultural underpinnings of the work and made no efforts to understand or learn, meaning that the reviews in the paper of performance works were often derogatory or backhandedly complimentary.

While there were two important works on African American dance in the mid 1900s—Jean and Marshall Stearns’ Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance and Lynne Fauley Emery’s Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970—there are problems with both of those works. The Stearns put a focus on the term vernacular, making very clear that the dance styles they are talking about will never be high art or even really considered worthy of such a title. Emery’s work tries to document too much in travelogue form, and she doesn’t consider that there is more to these dances than race and the slavery-to-freedom narrative. Yet these two works are the foundation for the few other books that have been written on African American dance forms, and since the records on the dance forms are poor, there are a strange amount of methodological approaches taken to studying and writing about the dances. Defrantz states that the best scholarship out of the last decades of the twentieth century comes from scholars Kariamu Welsh Asante, Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jacqui Malone, and Brenda Dixon Gottschild. Their works have served to diversify the scholarship on African American dance.

P. Sterling Stuckey discusses the challenges of converting African religious dance tradition into Christian worship. He briefly discusses the forced dancing on the boats during the Middle Passage crossing, and then goes on to say that the fact that the dances remained even after that and all the oppression and hardship they faced proves the importance of dance in African culture. But since there was such a mix of tribes, the dancing changed to become a language of slavery and communication across cultural boundaries. Stuckey then moves his focus to the Ring Shout, discussing it as a form of worship that involved shouting praises and shuffling the feet side to side while in a circle. Despite the many attempts to stop the practice, black people found ways to keep it in their worship. Stuckey also states that these dances were able to cross from religious to secular, and that while many times the steps were the same, the context is what made the dance different; thus, much like the African understanding of secular versus sacred, the line between the two is blurred. He states that Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin best describe the function and uses of these dances, citing Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain specifically as an example: the character Elisha performs a solo form of Ring Shout in the church as he dances and the crowd and preacher join in, creating something almost akin to Juba. The novel also contains prime examples of the Ring Shout in communal form at the church as it is done to tambourines and piano music, indicating that the Ring Shout is a very important and all-encompassing religious experience for these black Christian communities.

Nadine A. George discusses the struggles that black female vaudeville performers faced when going on the circuit. She focuses specifically on the Whitman sisters, discussing their rise as gospel focused performers and then moving away from the gospel performance to do vaudeville shows. They were light skinned, meaning that they could pass as white, and they performed on both the white vaudeville circuit and the TOBA circuit. George states that to their credit, they never did deny their black racial heritage, and yet that also brought its own set of challenges. These women, in order to “look black,” donned blackface and performed in it for most of the show. They also performed some stereotypical acts in order to keep the crowd pleased, and they were often fighting to get paid the rates that they had been promised. They were also in charge of being matriarchs to the picks that they had traveling with them, knowing that if they didn’t take good care of the children, it would ruin their business. At the same time as all of this was going on, they also often dyed their hair blonde and came out on stage for one number without the blackface, confusing many audiences because they wondered what white women were doing on stage during a black minstrel/vaudeville performance. They also had crossdressing acts, which challenged expected gender norms. Their business acumen and talent made these women the longest running vaudeville performing group, and they gave many great dancers their start, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In spending more time looking at the challenges, both gender and racial, they faced to accomplish all of this, George hopes their work will be more widely recognized and studied.

Marya Annette McQuirter discusses the myth of black people having natural dance talent, particularly focusing her studies on the 1940s forward. She states that there are problems with that precisely because every dancer goes through an awkward learning stage, but that stage is never represented in any studies or literature. Taking Malcolm X’s autobiography as an examples, she states that he goes directly from being unable to dance from lack of experience to a top jitterbug dancer magically: it is his African heritage that mysteriously gives him the ability rather than teachers helping him through awkward learning stages. It is narratives like that which put fuel on the fire of the stereotype of the natural black dancer. McQuirter states that there were many black people, especially those coming from the countryside, who did not dance and could not dance. If they wanted to go out on the town when they moved to the cities, they then had to go through an awkward learning stage in order to be able to dance at the clubs. As a parting statement, McQuirter asks her readers to realize that “The dance arena . . . did not offer a retreat from this awkwardness, but it was where women and men worked out the complex and difficult moves required to navigate the new and different terrain of urban centers throughout the United States at mid-twentieth century” (99).

Richard C. Green focuses on the career of Pearl Primus, a phenomenal black dancer who made many of her choreographic works about social issues (including the famous choreography to Billy Holliday’s Strange Fruit). Learning her dancing skill set at the New Dance Group’s school on a scholarship, she was influenced by the government’s efforts to use art to placate a people ready to riot. Her work was also shaped by the Harlem Renaissance, with figures like Locke and Hughes and Garvey speaking out about how to solve the “Negro Problem.” When she made her professional debut, she was very well received, and yet at the same time she did not rise to the fame that Josephine Baker and other lighter skinned performers did. Primus was considered a “real” black dancer due to her skin color combined with her dance movement choices. She did perform on Broadway and in an opera, and she staged many performances, some of which had lukewarm receptions, Given her history, it is troubling to Green that Primus is being used as a rebranding tool for both black dance and modern dance, her history being revised or erased in places that it becomes no longer a full picture of Primus. The revisionism reveals a truly American Dilemma where people feel they have to choose between calling Primus a black dancer and calling her a modern dancer. With revisionism like this occurring to push specific racialized agendas, it becomes even more important to be able to preserve a full picture of Primus as a dancer.

Marcia E. Heard and Mansa K. Mussa give a brief overview of African people like Asadata Dafora and Katherine Dunham who started African dance companies in NYC, many of which still operate today, although only three companies in the country are internationally recognized: Ko-Thi, Muntu Dance Theater, and the African American Dance Ensemble.

Sally Banes and John F. Szwed discuss the history of the instructional dance songs, which create a form of dance notation for people to learn popular dances of the time. They state that the instruction song was a long-standing tradition among black communities, where they would use songs to call out dance steps. The songs were always only part of the picture for learning the dance: the songs assumed some level of familiarity with dance steps that would be taught in communities or at parties on a dance floor. There would be people present who could help others who were unfamiliar with the dances learn. The songs take many forms that reassure the listeners that the dances are popular, that everyone is doing them, that they are easy to learn, and that they should learn it too. They give examples in the text such as “Mashed Potato Time” and “The Locomotion” as well as “The Monkey” and “The Twist” and “The Jerk.” The songs had declined by the 60s but saw a revamp in the 70s with the Disco age, but the songs were much less specific with their instruction. The only place that such songs seem to exist in the present day is in country line dances done to country music. Banes and Szwed conclude by stating that these instruction songs contradict Adorno’s belief that popular music was an opiate, because these songs required their audiences to pay close attention, and they were encoded with specific cultural and communal knowledge. The one problem that the instructional song poses is that of appropriation: by making the moves mainstream, they are often watered down and found bereft of their cultural heritage.

Veta Golar discusses the blues aesthetic, stating that it is more than just sad songs and hard times, but comes to embody “(1) art that is contemporary, that is created in our time, (2) creative expresssions of artists who are empathetic with African American issues and ideals, (3) work that identifies with and reflects popular or mass black American culture, (4) art that has an affinity with African/U.S.–derived music and/or rhythms, and (5) artists and/or artistic statements whose raison d’être is humanistic” (206). These aesthetic ideals combine to create something that is important to cultural production and black art forms. Golar states that Albert Murray’s belief is that it focuses and relies very much on vernacular. Therefore, the popular is the heart of the blues aesthetic. This aesthetic also opens up the blues to non-black artists. She looks at Dianne McIntyre’s work to discuss how the blues aesthetic can be seen in modern dance, stating that the rhythms she uses are a big part of that aesthetic. She performed many different dances that included dances which highlighted black cultural roots. Her aesthetic movement choices made the blues aesthetic clearer and more accessible to many audiences outside of black cultural audiences and connects those experiences to other people’s lives; her work is a form of cultural outreach.

Discussion of Work
The theory section of this collection will be very useful to me for my dissertation for a number of reasons, but perhaps most importantly that there is a reference to James Baldwin’s work in the piece on Christianity and AfAm Dance. Stuckey’s chapter specifically deals with not only the cultural importance of the Ring Shout but also the transference of that tradition into literary culture. The dance is an entryway to understand the cultural importance of the religious worship in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. The presence of the Ring Shout multiple times throughout the work demonstrates that it is important to be aware of the dance’s cultural importance in order to properly read or analyze the work as a whole and its representation of black church worship services. The literature is as much a cultural artifact as the dances, and it requires readers to have a level of cultural competency in order to fully understand and appreciate the works instead of consume them and appropriate the material for our own popular or scholarly purposes. This is particularly true of scholars, who have argumentative agendas in writing about these works: refusing to acknowledge the important cultural points in the work becomes an act of assimilation into the broader term of Western, and therefore white, culture.

Generally speaking, the collection brings up important discussion questions: should we be referring to the dances done as black vernacular dances, African American dances, idiom dances, or something different from all of those? How can words, performers, and dances be reclaimed from a pejorative history? At what point is someone appropriating black art forms (in creating, using, consuming without knowledge of the roots of the art form)? What motivations do we as writers have when we approach this rich cultural history to make arguments about the dances’ validity? How can we avoid the dangers of the need to create an “Africanist” notion of African American dance?

 

by bluesyjune

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. Vintage Books, 1995.

Summary of Work
Ruth and Walter Younger, their son Travis, and Walter’s sister Beneatha and mother Lena all live together in a small, two bedroom apartment on the South side of Chicago. Walter’s father has died, and after months of waiting, they are expecting an insurance check for ten thousand dollars. It is all Walter can think about, and over breakfast, Ruth tries to keep order as Beneatha and Walter fight about what will be done with the money. Ruth is acting strange, and she is particularly hard on Travis when he asks for money he needs for school, and harder on him when he asks to be able to deliver groceries after school in order to make the money himself. Walter gives his son $1 and sends him on his way, much to Ruth’s dismay. Walter wants to go into business with his friends to buy a liquor store, and he is upset that Ruth is always so worried about money but won’t let him do anything to change their situation. He is insistent that his mother will give him the insurance money to go into business. He leaves for work, Beneatha leaves for school (she is in college and wanting to become a doctor), and when Lena comes out, she starts fussing over Ruth and then talking about how she doesn’t know her children anymore. Ruth collapses.

She goes to the doctor and learns she is pregnant, and she is devastated. However, the next day, the check comes, and everyone starts out happy. Lena tells Ruth that she’s thinking about putting some money away for Beneatha so that she can go to school, and then trying to decide what to do with the rest. She thinks she might buy a house. Walter is angry that she won’t invest in the liquor store scheme, and he goes to leave, but Lena makes him stay, trying to get him to listen to Ruth’s important announcement. He just yells at Ruth, and she goes in her room. Lena tells him that Ruth is pregnant, and Ruth comes out to talk about it. She talks to her family about her trip to the doctor, and lets slip the wrong pronoun, indicating to Lena that Ruth actually went to see the woman who would help her get an abortion. Ruth confirms this, stating that with how Walter is acting and the financial state they are in, it doesn’t make sense to bring a child into the world. Lena, feeling like her world is falling apart, leaves the house with the check that has come in the mail.

When Lena returns, she’s bought a house, but in the white area of town rather than the black area. The family doesn’t know what to say, worried about what will happen. Beneatha, meanwhile, has been going out with different men. One, George, is the son of one of the richest men in town, and the family would like to see her keep dating him and potentially marry him. But Beneatha likes Asagai, the Nigerian who is in Chicago going to college to learn about democracy so he can bring revolution to his country. He brings her a beautiful Nigerian set of clothing, and she puts it on, and he comments that her hair isn’t natural, and that’s sad. She goes to the hairstylist and has it cut off. When she returns, all dressed up, she starts dancing how she imagines a Nigerian woman would dance, and Walter walks in and sees her. He is drunk, and starts wildly dancing as he imagines an African warrior would dance. It is this scene that Ruth and George walk in on, and George is flabbergasted at her dress and her hair. She comments that it’s natural, but she goes to change clothing for their date. Walter, still drunk, sits down, sullen. He makes crude comments about George and about how he dresses, and then they leave. Walter continues his bad attitude to Ruth, but they get talking, and he starts making up with her.

Lena, meanwhile, sees how sullen her son is, and she decides to give him the remainder of the money, the 6500 dollars, to invest as he sees fit, as long as he puts 3500 of it in a bank account for Beneatha. He is ecstatic, and becomes a completely different man. He even takes his wife to the movies and dances the Slow Drag with her. The kids get their mother a set of gardening tools to work with, since she now has the space to garden that she always wanted. They all get ready to leave by helping pack, when a man comes to the apartment to tell them that the white community doesn’t want them there, and they are willing to pay them more than they paid for the house to sell. The children are upset, and they tell him no and to leave. A neighbor also comes over with a newspaper to scare them by showing them the headlines of black people’s homes getting burned when they move into white neighborhoods. Not long after that, Walter’s friend comes around and tells him that their other friend and business partner has run off with all the money. They are broke. Walter is dumbstruck, especially because he didn’t follow his mother’s direction and invested the whole of the 6500 dollars rather than set aside the 3500 for Beneatha.

Everyone is upset and angry at Walter for his poor judgment. They start talking about needing to stay in the apartment now, because they cannot afford the mortgage without that extra money. Walter calls the man from the Homeowners Association in order to accept the offer for the house. Lena is sad and tells him that he ought to be ashamed of himself, and that his father wouldn’t recognize the man he’d become, because he wasn’t a man. And Walter won’t listen. Instead, he puts on a parody of what he’ll say when the man comes, choking himself up with the words as he says it. When the man actually comes, he realizes that he cannot do it, and he regains his dignity and tells the man that they are going to keep the home and that the white community will have to deal with them moving in.

Lena and Ruth talk about how they just watched Walter learn what being a real man is as they get ready to take the moving boxes down and direct the movers on how to carry the furniture. Beneatha talks about how Asagai has proposed to her and that she is thinking of accepting so she can move to Nigeria with him and be a queen, and both Lena and Walter talk to her about how she is too young to be getting married and that she should stay here and marry someone rich, like George. She is upset and still talking about it when she leaves the apartment. Lena is the last one to leave the apartment, happy and yet nostalgic about her husband. She grabs her plant, which has struggled to survive in the apartment environment, and turns the light off on the space.

Discussion of Work
This play explores themes of poverty and discrimination in Chicago: the abysmal conditions of the kitchenettes that black families are forced to live in and pay ridiculous rent for; few economic opportunities; discrimination from the economically wealthy black elite; racism from even poor whites in similar economic situations; and pipe dreams such as the “Back to Africa” movement and better economic situation through education.

The play also explores the meaning of gender roles and expectations within black families. Ruth is as much a breadwinner as she is a housekeeper, and her decisions are what goes for the whole family, often making her husband feel like less of a man when it comes to financial decisions and decisions regarding his own life choices. And yet what Walter comes to understand about his role is that it is owning up to mistakes, standing up and supporting his family both emotionally (when they learn they will be having another child) and physically (when he must stand up to the white HOA representative and when he tries, and fails, to stand up for and do what’s right by his mother’s trust and insurance money). Children’s roles are a main focus of the play, both with Ruth and Walter’s little boy and with Walter and Beneatha as Lena’s children. There is a level of obedience and respect that is expected, and when not shown, it in effect collapses the family unit because the people with the life experience and wisdom are not heeded (Beneatha disregarding marriage advice and basic life advice; Walter disregarding financial advice and friend advice; Ruth disregarding childbearing advice).

For the purposes of my dissertation, dancing features in this play in two separate instances: when Beneatha puts on the Nigerian robes, and when Walter and Ruth slow drag in the living room. The first instance highlights a particularly problematic obsession with Africa and the need to hearken back to African roots. African Americans, while certainly their culture does have African roots, is not African. And the imitation African movements come off as not only false, but disrespectful and comical. Just as Beneatha does not fit within the Nigerian culture that Asagai would have her assimilate to, African Americans cannot magically regain “Africanness” by dressing in native garb and attempting African dance ritual. The second instance highlights what happens when Walter becomes happy about his life prospects again and takes Ruth to the movies and then comes back home with her, still elated about his financial gain. A blues song is playing in the background, and they dance in the living room, much to Beneatha’s chagrin. Still hooked on the idea of going back to Africa, she cannot fully accept or appreciate her own culture, which Walter and Ruth have embraced both in music and physical movement. The space demonstrates that these dances are done in multiple spaces and for multiple reasons, whether they be to release sad or happy emotions, to engage in romantic entreaties, to engage in social convention, or other reasons altogether. The acceptance of the space, dance, and moment create a level of happiness and authentic cultural experience that the African dance scene lacks in its farcical display.

by bluesyjune

Gloria Naylor, Bailey’s Cafe

Naylor, Gloria. Bailey’s Cafe. Vintage Books, 1992.

Summary of Work
Bailey’s Cafe is a novel about people who have had a series of life struggles and are in need of a way station to put their lives back together. The unnamed narrator of the novel, the owner of the cafe who goes by the name Bailey because people assume his name is the same as his restaurant, introduces all the characters and tells their stories (except for Mariam, who his wife Nadine introduces). Bailey is a WWII veteran who spent time in Japan and saw the aftermath of the atomic bombs. It is that aftermath that leads him to question the moral quality of America and its leadership. Before the war, he met his wife Nadine. He saw her at a baseball game (he is a huge fan of baseball, both the MLB and the Negro Leagues), and he followed her and spilled a raspberry ice on her. Nadine rarely laughs and does not smile often; she is a practical, realist woman, even telling her husband that if he died in the war, she was going to marry the butcher. She helps Bailey run the restaurant. Bailey was a cook in the navy, and although his cooking skills aren’t great, he does cook. There is one menu item each day, and then on Saturdays people can order anything they want. Occasionally, Nadine makes peach cobbler. The cafe itself is said to not be grounded in space, making its way wherever people need to walk in from.

Sadie, a homeless prostitute and alcoholic, is a regular customer. The daughter of a prostitute, she always tried to be very good, but was regularly beaten and treated poorly for making noise or even just asking what her name was. At age 13, her mother starts whoring her out, and she gets pregnant very young, and the abortion her mother has her attain destroys her ability to have children. When her mother dies, she takes a job as a cleaning lady at a whore house, and when that is closed down during the war, she marries a man 30 years her senior. He is also an alcoholic, like her mother was, and she tries to make sure the house they live in is pristine in order to please him. When he dies, his daughters won’t let her stay in the house if she won’t buy it from them, and in her desperation to make money, she turns to prostitution, is arrested, loses her home, and when she gets out, turns to prostitution and drinking for survival. At the diner, a man who sells ice for a living, known as Iceman at the cafe, takes a liking to her and wants to give her a better life. He tells her stories about how he sells ice and that it is always the person on the top floor that wants the most ice. He tells a tall story about having his ice used to put out a fire, and it makes her laugh. When Iceman asks her to marry him, she wants to, but backs out because she thinks the dream is too good to be true and that she doesn’t deserve it.

Eve runs a home that some people think is a whorehouse and others know as a way station to get well from traumatic wounds. She helps many women in a several story house, and she is always making sure that she is choosy about who she allows in. When men come to see the women, they always have to bring flowers or purchase them from Eve, who always keeps flowers in bloom no matter the season. Eve’s life story is that she was saved and raised by a preacher, but he caught her with her dress up to her thighs and a boy stomping around her while she lay on the ground, and he made her burn her clothes, throw up all the food he had given her, and leave the house. She walked all the way to New Orleans and earned a living, and then moved North, a rich woman who supposedly had never whored for her living. She bought a home and always asked women who wanted to live there if they knew the dust of the Delta, the dust that she would always carry with her from her difficult journey. As women come in looking for Eve’s place, Bailey always directs them there.

Sister Carrie, a devout, self-righteous zealot, also frequents the cafe. She uses the Bible to denounce the women of the household, and is regularly upset when Eve, who was raised by a preacher, can use the Bible to make arguments better than she can.

Ester lives in the basement of Eve’s home. She hates the light. As a child, her brother “married” her to a local white man, who kept her in a room with a nice bed and then forced her down into the cellar to perform unnatural acts in the dark with him. She was twelve when her brother sent her, and she knew that her brother was receiving monetary compensation for her being there, and so she stayed twelve years in order to pay her debt to her brother, and then left. She loves white flowers because they show in the dark and she can watch them die.

Mary, also known as Peaches, came from a privileged home where she was offered many things, but she always saw herself in the mirror and felt that she was a whore, and that’s what she chose to become. When she was mistress to a rich man with a club foot, she was still seeing other men, and when he told her that he would kill the next man she was with, she tried to stay in for two weeks, and then mutilated herself with a bottle opener from her cheek down to her chin on the right side. The authorities thought he did it, but she wouldn’t accuse him, and she wouldn’t take any offers to have a plastic surgeon fix the scar because she knew she’d just do it again.

Jessie Bell married into the very wealthy King family, even though her family came from the docks. She struggled with her husband’s father and how he tried to run everything, and when she had a child, Ely got into her life and destroyed it, alienating both her from her son and her family from her son. She descended into heroine addiction, regularly going to lesbian parties to enjoy the company of her “special friend.” One night a party gets raided and she is caught in it, and Ely uses it as a reason to have his son divorce her. After the divorce, she descends further into addiction, and makes her way to Bailey’s Cafe and Eve. Eve helps her sober up and then forces her to get addicted again and go through the process one more time. Jessie hates Eve for that. She is the only one of the women outside of Eve who will regularly come to the cafe to talk, play cards, and eat.

Gabe is a Russian Jew who owns the pawn shop connected to Bailey’s Cafe. He and Bailey do not get along, but when Mariam comes to his shop, he takes her directly to Bailey’s so that Eve can help her. Mariam comes from a small African village. Her mother had her circumcised in order to ensure her virginity before marriage, but she gets pregnant anyway, even though no man has touched her. Her village throws her out, and she makes her way out of the village looking for someone to take her in. Eve takes her in, but they are all worried about the girl and the pain it is going to cause her to have a child after the genital mutilation. None of the men will engage with her because they can’t deal with her story.

Miss Maple is a cross dresser. His real name is Stanley Beckwourth Booker T. Washington Carver, and he was born and raised in Southern California. When he is about to go to school, his father orders him an expensive copy of the collected works of Shakespeare, and when they go to get it, the white men in town confront his father about the clothes he wears. They had already regularly slashed his tires of his nice cars, and they start to beat them and rip their clothes, forcing them to strip naked. They find women’s clothes in the store, and they walk out in those. At college, he attains a PhD in marketing, but cannot find a job anywhere. He spends some time in jail because he was a conscientious objector and refused to fight in the war. He starts dressing in women’s clothing because as he is going many places to search for jobs, the weather is unbearable and he finds women’s clothes cooler and more comfortable. He finally accepts a job as a housekeeper and bouncer for Eve, and he intends to save up enough money to be able to go back and start up his own company.

At the end of all of these stories, Mariam’s child is born. It is a baby boy, and the whole of Eve’s house and the people in the cafe sing spirituals for hours in happiness over the successful birth. Mariam follows Jewish customs, and Gabe comes in and does the Jewish communal rites for the child. Bailey is named Godfather, and together, Gabe and Bailey name the baby George, after their own fathers. The story ends there, not because there aren’t more stories to tell, but because Bailey chooses to end the tale on a happy note.

Brief Note on Themes
This book is structured as almost a set of interrelated short stories, connected by a common theme of tragedy. This ultimately creates a story that functions like a blues and jazz song, with the stories being tragic blues stories and each person getting time to riff or be the main melody to tell their story, like a jazz musician. There is a touch of magical realism in that the cafe is everywhere and nowhere, with the back of the cafe leading into infinity or into death, and the front of the cafe offering an entrance into a liminal space for healing. Eve becomes a form of griot, both pariah and savior, one who knows more than everyone else in the area and community. The women’s stories are mainly featured, offering a variety of stories about what it means to be a woman and female experience. Eve can perhaps be seen as the first woman, founding a space for other women, who are always and only seen as sex objects despite their major potential outside of their physical bodies. Having a cross dressing man also brings up discussions of gender fluidity and what it really means to be feminine or masculine.

by bluesyjune

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in

African-American Culture. Temple UP, 1990.

Summary of Work
In this critical work, Katrina Hazzard-Gordon traces the history of social dance spaces in African American culture from slavery to the 1980s. Starting with slavery, she discusses how African cultures had specific dances for many different cultural events and even daily events, linking their religious beliefs with dance and movement. As they were enslaved and placed on slave ships, they were often forced to dance for exercise, with or without chains, on the deck of the ship. If they didn’t dance they were beaten, and dancing often hurt them because it would leave large pieces of flesh and wounds on them as the chains ripped at their skin as they danced. Their were many strategies that slave ship captains used to make sure to keep slaves more healthy and alive and to stop insurrections.

When the slaves made it across the sea and were sold, they were mixed with other African cultures, and often the only communication or freedom they had was dance. Many slave masters allowed for weekly dances and several days of dancing on Christmas because they knew that it was a way to stop slave revolts. However, there was also a large risk of revolt because slaves would use these dances as ways to get together and communicate about starting slave rebellions across plantations. For this reason, many slave owners would not allow their slaves to go to other plantations, and drums were banned. Juba and other patting and noisemaking movements replaced drums. Slave owners would also host competitions and have slaves perform for groups of whites as entertainment, and many of the slave owners bought slave musicians to play for both slaves and whites.

After emancipation, dances continued in the form of jook joints: small country spaces where there was drinking, gambling, dancing, music, and barbecuing, among other quasi-legal activities. This is where dances such as the slow drag were created, as there was very little space in these jook joints for dances that took up a lot of space. Many of these jook joints were run by donations, with everyone pitching in. As black people migrated to the cities and began to have more money, they took their traditions with them, and Honky-Tonks and After Hours Joints started up. They were essentially like jook joints, but they were run for profit and often were considered classier or more reputable, at least the Honky Tonks. The After-Hours joints were run after the Honky Tonks closed, and they were places for gambling and bootleg liquor. Politicians bought votes by allowing certain spaces such as these to remain open. Another way around laws was to have private events through membership programs, and so they could have events past 1 AM and not get in trouble due to the private nature of the parties. Large ballrooms like the Savoy also offered spaces for dancing, although the Savoy was shut down because of fears of miscegenation. As disco became more popular, all of these spaces started to disappear.

Rent parties also started to become very big, as black people moved to the cities and struggled to pay the high rents. They would hire a musician and sometimes, if they had the ability, print up tickets for advertisement. They had plenty of liquor and would get a portion of sales, and they also got a portion of gambling money. It would stave off eviction. As rent parties died down, block parties became more popular. In order to buy votes, politicians would sponsor these block parties. Cutting contests would happen here, and it kept rival gangs from all-out warfare in the streets. Older people rarely participated in the cutting competitions, but they encouraged the best young people in their communities. The winners of these competitions would then go on to compete against each other in a larger competition.

However, for the black elite, the dancing was very different. They had more formal dances called cotillions, where debutantes were brought out and paraded. The dances were very much more like Western European dances than they were anything like the dances that were done by the lower economic class of black people. The prices of these cotillions were so high that there was no chance that anyone outside of the black elite would participate. Many of these cotillions were sponsored by businesses, who would get an advertisement in the program and a formal mention during the event. Elite clubs were formed that allowed for only the highest educated and the highest ranking community members to participate in the spaces, further eliminating the contact that the black elite had with the lower classes.

The focus in this book geographically is Columbus, Ohio, a little bit of Chicago, and the Southern plantations. However, places such as these existed across the country. Hazzard-Gordon also states that knowing how to dance and knowing these spaces was considered a litmus test.

Preliminary Notes on Specific Dissertation Use
Ralph Ellison, “responding to charges that black intellectuals have deserted core black culture, [stated], ‘Part of my pride in being what I am is that as a dancer, as a physical man . . . I bet you I can outdone, outran most of those intellectuals who’re supposed to have come back.’ Note that Ellison asserts that his dancing ability clears him of the charge—but he essentially confirms the guilt of others” (118). Malcolm X also found dancing ability to be divisive as Euro-American ideas dominated class division, and the culture used black dancing ability as a way to stereotype black people.

These abilities and spaces are not simply an embellishment in black culture and African American Literature, but such a part of black embodiment that it becomes a code or a rite of passage to be able to participate in the community and to know what’s going on or being said or done.

by bluesyjune

Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, A New Literary History of America

Marcus, Greil and Werner Sollors, editors. A New Literary History of America. Belnap P of Harvard UP, 2009.

Summaries of Selected Sections

“The Problem of the Color Line”

This section briefly overviews the different viewpoints between Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Washington’s work was a combination of a slave narrative and a rags-to-riches narrative that called for blacks to allow segregation and white supremacy until they had worked hard enough to prove that it should be eradicated; the work glossed over many important points about the struggles in the South during the Reconstruction years. Du Bois’ work made a detailed attack on Washington’s ideology and addressed the color line as the problem of the century. Du Bois created a black intelligentsia that previously never existed in the country, and he also worked to found and build the NAACP, leaving his position at Atlanta University in order to do so.

“The Invention of the Blues”

This section gives a broad overview of the blues as a genre, particularly focusing on the fact that we do not know who specifically created it and that, as the claim, the evidence for it starting in the Delta is largely anecdotal (can you feel my skepticism yet at this entry?). The entry includes W.C. Handy’s description of the first time he heard the blues and Ma Rainey’s description of the first time she heard it. They also discuss Samuel Charters being the first person to write a book on the subject, Country Blues, and how folklorists such as the Lomaxes went South and recorded numerous musicians.

“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”

This section details Irving Berlin’s start from humble origins to writing Broadway musical scores. He started as a singing waiter, and when Tin Pan Alley became successful, he tried his hand at it and was making a living writing coon songs, stereotypical and racist songs about black people and their wanton ways. All of these songs were ragtime music, and the press eviscerated the music. Then, Berlin wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and it was not only popular, it stayed popular. It changed the format of American popular songs, and the form would become the mainstay for a half a century. The song broke him out of having to write coon songs, and he was able to transition into a variety of songwriting and scoring. The most impressive thing about the song is that it persists in its popularity even today, and most people can sing the song if it is played for them.

“A Modernist Moment”

This section overviews the Armory Show in NYC, where artists in the Modernist period were displayed to the public, from Van Gogh to Matisse to Duschamp and Picasso. Art was bringing new perspectives on what art itself was; it was no longer meant for noble topics, but also for everyday and common topics. The Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden is also highlighted, with a discussion of how art brought together with striking workers made a statement about the time period as well as the economic moment, despite the failure of the performance to raise money for the strike. Finally, Poetry magazine, founded by Harriet Monroe and run by she and Ezra Pound, offered a revitalization of poetry in America, but also around the world as Pound inserted his thoughts on what poetry ought to be and Monroe searched for talent through an open door publishing policy: if it’s quality, we’ll publish it.

“Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’”

This section suggests that we should take another close look at Mamie Smith’s blues recording, even though it is not considered an actual blues song among scholars and musicians. This suggestion comes because when looking at the history surrounding Smith and her recording, we can see that the song is important because it was a formal notice of a broken racial barrier: black people could now record their music for sale and entertainment. Sophie Turner, the white blackface performer, was actually the first white woman to record a successful blues song, and this is important because it may have been, if we look past appropriation, the first crack in the barrier to recording black music: since Turner’s recording was successful, they were less worried about recording black music. While Smith was a vaudeville performer who was never considered one of the great blues singers of the era, her song and musical choices are important for the racial barriers they maneuver and the racial issues the song codes into itself and the tone of the lyric.

“Jean Toomer”

This section provides a spotlight on Jean Toomer’s life and writing. He struggled to feel that anything he wrote was good enough to publish, even declining to be published in a landmark book of poetry. Those who knew him would describe him as a strange man. He would frequent salons run by James Weldon Johnson, and he would work odd jobs just long enough to know what it was like to work them before he quit to read and write some more. He was in Washington D.C. taking care of sick grandparents, who practically raised him, and he was going mad. He decided to take a job as a temporary principal at a school in Georgia, and it is there that he learned more about black communities in the South, which inspired his writing of Cane. Toomer himself was mixed race and had very light skin, meaning he was often mistaken for white but did not fit in there once his ancestry was known, but he also did not fit in the black community. Still, his work is considered the inauguration of the Harlem Renaissance, and was hailed again during the Black Arts Movement before and after his death.

“T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence”

This section discusses the writing and lives of T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, particularly their crossing paths as Eliot moved to get away from America and its culture and Lawrence moved to it in hopes of a nationalist dream and pending publications. While Eliot had issues with his publication of Wasteland and the culture’s misunderstanding of his work and its seriousness, Lawrence was happy for the audience that would allow for his more sexual or deviant works to not just be published, but be popular. Eliot worked in finance during the financial dismantling of Europe after WWI, and Lawrence enjoyed freedom from discrimination with his German wife Freida in the USA. However, Lawrence became disenchanted with America the more and more he saw the treatment of Native Americans and the injustices; he came to the conclusion that the white American could never come to a cultural understanding with the Native American, and that similarly, he would always be Other from Americans as a European. Eliot would always call out and deplore dryness and sterility in writing as well as a nationalist spirit, while Lawrence would allow that nationalist spirit to create illusion.

“The Great Gatsby”

This section discusses the fear, dislike, and discrimination against new money in Fitzgerald’s work The Great Gatsby. Much as immigrants are discriminated against in America today, Gatsby and the other residents of West Egg are disliked by the East Egg residents, who are old, established money. The murder of Gatsby and the subsequent newspaper articles about how he deserved what he got are reminiscent of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, where the Italians were convicted of robbery and murder even though they most likely did not commit the crime. The fear of immigrants still looms, just like it does in Gatsby when Buchanan talks about the rising of the colored races to supplant white people. But much like the dream of Gatsby making it in America, what is inspiring about the book is the author himself. Fitzgerald embodies the opportunity available in America with his riches and success as a writer, a career that is not thought of as one that will lead to a prosperous life.

“John Dos Passos”

This section discusses how Dos Passos was both disenchanted by capitalism and communism in America, and how he, in his dissatisfaction with many things and growing his writing in his early twenties, went to Europe and then the Soviet Union and found a fellow writer who shared his ideas about how to structure his work. The rest of the section is dedicated to discussing the structure of the USA Trilogy, particularly The 42nd Parallel, and how the narratives cut off and come back and intertwine while the newsreels and camera eye biographies add a layer of complexity: on their own, they would have been gimmicky, but together, they create a uniquely layered complexity of American literature and life.

“Arthur Miller”

This section details the realist theater that is Arthur Miller’s legacy. Focusing particularly on Death of a Salesman, readers learn of his desire for people to feel that performance was immoral and to see how it conflicts with the American Dream even as it seems to uphold it. In fact, the illusion of the American Dream is also explored. Willy in the play is the ultimate performer, one who has cared more about what other people see and think than what he is actually building. As he breaks down, the rules of realism in theater break down: the scenes are regularly interrupted by music, which signal Willy’s entry into his memories, and all the other characters become supporting roles; when he runs out of memories and illusions, Willy breaks the fourth wall before killing himself. This and the other works of Arthur Miller, in their discussions of the problems of performance, set the stage for works like Sondheim’s Gypsy and Kushner’s Angels in America.

“Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom!”

Coming out in the same year, these two novels would have very different successes, mainly that Margaret Mitchell’s work would become radically popular and well read, whereas William Faulkner’s work wouldn’t sell well and wouldn’t become a film. Yet they both look at the South and its problems. Mitchell’s work unveils the economic failures and class superiority issues in the South, but then by the end of the work has put the romantic lens back on the South; her book would be further romanticized in the film, and its success proves the obsession and enchantment of the American populace about the pastoral American South. On the other hand, Faulkner’s work sets out to dismantle the problems of racism and slavery that built the American South and continue to pervade its society. He discusses issues of miscegenation and racial hatred that blanket the South and points out the fact that America’s success was built on slavery. His work was prophetic in its dealings with what would later, in the 1970s, be hailed as a national dilemma.

“Jelly Roll Morton Speaks”

This section deals with Alan Lomax being encouraged to invite Jelly Roll Morton to talk about his songs and older music and to sing and play for him to record. Lomax was initially reluctant given his interest was not in a popular jazz singer of the past but of folk music, but when Jelly Roll sat down and sang a song Lomax requested and then started to give a history of it and his life and how Jazz was created in Storyville, Lomax recognized the importance of recording Morton’s story. He spent weeks recording Morton talking and singing, and it was the birth of oral history, using sound recording to allow people to tell their own stories free from transcription and the pauses that inevitably come with that.

“Billie Holliday, ‘Strange Fruit’”

This section describes how Billy Holliday, more of a Jazz singer than a blues singer, was able to instill the blues throughout her work in the way she sang her songs and what messages she communicated through them. Her work, much like her life, embodies the suffering and the lives of African Americans that exist in the lyrics and notes of blues music, and even more so in the fact that there is no reasoning or scapegoat for the suffering described. The blues were a way for Holliday and many others to both rid themselves of the blues and describe and embody their experiences as they sent messages to the next generation.

“Up from Invisibility”

This section discusses Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and its themes, particularly on communism and African American cultural elements. While Ellison insisted the book was not autobiographical, this section posits that perhaps it was at least somewhat autobiographical given Ellison’s time at Tuskegee, move to New York, his support of Communism and Stalinism for years, and his later renouncement of those viewpoints. In 1939, Ellison worked with old documents that contained information about African American history and folklore, and this greatly influenced his work; while the work has many blues and jazz tropes, it also contains a lot of folklore which embodies the ideas and tropes expressed in stories and characters such as Brer Rabbit and other trickster figures. He refused to allow his writing to be defined by victimhood and suffering, and instead focused on the rich traditions that would bring African Americans up from invisibility.

“Tennessee Williams”

This section focuses on how Tennessee Williams inserted grand emotional performances and personal experience into his plays. Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire was a combination of two of his lovers, and he admitted to all his female characters being some embodiment of his sister, mother, and even himself at the time of writing. People have said that Blanche is essentially Williams on stage with the theatricality and the sexual theatricality. Williams was always openly gay, something that was a big risk in the time period, and his work deals with homosexuality in ways that could have had his plays banned from screen adaption or seriously revised for screen adaption. His work was very open about sex during a time when such discussions were rarely, if ever, public. Yet Williams would be criticized by LGBT people and activists for his work being constructed around heteronormative tropes; he would always defend his work as being for a broader audience than just LGBT communities. All of his work is set in the South, and much of his work deconstructs the myth of Southern Aristocracy, as can be seen with the loss of Belle Reve and the falling apart of the Southern Belle Aristocrat.

“The Birth of the Cool”

This section discusses the Aesthetic of the Cool, the idea that an artist should be able to do very difficult acts while making it look as if it takes no effort at all. While some form of this idea exists across time and cultures, the phrase “Cool” was slowly brought into use in regard to jazz music. Miles Davis was the catalyst for this idea, with his focus on blending instruments together and using instruments like the tuba and French horn over the tenor sax in his band. His trumpet melodies float over the accompaniment and blend with the other instruments in ways that jazz as “hot music” did not. He also did not perform like other jazz musicians, even turning his back upon the audience while he played. Even though Miles Davis’ first records did not sell well, they are considered landmark records for the era. And even after Davis was done with his ideas and had moved onto new ones, his work had influenced jazz permanently.

“The Autobiography of Malcolm X”

This section discusses the life of Malcolm X as he wrote his autobiography. He had been regularly denounced as a hate monger and demagogue, and he had even been exiled from Elijah Muhammad’s sect of black-centered Islam. Alex Haley had written a short bio piece on him for Playboy, and then he was invited by Doubleday to work with Malcolm X to write his autobiography. Haley’s work was rejected after Malcolm X’s assassination, but Grove Press picked it up. It is now firmly established in the literature canon, but that poses problems, as it is not simply a work of social science or literature, as it combines postmodern narrative elements into a work of nonfiction, something that had never been done before. There are also questions about narrator reliability given that Malcolm X upheld lies and then recanted them later in the narrative when he revealed Elijah Muhammad’s sins. Foucault calls this type of narrative parrhesiastes, where a speaker uses the most direct way to tell what he believes regardless of the full truthfulness of the tale being told.

“Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker”

This section discusses these three authors in relation to each other and the women’s movement of the 1970s. They told stories of black womanhood, a part of life that was a gaping hole in literature. They provided stories about what it was like to be a black woman in America, and showed the trauma that chased them in the South and in the North; but they also showed unique and strong women who had interesting stories to tell for their own sake, stories worth telling. They received criticism from all sides for the way they portrayed the black community and particularly black men, but they persisted in telling their stories. They also paved the way to the rediscovery of black female artists, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen, from previous generations.

“Toni Morrison”

This section discusses Morrison’s work in the framework of her being put on the cover of Newsweek. She was the first black woman to be featured on the cover since Zora Neale Hurston, and she was the first black author to be chosen for a Book of the Month club book since Richard Wright. Her work, with so many central black female characters, speaks to a new literary tradition that told untold stories, stories about pariah women who live a life outside of religious and community rule structures. Yet while her work, fictional and nonfictional, deals with many important racial issues, she has not become a public figure like James Baldwin did, who she claims as her main influence. She has done more than write amazing prose. She, as an editor for Random House, has helped a great number of African American authors bring their work to the public eye. She has won many awards, culminating with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

by bluesyjune

August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Wilson, August. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Plume, 1985.

Summary of Work
The play opens in a recording studio, with two men, Sturdyvant and Irvin, discussing Ma Rainey’s work. Sturdyvant, the owner of the recording studio, thinks that Ma Rainey is a diva, and he’s upset that her last recording didn’t sell as well as he wanted in the North, even though it sold in the South. He wants nothing to do with talking with the black people in the studio, and leaves Irvin to take car of that. He also requests that Levee, the horn player, have more of a role in the music because that is what is the new sound that’s selling. Aftewards, the band sets up for rehearsal. Levee is late because he is buying new shoes. When he arrives, he immediately starts bantering with the other band members: first about the price of his shoes and how Cutler helped him pay for them; then about how to spell the word music, and then about how the songs should be played. Levee wants to add more of a jazz feel to the music, and he doesn’t want to rehearse songs they’ve played numerous times.

They start rehearsing, but are regularly interrupted by arguments between Levee and Toledo, who reads books and has a lot to say about race relations and black entertainment and advancement. Slow Drag, a man who’s as laid back as his name implies, keeps trying to divert discussion so they can get back to rehearsing, but he fails. In the meantime, Ma Rainey has still not shown up, and Irvin is nervous about it. Just as Sturdyvant is getting angry, Ma Rainey, her girlfriend Dussie Mae, and her nephew Sylvester walk into the recording studio, escorted by a policeman. The policeman tells Irvin that she had hit another car with her car and then tried to run away in a cab, and then assaulted the cab driver when he wouldn’t take her. Irvin tells Ma he will handle it, and he slips the police officer some money for him to forget about taking her to the precinct.

Since the production of the record is delayed from the incident, Irvin gets sandwiches for the band, and while eating, they discuss their pasts. Cutler tells about how Slow Drag, dancing in a competition with a woman one evening, nearly got knifed for dancing with her when the woman’s boyfriend saw them. He talked the guy out of knifing him by saying that he was trying to help the girl win the competition so she could buy him a gold watch. After that, all the women wanted to Slow Drag with him, which is how Slow Drag got his name.

Toledo discusses how black people are the “leftovers” (57) in America, and after a brief discussion about race relations, they start to rehearse Levee’s version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Ma hears it from upstairs and confronts Irvin about it, who tries to convince her that it’s the style people want, but she’s not hearing it. She goes downstairs and tells them what they will be playing, and tells them that Sylvester will do the speaking part at the beginning of the song. Afterwards, Levee goes off, and in his anger, tells the story of watching his mother get gang raped by white men, and how he tried to stop them by getting a kitchen knife and cutting them, and they took the knife and sliced his chest open, nearly killing him. Then he tells about his father selling the home to one of the white rapists so they could get out of town.

Act Two opens with Irvin and the band discussing how Sylvester can’t do the part, and Irvin tells them to stick with Levee’s version of the song and he’ll work it out with Ma. Ma goes to record and sees there’s no coke to drink, and she will not record until she gets one. She waits, and tells Cutler that she knows that she doesn’t mean anything but money to these white men. She says that because of that, she’s going to do everything she can to ensure that they treat her how she wants to be treated even if it kills the white men. She talks about how the blues are a more than a form of expression for her, they are a form of survival, a way to understand life. Meanwhile Levee starts seriously flirting with Dussie Mae.

When they finally get to recording, they first have problems with Sylvester getting the line right. When he finally does, they don’t get it recorded due to technical difficulties with the sound equipment. Ma threatens to leave, and Irvin hurries to get the issues fixed. While they are waiting, the other men in the band tell Levee to lay off Ma’s girl, and try to tell him the problems that it will bring him to meddle with women who are involved already. They also try to tell him that the way he dresses won’t change anything in the eyes of white people, and that they even know black preachers who, very well dressed, were publicly humiliated and harassed by white people. Levee gets angry and says he isn’t an “imitation white man” (94), and he starts in about how he is going to be successful with his music once Sturdyvant lets him record. When Cutler tries again to talk to him about God, he insults Cutler and says that his God, if he is real, can strike him down.

Finally, the issues are fixed, and they finish recording. Afterward, Ma confronts Levee about his playing and tells him that he is to play his horn in a way that fits her music style for the band. When he gets upset at Ma, she fires him. Figuring he doesn’t need the job anyway, he goes to talk to Sturdyvant about his music, and he finds out that Sturdyvant will buy his songs for a few dollars, but won’t let him record. With no job and no prospects, he is upset, and as the band is getting ready to leave, Toledo accidentally steps on Levee’s shoes. Levee, in a rage, stabs and kills Toledo.

Brief Note on Themes
This play is the only one of Wilson’s Century Cycle plays to be based on a historical figure, although he insisted that Ma Rainey was not a researched character. The play itself deals with how the music and entertainment industry treated its black artists, who sold very well and yet were terribly treated and underpaid. Issues of segregation, how popular music is marketed, race relations, economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and black rage brought on by systemic injustice and oppression feature throughout the play. One distinct example is the altercation with the police, where only a white man can pay off the white police officer to keep Rainey out of jail. Still, the power black entertainers held was more than the average black person: Rainey describes being able to be forceful and get what she wants from white men in the business when otherwise she has no power to command respect, or if not respect, then decent treatment.

Music plays a big part of this play, the first of Wilson’s Century Cycle. The purpose of the blues is a theme running through the work. Blues is one of Wilson’s main influences for his work (he stated this many times in interviews during his lifetime). While Rainey outright states how she feels about it, the blues also feature as each of the characters tell their stories of sadness, travel, and life experience. Recording technologies are explored, as glitches occur throughout the process (a known problem for Paramount, since their recordings were regularly poor quality). The recorded and unrecorded blues songs can stand in as a form of cultural memory, music that passes on important information from one generation of listeners to the next.

by bluesyjune