Harlem Nocturne (2 page)

And—as with every heart that races at the speed of New York streets, every eye struck with awe at the grand façade of an elegant apartment building or the sheer audacity of a skyscraper, every mouth that smiles at a brief encounter, an overheard conversation, or the constant chatter—these women fell in love with this city. At times, they grew tired, a little weary, and sojourned away from the chaos and confusion of urban life. But always, they couldn't wait to return, to be back in the crowd, in the thick of it. New York beckoned, and, yes, they came, again and again. Amid the noise, the rush, the thrill, and the trepidation, they came, they settled, they made homes, and they made art.

There was also a cherished quiet. The still silence of a small apartment, where a woman sat at a typewriter in the hour just before dawn. A dance studio where a young woman marked her steps before her students or other members of the company arrived. An early-morning walk through the northern tip
of Central Park, where newly fallen snow muffled the sounds of the city and revealed a striking magenta hat. On a pink-covered twin bed in a Sugar Hill apartment, a woman tried to notate the sounds in her head so that she might eventually sleep in peace. These women were alone but not lonely. They knew solitude, welcomed it and the gifts it bore. They welcomed the rare chance to hear their own thoughts, before the city stirred, before rousing from that pink-covered bed.

Their city is a place that nurtures, produces, and challenges not only their art, but also their ideas, their thought, their aesthetic. In their city, they wear pompadours and platform shoes. One woman makes her clothes; one dresses like a bobby-soxer, complete with ankle socks and saddle shoes; and one is inclined to the fashionable life, with her Dior gowns, B. Altman shoes, furs, and orchid corsages. Platforms and pompadours sweep them up high, revealing foreheads and intelligent eyes. Not hiding behind bangs, they are forthright, honest—and the added height doesn't hurt. Platforms and pompadours “splendidly uprising toward clear skies.”
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Their New York is Sugar Hill, Strivers Row, The Hollow, Upper East Side, The Village, and Bed-Stuy. Their New York speaks Spanish and Jive, French, and West Indian–inflected Queen's English, in dialects born of the Yankee North and the Black South. And some Saturday mornings the Italians, Puerto Ricans, West Indians, Jews, and southern migrants leave their own Harlem to mingle under the bridge on Park Avenue from 111th to 116th—the open-air markets beneath the railroad tracks. There, the writer tells us, the vendors “quarrel, bargain,
exchange insults with customers in Spanish, Italian, Yiddish and American ranging from tough East Side, New York to the soft accents of the Old South.” Under the bridge, “stalls piled with . . . a bewildering variety of foods . . . long-grain Carolina rice, Spanish saffron, chili powder, fresh ginger root, plantains, water cress, olive oil, olives, spaghetti and macaroni, garlic, basil, zucchini, finocchio, white corn meal, collards, mustard greens, black-eyed peas, big hominy and little hominy, spareribs, hot peppers, pimentos, coconuts, pineapples, mangoes.”
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New York, in all of its delirious deliciousness, beckoned, and they came.

INTRODUCTION

N
ew York is a city of culture and commerce, skyscrapers and bustling crowds, opportunity and deferred dreams. There are many ways to know this city, but being acquainted with its artists, especially if they are artists who are concerned with the complex lives of ordinary people, is particularly illuminating. Such artists help us understand New York's particularities while also giving voice and vision to universal feelings: fear and longing, trepidation and possibility. Through them we experience the city: navigate its crowds, walk its streets, and ride its subways. We see how they relate to those who share their environment and how they address—or ignore—the social and political concerns of the day. Attending to the artists and their work helps us to remember that people are always bigger than the theories, narratives, and histories that seek to explain, define, narrate, and contain them.

The generation of artists who lived and worked in New York, especially in Harlem, during and immediately following World War II understood that people could not be contained or fully explained by academic or political theories. The stories
of three such artists drive the narrative of
Harlem Nocturne
, an exploration of politics and culture in New York during the 1940s: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, writer Ann Petry, and composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams. Although they are not well known to contemporary readers, Primus, Petry, and Williams were among the city's most celebrated artists in that decade. Each was inspired by her times to produce highly innovative art that communicated the aspirations of everyday people.

None of these women were native New Yorkers. Petry, a fourth-generation New Englander, was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1908. Williams was born in Atlanta in 1910 and migrated with her family to Pittsburgh when she was a girl. Primus was born in Trinidad in 1919 and came with her family to New York when she was three years old. Primus spent her teenage years in Harlem. Petry arrived there as a newlywed in 1938. Williams settled in Harlem in 1943, after over a decade on the road.

Primus and Williams would become friends and collaborators while both were working at Café Society, the politically leftist jazz club that presented some of New York's most important and exciting talent. Surely Petry, the loner, was aware of them, but there is no evidence that she knew them personally. However, this is not a group biography. Primus, Petry, and Williams are bound together by a place and a time, and together they give us an understanding of the relationship between artistic endeavor and political aspiration. During the 1940s all three women were producing celebrated art, actively
promoting progressive causes, and working to merge their political and aesthetic concerns. Each sought to expand the contours of the American ideal of democracy to include the most marginalized peoples. Each commented upon and critiqued the limited practice of American democracy. And each strove to contribute to American culture by bringing to it the perspective, history, and traditions of its citizens of African descent.

Importantly, all three women were recognized by their peers and by the arts establishment as significant artists. They also shared an extraordinary sense of themselves, a belief in their capacity and a willingness to build upon their natural talent through intense preparation, practice, and learning. In addition to being artists and activists, each was also an intellectual who critically engaged questions about her chosen art form.

The first half of the decade offered these women unprecedented opportunity. This would change by decade's end. By that time in each woman's experience, the range of opportunities was narrowing, the result of changing politics and shifting aesthetic sensibilities. By the early 1950s, Petry, Primus, and Williams had all left New York. Primus, who had been traveling in West Africa, returned to the United States to find herself under investigation by the FBI. Williams toured Europe and wouldn't return for two years; it would be decades before she reached heights similar to those of the earlier years. Petry spent the rest of her life in New England. Still, they all continued to be productive artists in spite of these changes.

Although
Harlem Nocturne
focuses on individual women, it also seeks to place them in the context of the city and the
organizations and institutions that helped to shape them and their art. The war years offered a brief period of possibility and hope for many, especially for white women and black Americans of both genders. These years tested the capacity of the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. During this time, a new group of gutsy, confident, and insistent black people joined a generation of progressive whites who were committed to a vision of their nation as a place of potential, a place capable of change and worth fighting for. Many of this generation would later be challenged and silenced by Cold War politics, or would capitulate to those politics, but not before laying the groundwork for the militant activism that exploded in later decades. Tactics that we most often associate with the civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties—sit-ins, freedom rides, economic boycotts, and mass marches—originated in the forties. The first March on Washington was to have taken place in 1941, and the plans for it became the blueprint for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The forties are a period of great importance in American history and culture. In popular history, it is the time of “the Greatest Generation”—those young men who served their country in the armed services and in so doing helped to free the world for democracy. But the idolization of these young men also highlighted a central contradiction: as the “Greatest Generation” was fighting for freedom abroad, women and African Americans were still lobbying for equality at home. So for American women, it was also the era of Rosie the Riveter and the emergence of the “woman's film,” when women's narratives first hit the silver screen. For African Americans, it was
the age of Double V—or Double Victory—where black Americans fought not only overseas for their country but also to be recognized as citizens at home (Victory at Home and Abroad). In American music, it was the time when the swing era gave way to bebop and rhythm and blues.

Throughout the 1940s, Primus, Petry, and Williams experienced a particularly fecund period of creativity, taking advantage of a brief era of openness and opportunity. Four factors contributed to creating the conditions for the social and artistic movement of which these women were a part: World War II, the Double V Campaign, the Second Great Migration of African Americans, and the Popular Front in politics, art, and culture that first coalesced during the Great Depression, but continued through the war years.

Because of the absence of men, many US women were afforded greater opportunity during the war years than they had seen in earlier times—or would see in the times immediately thereafter. This flowering of opportunity reached black women, too. Though most black women continued to work as domestic servants, some began to find work as clerks, nurses, teachers, and seamstresses. Those who entered the war industry were relegated to the most menial, labor-intensive tasks. A few black women in the skilled trades fought their way into newly integrated unions.

Petry, Primus, and Williams were profoundly influenced by the Double V Campaign. Through Double V, African Americans insisted upon their social and civil rights while at the same time committing themselves to the war effort. For black people, the war provided an opportunity to accelerate their
demands for equality. As the nation fought a war against fascism, a war for democracy, it also sought to present itself as a land of equality and opportunity for all of its citizens. Black Americans highlighted the distance between this ideal of America and the reality of ongoing racial inequality, often through the black press and civil rights organizations.

The Double V Campaign was part of a larger social movement whose ultimate goal was the destruction of Jim Crow and the dismantling of the infamous 1896
Plessy v. Ferguson
decision, which legalized and helped to institutionalize racial segregation in public accommodations. The movement focused on segregation in the armed services and reached its apex with the March on Washington movement in 1941, organized by civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, and political strategist and organizer Bayard Rustin. The march, which was planned in order to protest discrimination in the defense industries, had its beginnings in May of that year when Randolph issued a “Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense” on July 1, 1941. Within a month it was estimated that 100,000 protesters would attend. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appealed to Randolph and Rustin to call the march off, hoping to avoid the embarrassment of a mass protest against racism in the midst of a war against Nazism. When they refused, he issued Executive Order 8802, establishing the President's Fair Employment Practices Committee, which barred discrimination in defense industries and federal bureaus. Only then did Randolph call off the proposed march. But even though the march never happened,
Randolph and Rustin's proposal marked the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, the long, slow road to
Brown v. Board of Education
and beyond. For while the Double V Campaign used the war to focus on the armed services, it also concerned itself with segregation and discrimination in housing and employment.

The political activism evident in the Double V Campaign was undergirded by the tremendous growth of black urban populations during the war years. Between 1916 and 1930, approximately 1.5 million African Americans moved to northern cities in response to the call for industrial laborers. The Second Great Migration was larger and more sustained than the first. Between 1940 and 1970, over 5 million black southerners migrated north and west. By the end of World War II, the majority of African Americans were urban, and they were transforming the face of American cities politically, economically, and culturally. The migrants were often the subjects of Primus's and Petry's art, and they provided a significant portion of Primus's and Williams's audiences. Each woman aligned her art with the aspirations of migrants: the desire for equal citizenship, for adequate housing, for access to educational and economic opportunity, and for freedom from racial violence and police brutality.