Harlem Nocturne (5 page)

Pearl Primus in
Folk Dance
(1945). Photo by Gerda Peterich.

Through dance, Primus was able to portray the challenges and restrictions of segregation, and in her performance of “Jim Crow Train,” she limned the walls of the Jim Crow car, made palpable its confining nature, and then resisted its constraints by leaping out of it, by flying rather than riding. In these choreographed gestures she embodied a particularly black paradox: forced confinement
and
forced mobility. While the major experience of black diasporic communities has been one of mobility, migration, and dislocation, these populations have also experienced forced confinement in various forms of segregation, imprisonment, and enslavement. Black activists and writers had been resisting segregated transportation since its institutionalization in 1893. In fact, for writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt, the Jim Crow car had become a major signifier of black people's second-class status. And both Ida B. Wells and Homer Plessy filed suits against segregated seating on public trolley cars to contest this second-class status. The blatant indignities of the Jim Crow car gave African Americans an opportunity to raise questions of class differences between black and white Americans, to challenge the social construction of race, and to question the ethics of white men who used the car to smoke, curse, and harass black women. For black women activists, the Jim Crow car was the impetus behind their challenge to race-based definitions of the term “lady.” On some segregated cars, black women were forced from the “Ladies Car” to the “Smoker's Car” or the “Colored Car.” Black women were excluded from the category “lady,” and thus from the protections afforded by that term.
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At the time of her appearance at the Freedom Rally, Primus had never been on a Jim Crow car. She had been born in the Caribbean and had migrated to New York as a toddler, so she had missed the worst of southern racism. But much of her audience and many of her neighbors were migrants from the South and had experienced Jim Crow cars and other types of segregation firsthand. Between 1916 and 1930, approximately 1.5 million African Americans moved to northern cities in response to the call for wartime labor. This mass movement was known as the Great Migration. The Second Great Migration was longer and more sustained than the first. Between 1940 and 1970, over 5 million black southerners migrated north and west.

During this period, black Americans became an urban people. Large numbers of black migrants who now populated northern cities and lived in communities like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant attended events such as the Freedom Rally. They brought with them firsthand knowledge of the indignities of racial segregation. Although black migrants had escaped the most persistent and virulent forms of racism, they carried their experiences with them when they left the South. Those experiences shaped their sense of history, culture, tradition, and family. For many, the South was
the
site of struggle, the primary but not the only battleground in the war against white supremacy. The North, they soon learned, was yet another battleground, and there they experienced a subtler and more insidious form of racism. There were no “Whites Only” signs in New York, but black migrants were racially segregated
by neighborhood, and there were many establishments where they were not welcome. The existence of racial segregation struck many as a mockery of American ideals of democracy. They were joined by a growing number of white Americans who also believed the time had come to end Jim Crow. Many of them had also experienced segregated transportation: they rode in the “Whites Only” car.

As black and white Americans in cities like New York were confronted again and again with the failures of American democracy, they began to become more politically active. As a young dancer in New York, Primus tapped into that activism, creating pieces inspired by the black struggle in the United States. But she was also creating a repertoire based on African and Caribbean dance. As such, she constructed a vision of the African diaspora, one that was enabled not only by her own background but also by New York City. The city was an aspiring dancer's dream. There, Primus had access to folk and modern dance classes, to venues for social dance, such as Harlem's famous Savoy Ballroom, and to performances by dancers as diverse as Martha Graham and Asadata Dafora. In fact, she would dance with both of these pioneers. A native of Sierra Leone, Dafora—drummer, singer, and dancer—introduced African drumming and dance to the United States in the early 1930s. His 1934 performance of
Kykunkor
brought West African music and dance to the American concert stage. Martha Graham is one of the foremothers of modern dance in America, credited with having invented an entirely new movement vocabulary.

Primus was also exposed to a dance aesthetic that connected modern dance to social protest. Speaking about her preparation for the Negro Freedom Rally, she told the
Daily Worker:
“I know we must all do our part in this war to beat Fascism and I consider the battle against Jim Crow in America part of that fight, which is taking place on the battlefronts of the world.” In this broad battle, Primus believed her dancing could serve as a tool to help dismantle these evils. She continued, “Each one of us can wield a weapon against Jim Crow and Fascism and my special one is dancing. I shall continue to protest Jim Crow through my dancing until Victory is won.” Primus's statement demonstrates her grounding in Double V discourse linking fascism abroad with Jim Crow at home. According to Double V, both Nazism and Jim Crow were animated by white supremacist ideology and maintained by law and violence.
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The Popular Front aesthetic would also have a profound influence on the young dancer. The Popular Front, the coalition of liberals and leftists who opposed fascism, and the modern dance companies it inspired insisted that art, including dance, could be a weapon in the struggle for social justice. In the 1940s, Primus believed the arts were a tool in the struggle. Later, she recalled that “in the forties you could protest[;] in fact, I was most encouraged.” She was not alone—Katherine Dunham and Talley Beatty also choreographed dances of social protest—but she was unique. Primus combined athleticism and grace, intellect and political passion, and had a devotion to the African past and present as well as a thorough engagement
with the modernist aesthetic. She was less interested in commercial or popular success than Dunham and Beatty were; she was an intellectual first and foremost. For Primus, dance was as much a medium of teaching and consciousness raising as it was a form of entertainment—if not more so.
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Primus was not only engaged in a leftist political and artistic community, however; she was also part of a group of New York–based artists who wished to bring the culture of Africa and peoples of African descent to the attention of white audiences. Instead of evolving from a leftist to a black nationalist, instead of transitioning from an artist interested in social realism and modern dance to one interested in what would later be called “Afrocentricity,” Primus always merged these political stances and aesthetic commitments. She did so by situating African dance alongside modern dance, and in so doing creating a dialogue between the two forms, showing them both to be representations of a longing for freedom and human dignity. In this way she was not different from a number of her politically engaged contemporaries. Long before her first trip to Africa in 1948, Primus was as interested in the history and culture of the continent as she was in the innovations of modern dance. In fact, her awareness of and interest in Africa preceded any formal dance training.
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When Primus told her own story, she almost always started with her Ashanti grandfather, who was a “voodoo” drummer in Trinidad, and with the masked, dancing figure of Carnival. She rooted her own artistry in her African and Caribbean roots. Her grandfather, “Lassido” Jackson, traced his lineage to an
Ashanti king. According to Primus, “he lived the life of a traditional person.” She later said, “My home was an African home.”
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Outside her childhood home, she recalled as an adult, one could experience Harlem or Brooklyn, but inside, it was always the Caribbean and Africa. As in the homes of many black people, dance was not something to be performed onstage, but something done in the home and in the ballroom. At times she claimed her mother excelled as a graceful and gifted dancer. The dances at home or in the ballroom were an amalgamation of Africa, the Caribbean, the American South, and the black North. When Primus began her formal training and then her professional career, she sought to dance Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South as she imagined them and reconstructed them from her own research. She danced this geography before she traveled it.

As a Caribbean immigrant to New York, Primus inherited a legacy that combined political radicalism, pride in African ancestry, and a belief in the opportunities available to her in her new home. She was one of the 40,000 Caribbean immigrants who came to New York and Harlem between 1900 and 1930. They were central to the development of Harlem's political and artistic culture during this time. Primus inherited not only a sense of culture from her Caribbean roots, but also a very strong black nationalist worldview. Her father and uncle constantly talked of black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey and his Back-to-Africa movement. She was aware of herself as an African in the West, part of a people who had contributed much to the development of the Americas, and part of a generation that would help to defeat fascism.
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Pearl Eileen Primus was born in Woodstock, Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1919. In 1921 she and her mother joined her father in New York, part of a wave of Caribbean immigrants who settled in the city. Between 1913 and 1924, the peak years of Caribbean migration to the United States, large numbers of migrants settled in Manhattan and Brooklyn. By 1930, Caribbean immigrants made up a quarter of black Harlem's population. In New York, Primus, her parents, and her two brothers, Edward Jr. and Carl, first lived on 69th and Broadway, an area near what is now Lincoln Center. The neighborhood was home to a number of West Indian and African American families, including that of a budding young pianist named Thelonious Monk. Later, the Primuses moved to 110 East 97th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues in East Harlem. Although the area housed a number of black families, it would soon be best known for its Puerto Rican inhabitants. Even in the thirties, this part of Harlem was more ethnically and racially diverse than its better-known western side. Eventually, the Primus family would move to another Caribbean stronghold in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant.
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Like many other Caribbean immigrants of this first major wave, the Primus family put a high premium on education and professional achievement. Therefore it is not surprising that Pearl attended one of the city's most competitive high schools, Hunter College High School. Founded to teach intellectually gifted girls, Hunter College High School was established as a private girls' school in 1896. It eventually became a selective magnet public school, but it was not operated by the New York City Department of Education; instead, it was administered by
Hunter College. Primus was one of the few black students to attend. After graduating from Hunter College High School, Primus enrolled at Hunter College, where she was a pre-med and biology major. The college was open to all qualified young women regardless of religion or ethnicity, and it maintained a reputation for a rigorous program of academic study.

Although she aspired to be a doctor, Primus had a broad range of interests as a student. She was an Olympic-caliber track-and-field star who excelled at the broad jump; she minored in physical education and took classes in dancing, apparatus, fencing, basketball, tennis, and possibly swimming (“if I can get it,” she wrote in her journal before registration). Even as early as 1937, she wrote, “I'd love to specialize in the dancing but it is not stressed more than the others.”
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That she majored in biology and excelled at sports would not be insignificant. She understood, both intellectually and experientially, the mechanics of the body. But although she was an avid athlete and dancer, at this time in her life Primus seemed destined to be a scientist.

Still, her letters and journal entries from this period reveal a sensitive, thoughtful, intellectually curious young woman devoted to her family, her studies, and her friends. She possessed a poetic nature and a love of the natural world and the changing seasons. A well-rounded reader, she was also ambitious, hoping to earn a PhD in biology and eventually to become a surgeon. As Hunter was a commuter school, Primus lived at home with her close-knit family. In one journal entry from that time, she described her chaotic room as she studied for finals:
“All my biological instruments, frogs, skeletons, butterflies, glass jars, stirring rod, mixing bowls, hard lens, all my drawing apparatus, chalks and rags; all my school notes . . . my books are now arranged under the bed.”
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