Harlem Nocturne (8 page)

Pearl Primus performs to “Honeysuckle Rose” as played by Teddy Wilson (piano), Lou McGarity (trombone), Sidney Catlett (drums), Bobby Hackett (trumpet), and John Simons (bass). For more information, see “Giants at Play: Life with Jazz Legends,”
Life
, Time Life Historic Moments (photo gallery), especially
http://life.time.com/culture/photos-of-jazz-legends-duke-ellington-billie-holiday-dizzy-and-more/#2
. Photo by Gjon Mili.

At Café Society, Primus was ensconced in a community of innovative and politically minded artists, activists, and intellectuals who were open to new aesthetic expressions. She had found encouraging supporters in Josephson and Martin. The club was central to her ascendancy in 1943. In June, she made her show-stopping leaps at the Negro Freedom Rally. In August, John
Martin named Primus “the most distinguished newcomer of the season,” even though “there were more newcomers than usual in this wartime season.” By the end of that year, Primus had choreographed and premiered a number of dances inspired by the works of other Café Society habitués. She choreographed “Strange Fruit” to Lewis Allan's poem, made famous in the 1939 song of the same title recorded by Billie Holiday.
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She also choreographed “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” inspired by Langston Hughes's poem. Her photograph appeared in
Life
magazine, and she closed the year with a performance at the African Dance Festival at Carnegie Hall, where she appeared with Asadata Dafora. Eleanor Roosevelt was in attendance.

Like other artists committed to Double V during the height of the war, Primus used her art both to protest against racism and to demonstrate her support for the war effort. For instance, in addition to her concert performances, Primus often entertained the troops at USO events, later recalling that they loved her jazz dances the best. In fact, in 1944 she received a USO Certificate of Merit for entertaining servicemen in camps, hospitals, and ports of embarkation.
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Sometime during this period, Primus met a young Jewish man named Yael Woll. Though she seems to have left little time for a personal life, she would eventually marry him. Himself a leftist, Woll later recalled having met her in the early 1940s, most likely at an event or benefit where she performed. Few details about their relationship exist. When they married in 1950, few people in Primus's life seem to have known about it.
However,
Jet
magazine, in 1952, listed Primus, along with Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Hilda Simms, and Josephine Baker, as prominent black women who were married to white men. Woll, who later became a film and television director, worked closely with Primus, serving as a kind of stage manager during her tours. He seems to have been a very supportive husband. The two traveled together to Israel in 1952, where she performed and where the press referred to her as “Mrs. Yael Woll.” Woll was apparently disappointed by her extended travel to Africa, which kept her away from home for months at a time. During one trip to Trinidad, while still married to Woll, Primus fell in love with the Trinidadian dancer Percival Borde. Primus often noted that she and Borde married in 1954, but she did not officially marry him until 1961. After that time, she rarely mentioned Woll. She basically erased him from her history, referring to Borde as her first and only husband.
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Prior to her first marriage, in the summer of 1944, Pearl Primus left New York to travel extensively throughout the Deep South in search of material for her dance. However, the trip yielded much more: it also strengthened her political resolve. This change would influence the way she portrayed these struggles. Of her travels in the South during this period, Primus later told the
Daily Worker:
“I am not trying to create something new in the dance. . . . I am only attempting to present the Negro in his own true light as he was in Africa and as he is now, a member of a fighting democracy.”
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Again, though dance is her medium, here she represents herself as a scholar or a journalist seeking to reveal the truth, rather than as a
creative artist who is inspired by her findings. Primus highlights the dignity of the African past while calling attention to the black contribution to the most important struggle of modern times. She sought to present “Negroes” as people with a history as well as modern subjects, cocreators in contemporary civilization.

Primus did not romanticize southern life. Of the South, she wrote, “The Spanish moss hangs like a crepe over everything, is a fungus that creeps through everybody.”
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She wasn't nostalgic for a past that never was; nor did she look longingly to the South as a home, like many black migrants. Instead, she wanted to experience firsthand the land that informed the sensibilities of many of her contemporaries and audiences. A large number of African Americans living in northern cities were recent migrants who had come north during the Great Migrations, and she wanted to understand the world they had left behind.

Primus's trip to the South was an eye-opener for her. She didn't see a world of victims and villains: “I could not hate anyone,” she later said. “It was a pathetic scene, both sides swallowed by fear of one another. Everything looked ugly to me there—the Negroes because of their hunger and feeling of inferiority, the whites because of their fear and hunger.” Her experience was not one that made her fall in love with black southerners. Nor did it cause her to hate whites. In fact, a few encounters with whites made her question her own assumptions. When she started to faint in a Jim Crow bus, a white man got up and offered her his seat.
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Primus sought to know intimately the landscape and the people, so she disguised herself as a field worker, worked alongside sharecroppers, and visited their churches in the evenings and on the weekends. It was in church that she made note of the core rhythms of black music, oratory, and movement: the preacher's intonations were as rhythmic as the drum, his movements as dramatic and graceful as a dance. The congregation responded to him with tears, ecstatic movement—shouting and leaping from their seats. Primus observed leaps and crawling bodies, “snake-like undulations” not unlike the dances to the god Damballa in the Caribbean. She began to see connections between the Caribbean dances with which she was familiar and the movement she observed among former slaves in the South. She visited little churches and open-air prayer meetings in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, and everywhere she observed similar kinds of movement.
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Primus had danced the part of a sharecropper in “Hard Time Blues” at the Negro Freedom Rally, but now she bore witness to their bodies and movements. During this trip, Primus joined a historic trail of black intellectuals whose first encounters with the American South would inform their artistic, intellectual, and political sensibilities forever. W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, and the painter Eldzier Cortor, among others, undertook this “Journey of Immersion” before emerging as people who could articulate the concerns of American blacks and build upon both the pain and the beauty of life under Jim Crow. Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who was born in Alabama and raised in Florida, left New York for
extended forays into the South, a place believed to be the fount of African American culture. Primus would later say:

If I were dancing about how sharecropping or how our spirituals came into being and what they mean in the lives of people or if I wanted to know the truth about the commissary stores that refused food to the people, then I wanted to know what they were like. . . . That's why I went south. I went south to live among the people and to be part of the cultures of the Southlands to know what cotton was. Except for the museum up here in New York . . . I didn't know what it was. . . . I did get into the fields and along the dockside and into the revival churches of the South. I walked those long dusty roads between towns. So when I began to create about these experiences the remembered feelings were part of what I was speaking about. It wasn't that I'd read about it but that I had experienced it.
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This would be the same reason she ultimately went to Africa: to move beyond reading in order to experience what her migrant audience had experienced; to witness and bear witness to what Du Bois had called, in the title of his 1903 book, the “Souls of Black Folk.” She saw and placed movement in context. The trip to the American South was the first time she brought this kind of methodology to dance.

It was also during this period that Primus tied her political activism to the causes of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC). Founded in 1937, SNYC was an organization of
young black activists who were devoted to guaranteeing and protecting the rights of southern blacks. They worked closely with a number of leftist and political organizations, black and white. According to her FBI file, Primus attended the organization's Leadership School in Atlanta from August 7 through August 18, 1944, right in the middle of her research trip. SNYC's Leadership Academies were held throughout the South. Prominent activists and educators attended the one in Atlanta, including Horace Mann Bond, an educator and leader who was also the father of civil rights activist Julian Bond. Primus would have joined students, people from the community, teachers, sharecroppers, and faculty members of neighboring black colleges for these classes.
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Given the nature of her research among southern sharecroppers, it is not surprising that Primus would have been moved by their condition and want to help alleviate their economic, social, and political sufferings. As an activist-minded artist, she would have been drawn to other courageous young people working to empower southern blacks. The young people of the Southern Negro Youth Conference represented a cross-section of the black community. Many, such as Esther Cooper Jackson, her husband James Jackson, and Louis and Dorothy Burnham, were college-educated young people from the North who came to Alabama to organize rural blacks. Esther Cooper Jackson received her bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and her master's in sociology from Fisk, where she wrote a thesis on organizing black domestic workers in New York. She was on her way to the University of Chicago for a PhD when she went to
Alabama to work on a SNYC voter registration drive. Other members of SNYC were young sharecroppers or factory workers. Still others were young southern students, such as Sallye Bell Davis, a Birmingham native and student at Miles College. Davis would give birth to radical activist Angela Davis.

Many of the members of SNYC were also members of the Communist Party. But, like those black Americans who were committed to Double V, who were more focused on waging national battles for equality and civil rights than on pursuing the goals of international communism, SNYC didn't have explicit ties to the Soviet Union. As Esther Cooper Jackson later asserted: “There wasn't anybody from Moscow telling us what to do.” One of the organization's pamphlets said, “We Negro Youth act to win the full blessing of true democracy for ourselves, for our people, for our nation.”
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They were committed to the vision of an interracial society free of poverty and racism where all people would exercise their right to vote and have the opportunity to reach their full potential.

Because SNYC activists understood the centrality of the expressive arts to black Americans, they also placed a premium on the “unique Black cultural heritage,” making the arts central to their organization and to their vision of the world they sought to create. James Jackson invited Primus to contribute an essay on the “Negro Youth's Heritage in Dance” for one of SNYC's publications. Primus wrote that she was “truly happy to be called on to write the essay.”
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Given the FBI's ongoing campaigns against black activists and Communists, the Bureau was especially interested in SNYC.
It is therefore not surprising that investigators made note of Primus's involvement with the young radicals. They opened a file on her in September 1944. According to Primus's file, at this time she was also a member of the Communist Party and had been involved in the party since her college years, when she was a member of the Young Communist League, an accusation that she would confirm in later years. If Primus was seen as a great “Negro” dancer by reviewers and other members of the press who hailed her artistry, for the FBI she was “a negress born July 1, 1917[,] at Trinidad, British West Indies.”
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She seems to have first come to their attention when an informant reported that she had been in touch with the Communist Political Association to invite Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1934 to 1945, to her performance.

According to her file, Primus had participated in a number of Communist-sponsored events that encouraged interracial unity and harmony. The Bureau noted her own sponsorship of the Citizens Non-Partisan Committee to Elect Benjamin Davis, the black Communist city councilman from Harlem; her participation in the Negro Freedom Rally, which it referred to as a “monstrous annual affair” run by Communist front organizations; her performances at the Harlem Youth Center and Café Society; and all of the coverage she received in the
Daily Worker
. In this she would have been no different from a number of other prominent artists and intellectuals of the Reformist Left. Like many of these artists, Primus would not have been likely to have had the exposure or critical success
that she had without the support of these progressive political and cultural organizations.
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Many of these organizations were already under surveillance and would become the objects of government investigation during the McCarthy years.