Harlem Nocturne (9 page)

In an interview in the
Daily Worker
in September 1944, Primus spoke “highly of the Southern Negro Congress, with whose leaders she had discussed a plan to include the Arts in their organizing drives,” and articulated a philosophy that mirrored the one behind the Double V Campaign. The statement and the context in which it was made helped to make her of interest to the FBI and its director, J. Edgar Hoover. From the distance of time, her perspective doesn't seem that radical. In fact, she appears patriotic, committed to a US victory against fascism, and as fervently devoted to fighting racism at home. Her stance seems little different from that of the civil rights movement then in its infancy, which would soon blossom at the very center of American political life. For the next year, the Bureau sought to find out her naturalization status. But by May 30, 1945, the FBI had lost interest. A note in her file said, “There is no information in the files to indicate that she is either a prominent or influential Communist. Because of her dancing engagements, and theatrical work, it is believed she has very little time for actual Communist activity at present. In view of the fact that she is not considered dangerous to the internal security of the United States at the present time, it is recommended that the Security Index card on Primus be cancelled.” The file would be reopened, however, in 1951.
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In the FBI affidavit she later gave, Primus said she was led to believe that the best way to aid the Negro in the United States “was through the Communist Party.” According to Primus, she joined the party shortly after the Negro Freedom Rally: “My reason for joining the Communist Party, if in fact, I did so, was that I believed that the lot of the Negro in the United States would be best served by the Communist Party.” After returning from the South, where she was “appalled” by the conditions of the southern Negro, she resolved to “do whatever possible to help this situation.” She went to the
Daily Worker
with suggestions for addressing racial issues more effectively. She wanted to petition the president and Congress, but the receptionist told her that this would be considered treason while the country was still at war. According to Primus, the party's retreat from racial issues during the war years “angered and upset her.” In this way she was not unlike the many black activists—or even the fictional protagonist of Ralph Ellison's novel
Invisible Man
, published in the same year of Primus's affidavit. These activists and intellectuals claimed that the Communist Party had abandoned an explicit commitment to the black struggle in favor of supporting the image of a united front between the United States and the Soviet Union in the fight against fascism. They believed that this decision had resulted in the party's unwillingness to be a vocal critic of American racism.

Following her return from the South in 1944, Primus claimed to have suffered a nervous breakdown. Isolated and having received no word or support from her political colleagues, she convalesced at the home of Rockwell Kent at AuSable Forks,
New York. Kent was a painter, printmaker, and writer, and Primus had met him at Café Society. After a brief stay at Kent's home, Primus moved to 536 Madison Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. While Manhattan would continue to be central to her performance life, she would now call Brooklyn her home. Bedford-Stuyvesant had been a black enclave as early as the nineteenth century, when James Weeks, an African American entrepreneur, began to sell land to other blacks, and some blacks had moved from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant beginning in the 1930s. The area presented the opportunity for home ownership, and many blacks, particularly Caribbean immigrants, chose to relocate there. Madison Street, known for its stately and beautiful brownstones, predominantly housed middle-class blacks. When the A train was constructed in 1936, the New York subway linked the city's two most important black neighborhoods, Harlem and Bed-Stuy.

Upon her recovery, Primus began preparing for her Broadway premier at the Belasco Theater. New York once again provided her with the venue and the audience for her new work. As part of the Belasco program, Primus performed updated versions of “African Ceremonial,” “Hard Time Blues,” and “Strange Fruit.” Her experiences in the South had made her rethink some of her earlier dances. With “Strange Fruit,” she would join artists, black and white, who created works that addressed lynching. Talley Beatty premiered “Southern Landscape” in 1947, and Dunham presented “Southland” in 1950. In 1960, Gwendolyn Brooks would write a poem from the perspective of a young white mother who had to continue living
with her husband after he brutally murdered a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till, supposedly for flirting with her. One of the earliest such works, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poem called “The Haunted Oak,” had appeared in 1903.

Primus's new version of “Strange Fruit” was choreographed as a solo, without music, accompanied only by the spoken words of the Lewis Allan poem. Primus wanted to focus not on the lynched victim or a member of his or her family, but instead on a member of the lynch mob, a woman who had watched the deed. Primus said the character was “not one beloved of the victim, but one of the lynch mob who had been screaming and shouting in animal fury with the rest. Then, the act accomplished and the satisfied mob departed, this one, drained of the poison, stays behind, realizing with grief and terror what has been done.”
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“Strange Fruit” differed from other Primus performances. Gone were the leaps. In their place, there is a body on the floor, a writhing, distraught human figure, reaching to the tree one moment, fallen down in twists and turns the next. And running but getting nowhere: running in a circle. The isolation of the figure was striking—its profound aloneness, its separateness from both the mob and the lynched body. Its physical isolation seemed to mirror a kind of psychological isolation, a person tormented by her mind, by the lingering horror of what she has witnessed and in which she has participated. There was no transcendence. There was no airy flight. The figure's fixedness to the ground insisted upon a connection between the legacy, the torment and restlessness, of the southern land.

As in “Jim Crow Train,” Primus made the lynching scene a canonical moment for her New York audiences. She brought the tragic dimensions of the South to the northern stage in an effort to provoke empathy and action. Like the authors of slave narratives, who often presented sensitive white female characters with whom their northern audiences could identify, Primus made her protagonist a white woman—but one who had both witnessed and taken part in the brutal act. Through works like “Hard Time Blues,” “Jim Crow Train,” and “Strange Fruit,” Primus created a dance narrative of black southern life for New York audiences. This sophisticated group would understand, appreciate, and be moved to political action by her performance.

There is very little footage of Primus dancing in the forties. However, we do have access to eyewitness descriptions and a contemporary restaging that help us appreciate Primus's talent as a dancer and choreographer. In 1945, Donald McKayle, then a high-school senior, saw Primus perform at Central High School of Needle Trades in New York's garment district. McKayle, who attended a different high school, had been invited by his friend Anna, who was an aspiring dancer—and McKayle himself eventually became a dancer. His description is worth quoting at length because it is one of the few firsthand accounts of a Primus concert by someone who was not a critic: “A beautiful vision, a carving in ebony, was dancing. . . . The movements were powerful, yet sparse. It was living sculpture on view. Every curving of her spine, every thrust of her hips, every flapping of her loins, every wave of her heavily
bangled wrists was a gesture from an ancestral ritual of unknown origin.” He was especially moved by “Strange Fruit”: “She was a woman consumed with horror, recoiling from a lynching she had just witnessed,” as the words of the poem were “spoken so beautifully by the actress Vinette Carrol,” he later wrote. The author of the poem “Strange Fruit,” Lewis Allan, was actually McKayle's English teacher that year. After seeing Primus dance—“her feet (running) along the air and then she landed with the assurance of an avian creature”—McKayle knew he wanted to be a dancer. He told Anna, “I want to dance like her!”
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Thankfully, a few Primus pieces of the 1940s have been restaged by contemporary choreographers, including “Strange Fruit,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and “Hard Time Blues.” The choreographer and founder of Urban Bush Women, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, created a work dedicated to Primus entitled “Walking with Pearl . . . Southern Diaries” inspired by Primus's trip to the US South and the dances she created based on that research. The piece includes a restaging of Primus's “Hard Time Blues” by Kim Bears-Bailey. The quotidian movement of black rural life in the 1940s permeates the movements of this dance, from the field to the church house, climaxing in the ecstatic “shout” of the black worshipper. In Zollar's restaging, a series of dancers take on the part that Primus danced solo, each expressing the pain, the suffering, the self-expression, the ecstatic worship and release of the field-worker. So convincing were the dancers that Zollar has to remind us of all the technical work, all the rehearsal and
preparation that one must bring to the moment of performance in order to reach a zone where individual stories can be relayed. For Zollar, dancers are actors, movement actors. “It is not ritual, but performance,” says Zollar. As if to remind viewers of Primus's skill, Zollar notes that the numerous leaps required of the piece challenge even the best of dancers, requiring the dexterity and strength of “a highly skilled athlete.”
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When Primus performed “Hard Time Blues” at the Belasco, she was accompanied by Josh White, who sang the song to guitar accompaniment while she danced. The program also included five male dancers as well as a jazz band and a narrator, who supplied commentary throughout. In addition to “African Ceremonial,” “Strange Fruit,” “Rock Daniel,” and “Hard Time Blues,” she also performed “Study in Nothing,” set to the music of her Café Society colleague and friend Mary Lou Williams. “Slave Market” was a new addition to her repertoire and included two other dancers as well as a number of speakers and the music of the spirituals. For Broadway, Primus had clearly staged a more ambitious, theatrical performance, one that sought to entertain as well as enlighten.

The Belasco was Primus's first Broadway appearance, but it would not be her last. She helped to choreograph
Show Boat
for its 1945–1946 season and performed in it as well. After appearing in the Chicago production of
Emperor Jones
, she returned to Broadway in Adolph Thenstead's production of
Caribbean Carnival
at the International Theatre in 1947. She continued to perform throughout the city and began to tour
nationally. With the help of her manager, Austin Wilder, Primus took the “Primus Company,” a new dance group she had formed, on a cross-country tour. She also continued to perform at benefits for progressive organizations and causes, which kept her under the watchful eye of the FBI.

Even throughout this busy period, during which she performed both in New York and nationally, Primus also continued to teach at the New Dance Group, helping to develop their offerings in ethnic dance studies. Along with dancers Josephine Premice and Hadassah, she helped to develop a West Indian Dance Program there.

Today, with companies like Alvin Ailey's American Dance Theater, the Dance Theater of Harlem, Philadanco, Urban Bush Women, Ron K. Brown's Evidence, and others, it is difficult to appreciate the dearth of black concert dance in the 1940s and the explosive excitement created by Primus and Katherine Dunham. They approached their work as a mission, a calling, and took it upon themselves to train younger dancers and create opportunities for them.

Performing and teaching also gave Primus the opportunity to perfect her own technique. “The earth is the voice of the dancer. The dancer is the conductor, the wire, which connects the earth and the sky,” Primus told her dancers. Movement was marked by variations on the walk: leaping, skipping, hopping, jumping. There were isolated movements of specific body parts: the head, the shoulder, the torso, and the pelvic area. Dancer Jacqueline Hairston danced with Primus in the 1940s and described a typical Primus class. She recalled that
the “ballet barre” was essential and that Primus incorporated the methods of Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm. She would have students warm up with stretches, bends, and bounces before going to floor exercises, contractions and releases, and isolations of the abdomen, back, legs, and ankles. Then she would work on technique built around three positions of the feet, those signifying a “Ceremonial Pose,” “Pride and Elegance,” and “Strength and Aggression.” These would be followed by the “Earth Series,” which focused on the feet in relation to the earth. Next, students would perform excerpts from dances that were already choreographed or those that were works in progress. Primus would close class by telling students the meaning, narrative, and history of one of the dances they had just practiced. An exquisite marriage of her modern dance training and her in-depth research about dance in Africa, Primus's dance classes emphasized that each movement had meaning and each dance had a narrative and a history.
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Primus was always an intellectual artist as well as an activist, and her interest in creating her own technique stemmed from this intellectualism. Dance became a way of bearing witness to what her studies revealed, and her activism was driven by a desire to eliminate prejudice, discrimination, and white supremacy. The decision to pursue anthropology at Columbia University was one element in her pursuit of this goal. From 1945 to 1954, Primus took classes toward a PhD. In turning to Columbia, she chose a premier program with a number of pioneering scholars. Her scholarship helped to underscore the significance of African-based cultures, which were still
denigrated in the popular imagination. To insist upon the significance of the continent and the cultures that it birthed was a political project in a white supremacist society.