American Fun (61 page)

54.
“
Narcotics are said to be distributed
”: Ernest W. Mandeville, “Detroit Sets a Bad Example,” reprinted in Mowry,
The Twenties,
111. Singer Billy Daniels fondly recalled that “the Mob was always present” on the 1930s New York nightclub scene: “Some of Murder, Inc.… used to come in and have a good time, have a ball, a half-dozen of them that I got to know. They were always full of fun, usually on a kick or something.” W. Royal Stokes,
The
Jazz Scene: An Informal History from New Orleans to
1990
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 53. While midwestern drinking and crime did decrease in the early years of Prohibition, “especially in towns and cities inhabited by Protestants of northern European extraction” (118), as Daniel Okrent specifies in
Last Call,
trangressions against the Volstead Act were hardly limited to the coasts. Chicago became an
organized crime capital, and Detroit was considered “the liquor capital of the United States.” Charles A. Selden calculated that “the manufacture and sale of automobiles in Detroit involves nearly $2,000,000,000 annually and the chemical industry about $90,000,000. Between the two stands Detroit’s illegal liquor traffic, estimated at $215,000,000” (“Rum Row in the Middle West,”
New York Times,
May 27, 1928, reprinted in Mowry,
The Twenties,
105).

55.
“
the matter of cocktail parties
”: Carl Van Vechten,
Parties
(1930; Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993), 172.

56.
“
Of the 113 establishments
”: Okrent,
Last Call,
208.

57.
“
in a decade that saw a declining interest in politics
”: David J. Goldberg,
Discontented America: The United States in the
1920s
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 56.

58.
“
C’est lui Lindberg, LINDBERG!
”: Harry Crosby,
Shadows of the Sun,
ed. Edward Germain (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1977), 146.

59.
“
Only in America
”: Ann Douglas,
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the
1920s
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 456.

60.
“
like[d] looping the loop
”: Crosby,
Shadows of the Sun,
264.

61.
“
his ambulance was vaporized
”: Geoffrey Wolff,
Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby
(New York: Random House, 1976), 54.

62.
“
Bodily he survived
”: Malcolm Cowley,
Exile’s Return
(New York: Penguin, 1976), 250.

63.
“
aristocrat
”: Crosby,
Shadows of the Sun,
284.

64.
“
a glamorous and charismatic man
”: Douglas,
Terrible Honesty,
458. Full account of Julian from ibid., 457–61.

65.
“participatory” qualities
: Kathy J. Ogren,
The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8. Jazz dancers were inspired by both musicians and spectators. Zora Neale Hurston called dancing a chief form of “Negro Expression” and described how the dancer’s “flex[ing]” knee, “thrust[ing]” chest, “clenched fists,” and “elbows taut as in hard running or grasping
a thrusting blade” demand a response from the spectator, who “adds the picture of ferocious assault, hears the drums and finds himself keeping time with the music and tensing himself for the struggle.”

66.
“
dance-based music
”: Roger Pryor Dodge, “The Dance-Basis of Jazz,”
Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance: Collected Writings
1929–1964,
ed. Roger Pryor Dodge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 145. Article originally appeared in
The Record Changer,
March and April 1945.

67.
“
Saxophone Supper[s]
”: Dicky Wells quoted in Ogren,
Jazz Revolution,
82.

68.
“
in control
”: Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins,
Jazz
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 56.

69.
“
compet[ing]
”: Gunther Schuller,
Early Jazz
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 89.

70.
Let’s Do the Black Bottom
: “Castle Novelty” instructional film,
Let’s Do the Black Bottom,
1924.

71.
“
It was new to them
”: Stearns and Stearns,
Jazz Dance,
315–16.

72.
“
The Home of Happy Feet
”: Ibid., 324.

73.
Harlem’s Savoy held special nights
: Ibid., 322.

74.
“
segregated
”: Interview with Pearl and Ivy Fisher at 409 Edgecombe Ave., March 1975, p. 3. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. David Levering Lewis, “Voices from the Renaissance Collection,” MG 335, Box 1, Folder 1.

75.
“
grab a cook or mechanic
”: “Savoy,” Lucky Millinder, Warner Brothers Music Corp./ASCAP.

76.
“
Cat’s Corner
”: Stearns and Stearns,
Jazz Dance,
327.

1.
“
the nobody’s child of the levee
”:
J. A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” in
The New Negro,
ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Touchstone, 1997), 217, 223.

2.
“
an average group of Negroes
”: Johnson,
Black Manhattan,
162.

3.
“
poison for the weak
”: Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” 223. He writes:

4.
“
This new spirit of joy and spontaneity
”: Ibid., 223.

5.
“
the first influence of the Negro
”: W. E. B. DuBois,
The Gift of Black Folk
(1924; Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1975), 146, 61.

6.
“
gift of laughter
”: Fauset, “The Gift of Laughter,” 165.

7.
some 555,000 in the 1910
s alone
: Isabel Wilkerson,
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
(New York: Random House, 2010), 161.

8.
“
Red Summer
”: Cameron McWhirter,
Red Summer: The Summer of
1919 and the Awakening of Black America
(New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 13–17.

9.
“
Long before the stock market crash
”: Jonathan Gill,
Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America
(New York: Grove Press, 2011), 231, 227.

10.
“
white clients enthusiastically
”: David Levering Lewis,
When
Harlem Was in Vogue
(New York: Penguin, 1979), 209.

11.
“
the more of a quiet reserved type
”: Alberta Hunter quoted in Ogren,
Jazz Revolution,
77.

12.
“
The whole joint was rocking
”: Eddie Condon quoted in Ogren,
Jazz Revoution,
77–78.

13.
“
transvestite floor shows, sex circuses
”: Lewis,
When Harlem Was in Vogue,
209.

14.
“
catered to all varieties
”: Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in
Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past,
ed. Martin Duberman et al. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 323.

15.
“
ladies’ maids and truck drivers
”: Langston Hughes,
The Big Sea
(1940; New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 233.

16.
“
semi-illiterate night watchman
”: Chris Albertson,
Bessie,
rev. and expanded ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 29.

17.
“
lighted cigarettes
”: Elaine Feinstein,
Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues
(New York: Penguin, 1985), 61.

18.
“
Gimme a Pigfoot
”: Bessie Smith, “Gimme a Pigfoot,” recorded November 24, 1933. Okeh 8949.

19.
“
fun to be a Negro
”: Lewis,
When Harlem Was in Vogue,
103–4.

20.
“
violently interested in Negroes
”: Nathan Irvin Huggins,
Harlem Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 99–101.

21.
“
Coney Island
”: Carl Van Vechten,
Nigger Heaven
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926).

22.
“
the fat black bucks
”: Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo,” in
The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay: Complete and with Lindsay’s Drawings,
ed. Dennis Camp (Peoria, IL: Spoon River Press, 1984), 174.

23.
“
glistening African god of pleasure
”: Willa Cather,
My Ántonia
(New York: Virago, 1999), 191.

24.
“
a blow in the face
”:
W. E. B. DuBois, “Books,”
The Crisis,
December 1926, 81.

25.
“
caricature
”: Ibid., 82.

26.
“
there is laughter, color
”: Ibid., 81.

27.
“
race toward whiteness
”: Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,
2nd ed., ed. Vincent P. Leitch (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 1196. Originally appeared in
The Nation,
June 23, 1926.

28.
“
money to
spend
”: Hughes,
The Big Sea,
39.

29.
“
Fun!
”: Ibid., 62.

30.
“
Let the blare of Negro jazz bands
”: Hughes, “Negro Artist,” 1196.

31.
“
Harlem Negroes, once their aversion
”: “Fire Burns: A Department of Comment,”
Fire!!
1, no 1 (November 1926): 47.

32.
“
debauched tenth
”: David Levering Lewis,
W. E. B. DuBois,
1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century
(New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 176. In 1928,
Nella Larsen and
Claude McKay released their debut novels, and DuBois yoked them together in a single review: he lauded Larsen’s
Quicksand
as “the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chesnutt” and said McKay’s
Home to Harlem
“nauseate[d]” him and that “the dirtier parts of its filth” made him feel “distinctly like taking a bath” (W. E. B. DuBois, “Two Novels,”
The Crisis,
June 1928). These novels, when juxtaposed, also illustrate Harlem’s class-driven ambivalence over Jazz Age fun. DuBois admired Larsen’s protagonist Helga Crane for her “whimsical, unsatisfied soul,” the tragic feature that prevents this mixed-race nomad
from joining any of her possible communities, black, white, highbrow, lowbrow, or high-society Danish. Accordingly, in a key scene in a Harlem cabaret, she briefly joins the dancing throng and is “drugged, lifted, sustained by the extraordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra” and is ultimately repulsed by what she considers the “fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty, semi-barbaric, sophisticated, exotic.” She tries to reduce Harlem fun to primitivism, but what she describes is the welter of modern America, spun by the body-racking pleasures of jazz. DuBois accused McKay of “us[ing] every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.” McKay’s working-class protagonist, Jake, about whom even DuBois found “something appealing,” is the portrait of a hedonist—he deserts the army (because he sees no action in the war) and returns home to “Good old Harlem! Chocolate Harlem! Sweet Harlem!” where he loses himself in its “sugared laughter” and “contagious fever”—but he is no flashy caricature like the Scarlet Creeper in
Nigger Heaven
. He brings a poet’s light sensibility to Harlem’s pool halls, brothels, and cabarets and is most at home in the Congo, “an amusement place entirely for the unwashed of the Black Belt,” where “smells lingered telling the nature of their occupation. Pot-wrestlers, W.C. attendants, scrub maids, dish-washers, stevedores.… The Congo was African in spirit and in color. No white persons were admitted there.”
Home to Harlem
(1928; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 7, 14, 15, 29–30. But McKay seems uninterested in offending readers like DuBois. He is showing Jake’s intimacy with the fragrant crowd and his love of the dancers’ sweaty “hot soup” (32). But of course such candor was in itself a kind of joyous revolt.

33.
“
adorable
”: “Mae Sullivan,” interview with Mae Sullivan, at her home in Washington, D.C., April 19, 1977, page 3. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library. David Levering Lewis “Voices from the Renaissance Collection,” MG 335, Box 1, Folder 2.

34.
“
miss something
”: Hughes,
The Big Sea,
47.

35.
“
must be smelt
”: Ibid., 71.

36.
“
to shake hands
”: Ibid., 81.

37.
“
not fun
”: Ibid., 83.

38.
“
gaily mutinous state
”: Ibid., 111.

39.
“
hunched over
”: Ibid., 250.

40.
“
grandiloquently about democracy
”: Ibid., 255.

41.
“
Jim Crow policy
”: Ibid., 224–25.

42.
“
more amusing than any night club
”: Ibid., 229.

43.
“
the tom-tom of revolt
”: Hughes, “Negro Artist,” 1195.

44.
“
marked the height
”:
Arnold Rampersad, “Hughes’s
Fine Clothes to the
Jew,
” in
Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present,
ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad Press, 1993), 53. Rampersad suggests that Van Vechten, who read through the volume before sending it on to Knopf, and to whom it is dedicated, may have suggested the title
Fine Clothes to the Jew,
with which Knopf (Jewish himself) took issue until persuaded by Van Vechten to keep it. As Rampersad also points out, Knopf did not take issue with Van Vechten’s own controversial title,
Nigger Heaven.
The title comes from the poem
Hard Luck:
“When hard luck overtakes you / Nothin’ for you to do. / Gather up yo’ fine clothes / An’ sell ’em to de Jew. // Jew takes yo’ fine clothes, / Gives you a dollar an’ a half.… Go to de bootleg’s, / Git some gin to make you laugh” (
Collected Poems,
82). In
The Big Sea
Hughes himself voices regret over it.

45.
“
piffling trash
”: James A. Emanuel,
Langston Hughes
(New York: Twayne, 1967), 31–32.

46.
“
Laughers
”: Langston Hughes,
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,
ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Vintage, 1995), 112, 114. “Laughers” shines in this somber volume. It parades
Jessie Fauset’s “gift of laughter” that “has its rise in the very woes that beset us.” Its refrain—“Loud-mouthed laughers in the hands / Of Fate”—considers both the peoples’ hazards and the gaiety with which they brave their dangers. And if its frowning question, “Laughers?,” gives voice to Hughes’s critics, then its exclamations (“What dancers!” “What singers!”) put those critics in their place.

47.
“
Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret
”: Ibid., 60.

48.
“
Zelda just wasn’t afraid of anything
”: Nancy Milford,
Zelda: A Biography
(New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 16–17.

49.
“
ten boys
”: Ibid., 44.

50.
“
gets stewed in public
”: Ibid., 60.

51.
That month they chaperoned a party
: Kendall Taylor,
Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald
(New York: Ballantine, 2001), 68.

52.
white-supremacist Scott
: “I believe at last in the white man’s burden,” he wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1921. “We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro.”
The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 326.

53.
“
was nasty
,” “
drunk
,” “
was an original
”: Van Vechten as quoted in Milford,
Zelda,
98–99.

54.
“
The flapper springs full-grown
”: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, “What Became of the Flappers?”
McCall’s,
October 1925, reprinted in
The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald,
ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 397–99.

55.
“
Flapper Styles Will Prevail!
”: Cover text,
The Flapper,
October 1922. Fitzgerald calls 1922 “the peak of the younger generation” in “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” 15.

56.
“
Eulogy on the Flapper
”: Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, “Eulogy on the Flapper,”
Metropolitan Magazine,
June 1922, reprinted in
Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald,
391–93.

57.
“
the quintessence of what the term
”: Stenn,
Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild,
87.

58.
“
the unrivaled embodiment of sex appeal
”: Elizabeth Atkins quoted in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
Letters from the Front,
vol. 3,
No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 63.

59.
“
liv[ing] in that gay poverty
”: Floyd Dell,
Love in Greenwich Village
(1926; North Stratford, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1970), 33.

60.
“
jazzing music
”: Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Second April
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921), 88.

61.
“
My candle burns at both ends
”: Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Collected Poems,
ed. Norma Millay (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945), 127.