Harlem Nocturne (28 page)

55.
Julia Foulkes,
Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 70–71; Wren interview, 4.

56.
Josephson and Trilling-Josephson,
Cafe Society
, 256–257.

57.
Esther Cooper Jackson, who had been the subject of extensive FBI surveillance and investigation and had been very active in Communist Party circles, said that she never heard anything about Primus having been an informant. Author interview with Esther Cooper Jackson, June 20, 2011.

58.
Sapphire,
The Kid
(New York: Penguin, 2011), 195.

Chapter 2: Ann Petry: Walking Harlem

1.
The date of Petry's birth is listed differently in a number of publications, and Petry herself gave different dates for her birthday. Her official birth certificate says October 20, 1908. Throughout her career, she often gave the date October 12, but the years varied from 1908 to 1912. Family records indicate October 12, 1908. The town clerk of Old Saybrook once informed Petry that the doctor who signed her birth certificate dated a batch of certificates according to the date he submitted them.

2.
Elisabeth Petry,
At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 38.

3.
Ibid.

4.
Ibid., 38–39.

5.
Ibid., 45.

6.
Ibid., 43.

7.
Petry journal entry, quoted in ibid., 166.

8.
Petry,
At Home Inside
, 164.

9.
E-mail correspondence with Elisabeth Petry, March 23, 2011; Elisabeth Petry, “What I've Finished Reading,”
http://lizr128.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/what-i%E2%80%99ve-finished-reading/
. George Petry also recalled his experience in the DC church, speaking to the author in June 1993.

10.
These descriptions come from photographs taken by Morgan and Marvin Smith. See James A. Miller,
Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).

11.
Nat Brandt,
Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII
(New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 156; see also the survey of 1,008 blacks and 501 whites in New York, conducted in the spring of 1942 and published by the Extensive Surveys Division, Bureau of Intelligence, Office of Facts and Figures, as “The Negro Looks at the War: Attitudes of New York Negroes Toward Discrimination Against Negroes and a Comparison of Negro and Poor White Attitudes Toward War-Related Issues,” Report 21, May 19, 1942. The Office of Facts and Figures became the Office of War Information.

12.
Patrick S. Washburn,
A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government's Investigation of the Black Press During World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 178.

13.
Not all American leftists abandoned the Communist Party, and among those who did, a number remained committed to leftist politics. Others adopted more liberal or conservative stances. For insightful discussions of American leftist intellectuals and writers and their reactions to the revelations about Stalin, see Alan Wald's two insightful studies,
Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade
, and
American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War
. Both were published by University of North Carolina Press, 2007 and 2012, respectively.

14.
Wald,
Trinity of Passion
, 108–109.

15.
Hazel Arnett Ervin,
Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1993), 9.

16.
Ibid., xxiv.

17.
Wald,
Trinity of Passion
, 119.

18.
Nina Mjagkij, ed.,
Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations
(New York: Routledge, 2001).

19.
Dayo F. Gore,
Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War
(New York: New York University Press, 2011), 39.

20.
“Ann Petry,” in Adele Sarkissian, ed.,
Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series
, vol. 6 (Detroit: Gale, 1987). 253–269.

21.
See African American Registry,
http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/american-negro-theater-formed
; see also Langston Hughes, Milton Meltzer, and L. Eric Lincoln,
A Pictorial History of Black Americans
(New York: Crown, 1956).

22.
Ervin,
Ann Petry
, xiii.

23.
“New York/Chicago: WPA and the Black Artist,” Exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, November 13 thru January 8, 1978, Essay by Ruth Ann Stewart, Guest Curator.

24.
Ibid., xiv.

25.
“Ann Petry,” in Sarkissian, ed.,
Contemporary Authors
?

26.
Ibid.

27.
Alain Locke, “Inventory at Mid-Century: The Literature of the Negro for 1950,” Phylon 12, no. 2 (1951).

28.
Bill V. Mullen,
Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 133.

29.
See Appendix C.

30.
Petry,
At Home Inside,
95.

31.
“Ann Petry,” in Sarkissian, ed.,
Contemporary Authors,
265.

32.
Ibid., 152–153.

33.
Maureen Honey,
Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 8.

34.
Boots has a dangerous operation on his ear so that he is unable to pass the physical examination required by the military. Malcolm X appeared at the induction center dressed in his zoot suit and professed a desire to “organize them nigger soldiers . . . steal . . . some guns, and kill up crackers.” Malcolm X,
Autobiography of Malcolm X
(New York: Grove Press, 1965). Dizzy Gillespie could have been reading from a script written by Petry when he told the army psychiatrist: “Well, look, at this time, in this stage of my life here in the United States whose foot has been in my ass? The white man's foot has been in my ass hole buried up to his knee in my ass hole! Now, you're speaking of the enemy. You're telling me the German is the enemy. At this point, I can never even remember having met a German. So if you put me out there with a gun in my hand and tell me to shoot at the enemy, I'm liable to create a case of ‘mistaken identity', of who I might shoot.” Dizzy Gillespie, with Al Fraser,
To Be, or Not . . . to Bop
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 [1979]), 120.

Both Malcolm X and Dizzy Gillespie were classified 4-F (registrant not acceptable for military service).

35.
The full marketing plan is printed in Lawrence P. Jackson,
The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 228–229; see also Hazel
Arnett Ervin and Hilary Holladay,
Ann Petry's Short Fiction: Critical Essays
(Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2004), xviii.

36.
Stacy I. Morgan,
Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 2.

37.
Ann Petry, “The Novel as Social Criticism,” in
The Writer's Book
, Helen Hull, ed. (New York: Harper Brothers, 1950), 33.

38.
Ibid.

39.
Ibid.

40.
For a brilliant discussion of Cootie Williams, see Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.,
Race Music: Black Music from Bebop to Hip-Hop
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Ramsey writes: “Williams's music provides a clear example of the stylistic flux in black popular music during the war years. In fact, I view this group as a progressive, early R&B band” (p. 69). As a band leader, Ramsey wrote, Williams “drew on many resources . . . : the repertory of his Ellington years, the jazz and swing tradition of his youth, the diverse talents of new instrumentalists and vocalists such as Powell, Vinson, and Davis, the innovations of new composers such as Monk, and the novel sounds of two emerging styles, bebop and rhythm and blues” (p. 72).

41.
See Gerald Horne,
Black Liberation / Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 102. See also “Race Bias Denied as Rioting Factor: Spokesman for Negro Groups Lay Harlem Disorders to Sporadic Hoodlumism,”
New York Times,
August 3, 1943.

42.
“Ann Petry,” in Sarkissian, ed.,
Contemporary Authors,
265.

43.
On the young Malcolm X, the culture that produced him, and the relationship of that culture to the kind of proto-revolutionary consciousness that Malcolm Little, “Big Red,” inhabits, see Robin D. G. Kelley,
Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
(New York: Free Press, 1996).

44.
Records of the Harlem Magistrate, August 1943, Municipal Archives, New York.

45.
Lawrence P. Jackson,
The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 145–146.

46.
If Wright is a literary relative, so, too, is Marita Bonner. Bonner, a New Englander like Petry, graduated from Radcliffe; moved to DC, where she wrote essays and experimental plays; then married and moved to Chicago, where she began to master the short story. She created a fictional black neighborhood, “Frye Street,” for her stories about Chicago's black migrants. Like Petry, Bonner published in
The Crisis and Opportunity,
but during the 1930s.

47.
“Ann Petry,” in Sarkissian, ed.,
Contemporary Authors,
265.

48.
See Steven Gregory,
Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 27.

49.
See Martha Biondi,
To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 164.

50.
Ann Petry, “Harlem,”
Holiday,
April 1949, 84.

Chapter 3: Rollin' with Mary Lou Williams

1.
Born September 8, 1903, in Dawson, Georgia, Davis went on to attend Morehouse and Amherst Colleges before enrolling at Harvard Law School. By the time he arrived in New England, he already had experienced protests against Jim Crow. On July 5, 1923, he was arrested in Atlanta because, like Petry's Sam, he refused to obey Jim Crow laws governing city buses.

2.
Gerald Horne,
Black Liberation / Red Scare
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 108; John C. Walter,
The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), 110;
Amsterdam News
, October 30, 1943, A8.

3.
New York Times
, November 14, 1943, 52.

4.
Ann Petry, “Harlem,”
Holiday
, April 1949, 84.

5.
Mary Lou Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #2, 281, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 5, Box 1, Folder 2, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

6.
See Tammy Kernodle
, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 103.

7.
Mary Lou Williams interview by John S. Wilson, June 26, 1973, transcript, p. 130, Jazz Oral History Project, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey (“Wilson interview” hereafter).

8.
Wilson interview, 32.

9.
Linda Dahl,
Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams
(New York: Pantheon, 2001); Kernodle,
Soul on Soul
.

10.
Dahl,
Morning Glory
, 9.

11.
Mary Lou Williams, “Jazz Is Our Heritage,” Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 5, Box 2, Folder 38, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

12.
Quoted in Dahl,
Morning Glory
, 11; Wilson interview, 4. See also Tera Hunter,
To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Harlem stride was a highly percussive style of jazz piano developed in New York during the 1920s. Virtuoso improvisers, stride pianists were considered among the elite of New York's early jazz musicians. Stride pianists were also known for their “leaping left hands.”

13.
Kernodle,
Soul on Soul
, 13.

14.
Telephone conversation between author and Bobbie Ferguson, July 2012.

15.
Dan Morgenstern, ed.,
Living with Jazz: A Reader
(New York: Random House, 2009).

16.
Petry, “Harlem”; telephone conversation between author and Gray Weingarten, January 11, 2011.