Harlem Nocturne (3 page)

Finally, the political and aesthetic sensibilities of these women were encouraged by a number of left-leaning organizations and institutions. The Popular Front was a program initiated by the Communist Party in response to the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. At its Seventh World Congress in 1935, the Comintern—the international
association of Communist organizations created by V. I. Lenin in 1917—replaced its call for a proletariat-led global revolution with a call for a “broad People's Front” coalition of liberals, radicals, trade unionists, farmers, socialists, blacks and whites, anti colonialists and colonized. In an effort to unify this broad constituency, the party simultaneously inaugurated a campaign to promote what it had come to call “people's culture.” On February 14, 1936, a coalition of black groups met in Chicago at the National Negro Congress and vowed to support black artists who challenged stereotypical representations of black people. This effort, called the Negro People's Front, included a number of organizations, individuals, and institutions from diverse ideological beliefs: churches, civil rights organizations, black women's clubs, fraternal groups, politicians, students, union members, and the black press. Although 1939 marked the official end of the party's Popular Front period, the idea of a Popular Front would continue throughout the war years. Without Popular Front venues like the Café Society, or publications such as
PM
, a leftist newspaper, it is doubtful that Petry, Primus, and Williams could have met with such success. Popular Front initiatives focused on culture as an especially important forum for educating and mobilizing audiences in support of an antifascist agenda.
¹

Ann Petry and Mary Lou Williams were part of what one of America's most important philosophers, Richard Rorty, identified as the Reformist Left, though he did not name either of them as being members of that group. According to Rorty, the Reformist Left included a diverse array of Americans who
fought within the framework of constitutional democracy to ensure the rights of the nation's weakest citizens. Such activists represented a broad range of progressive stances, from those calling themselves communists and socialists to those who eschewed political labels altogether.
²

Borrowing a phrase from writer James Baldwin, Rorty used the term “achieving our country” to explain the work of the Reformist Left. This group of progressive intellectuals, artists, and activists sought to make the nation live up to its founding principles of liberty and equality for all. While they did not forget the brutality of our nation's past, they maintained that it was a continuous work in progress, one that had demonstrated and would continue to demonstrate its ability to become a better place.
³

The three women of
Harlem Nocturne
sought to achieve America by directly confronting its legacy of white supremacy. Primus, Petry, and Williams consistently confronted the darkness of our nation's soul. They were critical of white supremacy and the excesses of American capitalism. Yet, their art and their activism also denoted a firm belief in the transformative nature of social change. They were agents, not spectators. They advocated for access to education, jobs, and adequate food and shelter. They were concerned with both racial and economic equality. They walked the streets of Harlem during the time that a young Baldwin walked those same streets. They saw what he saw, were angered and inspired by the people, forces, and sensibilities that would give rise to his own sense of rage, purpose, and justice. As with Baldwin, these women were not
willing to forget or wholly forgive America's historical transgressions, but they were devoted to helping this nation “achieve” itself. They did so in a variety of ways and in a variety of contexts.
⁴

The Communist Party was one venue through which some Americans tried to help their nation “achieve” itself. Pearl Primus was a member of the Communist Party. Of the three women, she was the most articulate about the struggle to make the United States a true democracy; for her the racial problem in America was a problem of democracy. All three women were politically engaged, though to differing degrees and along different points of the spectrum. Primus was the most politically radical of the three, sitting at the nexus of the Reformist Left and the Black Radical tradition. Although she worked for change within US borders, her concerns were always transnational, extending beyond the boundaries of the United States to include Africa and the Caribbean.
⁵

Williams was rumored to have hosted Communist meetings in her apartment; she often offered her home up as a kind of intellectual and artistic salon to the people and causes she loved, admired, and supported. She was never a member of the party. Williams, long before her conversion to Catholicism, was instead largely driven by spiritual concerns that informed her strong sense of social justice. Petry was an editor of the
People's Voice
, and in that position she was surrounded by Communists. While she had respect and admiration for individual Communists, she protested any attempt to categorize her as such. She discounted the centrality of Marx to her own thinking,
noting instead that biblical ethics informed her sensibilities. Whereas Williams sincerely sought meaning in her sense of spirituality, Petry may have been seeking to demonstrate the way her political views were steeped in values of the Judeo-Christian tradition that preceded Marxism, and would have distanced herself from the kind of radical politics that eventually fell out of favor.

Although each of these women lived in Harlem at some point during the period under consideration, their work took them throughout the entire city and ultimately throughout the nation and the world. By following them as they navigate Manhattan, we acquire a unique vision of the city during and immediately following World War II. New York sits at the center of this narrative. The city enabled and influenced their creativity. It facilitated their emergence as significant artists. It provided the social, cultural, and political context that laid the foundation for their careers.

In the 1940s, Harlem and New York were vibrant, glamorous, and exciting places, brimming with creativity. A new generation of artists ushered the transition from swing to bebop, tended the birth of rhythm and blues, questioned the continuing significance of social realism, experimented with abstraction, and sought a seat at the center of the national narrative. The forties differed from the better-known Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age in a number of important ways. Although the Harlem Renaissance produced Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, Bessie Smith, and Josephine
Baker, among others, each of these women found her voice—or her stride—in an earlier time, and black women never received as much attention and acclaim for their work as they did during World War II. Furthermore, many of the women who emerged during the forties more explicitly linked their art and their public profile to a political movement.

Other women's voices contributed to this generational shift as well: the poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker, entertainers Hazel Scott and Lena Horne, and dancer Katherine Dunham, for instance. Lady Day was the Queen of 52nd Street, and Ella Fitzgerald was “Flying Home.” Sarah Vaughan, first hired as a pianist for Earl “Fatha” Hines, soon left to join Billy Eckstine's band with Miles Davis, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey, Lucky Thompson, Gene Ammons, and Dexter Gordon. And then there was the new queen of the blues, queen of the black jukebox, Miss D herself—Dinah Washington, whose Chicago-inflected, Harlem-based sound reflected the national postwar optimism and a newfound African American confidence. Through their art, Ann Petry, Mary Lou Williams, and Pearl Primus documented these times and in so doing helped to shape the history of a city and its people by presenting perspectives that were absent from official records.

New York fed each woman's art, providing inspiration, material, and venues for performance and publication. However, the city was no utopia; nor was it free of obstacles to black freedom. As late as 1940, 90 percent of New York State's defense plants refused to hire black workers. The nearby Fox Hills Army Camp in Staten Island was a segregated military base.
Furthermore, a number of restaurants and bars did not serve black patrons. Though subjected to these laws and customs, none of the women examined in this book lived racially segregated lives. Each claimed black and white friends, and Primus and Williams especially operated in racially integrated milieus. The tension between these restrictions and the sense of possibility with which they lived their own lives made them acutely aware of and committed to fighting against racial injustice.
⁶

Despite the obstacles they endured in New York, these women were prominent artists. Through major works they also gave back to the city that enabled their art. Pearl Primus danced for soldiers and students. She became a favorite of
New York Times
dance critic John Martin, who covered all of her performances and, as a respected arbiter of taste, helped to cement her reputation. Among black dancers, only Katherine Dunham rivaled her. Ann Petry sits alongside Richard Wright and before Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin; through her work she presented complex, engaging, working-class black women in American fiction for the first time. She provided one of the first fully imagined portrayals of working-class Harlem in her 1946 novel
The Street
, which became the first book by a black woman to sell 1 million copies; it was widely reviewed in the black, left, and mainstream press. Mary Lou Williams became a major figure in the birth of bebop and challenged notions that women contributed to jazz only as vocalists. She was not simply the nurturing “godmother” of younger musicians such as Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. In 1945, she had her own weekly radio broadcast,
Mary Lou Williams's Piano
Workshop
, and premiered her
Zodiac Suite
to diverse audiences at two of the city's most prestigious venues: Town Hall and Carnegie Hall.

All three women volunteered for causes they believed in, organized people and events, and taught younger artists. Their art was driven by a fierce passion for social justice and an insistent drive to create. Petry, Primus, and Williams were also included in anthologies and performances with some of the brightest talents of their generation. Their names frequently appeared in the press, and they were well known to culturally literate New York audiences.

Who were these women? Where did they acquire their confidence and their ambition? As was the case with many other American women, their youth, their marital statuses, and the absence of children gave them the freedom to focus on their careers. Petry and Williams were both in their early thirties during the war years, while Primus was in her early twenties. During this time none of them had children. Both Petry and Primus later became mothers, with one child each, but Williams remained childless throughout her life. Petry was married, but her husband was away at war for most of the time under consideration. Williams was separated from her second husband, the trumpeter Harold Baker, and Primus would not marry until the end of the decade.

Each of these women was highly intellectual and had prepared well for the path she pursued. Petry and Primus had gone to college. Williams, a child prodigy who began playing piano by ear at age two, went on the road before completing her formal education, but as the pianist, composer, and arranger
for one of the most famous swing bands of the day (the Andy Kirk Orchestra), she was highly trained in her medium. All were avid readers and deep thinkers. In many ways each benefited from the struggles to open doors of opportunity for women and African Americans that had taken place during the earlier decades of the twentieth century. They all were cosmopolitan sophisticates, and before the end of their lives, they all had international reputations (Williams and Primus even lived outside of the United States for extended periods). They were recognized for their contributions to the arts. Unlike so many women artists, none of them died unappreciated and unknown. This is largely due to the efforts of members of younger generations, themselves inspired by the social movements of the sixties, especially the Black Power and Black Arts movements and the feminist movement, who, in their own search for foremothers, rediscovered these three pioneers.

By the early 1950s, the window of opportunity that had given these women the freedom to flourish had been shut, as Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor took aim at the institutions that had supported them. Faced with these new limitations, each woman eventually left New York. Petry returned to Old Saybrook with her husband to raise her daughter. She would write two more novels, a number of short stories, and several books for children and young adults. Mary Lou Williams went to Paris, where, following a religious conversion, she gave up playing and composing music until she was encouraged to do these things again by her spiritual mentors. She returned to New York in the mid-1950s and eventually experienced a career resurgence in the 1970s. Williams
continued to be involved with the most innovative forms of music until her death. With the rise of McCarthyism, Primus came under governmental surveillance. A grant from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation allowed her to travel to West Africa, and for the rest of her career she devoted her efforts to bringing West African dance to the world stage.

While the anti-Communist furor did not target Petry or Williams, by targeting the institutions, venues, and individuals supporting their art, it nevertheless helped to destroy the milieu that nurtured them. However, during the war years and the years immediately thereafter, each woman produced vibrant, creative, and important work that spoke to the centrality of humanity, documented its suffering and striving, and insisted upon a world where both justice and beauty could thrive.