Harlem Nocturne (7 page)

While there is an expression of mutual respect, there is no discussion of friendship or collaboration. Dunham seems to suggest that Primus is primarily interested in reproducing authentic African dance for American audiences, while she is inspired by dances of the diaspora to create something new. Ultimately, she is making a distinction between the academic and the artist, identifying herself as the latter. It is not a distinction Primus would likely have made. She saw herself as both scholar and artist. Her understanding of “artist” was not as the individual who stands apart from the community; instead, it was a role chosen by the ancestors and created for the community to embody its history, bear its culture, and provide it with a vision, a path, and capacity for the future.

Modern dance had emerged in the early twentieth century, and by the forties it still did not have the status of classical ballet. Modern dancers might appear on a concert stage on Tuesday and perform as part of a vaudeville review on Wednesday. Despite the fame her performance in
Five Dancers
brought her, Primus could not expect to make a living through modern dance alone. Unlike Dunham's own dance company, few modern dance companies were racially integrated. So, like many famed dancers, singers, and musicians of her generation, especially black artists, Primus entered the nightclub scene and began performing at the legendary Café Society.

Much has been written about Café Society. Founded by Barney Josephson, it opened in 1938 in Greenwich Village. The first racially integrated club in New York, Café Society quickly became a gathering place for liberal and leftist socialites, intellectuals, artists, and political activists. The club's
reputation is well deserved when we consider the patrons and the artists who found their way there. The club was the site of political education for a number of artists as well as the venue where they found their individual creative voices. It is perhaps best known as the place where Billie Holiday introduced “Strange Fruit,” but the club also helped to launch the careers of Lena Horne and Hazel Scott. Café Society lacked a chorus line and hatcheck girls; instead, it showcased comedians and vocalists, self-accompanying solo artists, an ensemble, a boogie-woogie pianist, a solo pianist, a dance orchestra, and sometimes, a dancer. Zero Mostel, Imogene Coca, Josh White, Teddy Wilson, Albert Ammons, and, after the summer of '43, Mary Lou Williams were but some of the artists who appeared there. John Hammond was the club's musical director. Its employees—cooks, waiters, musicians, and comedians—were all unionized.

The nightclub and its owner are just as well known for their leftist Popular Front politics as for the talent that appeared there. Indeed, the club was rumored to have started as a fundraising vehicle for the Communist Party. Barney Josephson's brother was a noted member of the Communist Party, and Josephson himself remained under FBI surveillance for almost twenty years. Eventually, J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with routing out Communists would lead to the club's demise, but in the early 1940s it was still a breeding ground for politically minded artists and activists. On any given night, one might find Walter White, Ralph Bunche, Richard Wright, E. Franklin Frazier, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, or Sterling Brown in the audience. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. might drop in, especially
when he began courting Hazel Scott, though he was married. One night Eleanor Roosevelt paid a visit. The Café Society audience was made up of intellectuals, writers, labor activists, jazz fans, students, and celebrities. One might find Nelson Rockefeller seated next to Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, or Gene Kelley, or meet a young Betty Perske, on her way to becoming as famous as Lauren Bacall. Here was a gathering of Rorty's Reformist Left.
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In the spring of 1943, Primus successfully auditioned for Barney Josephson at Café Society Downtown. She had been working as a switchboard operator and going to school at the time, when a man on the street recognized her and said, “Hey, aren't you dat kid John Martin wrote about? What the hell are you doing here? Why don't you go down to Café Society?” She had never been to a nightclub before, though she had frequented the Savoy, where she danced the Lindy Hop. In an unpublished interview with Elsa Wren, Primus later recalled, “I had on a pale blue scarf, a pleated skirt, an organdy blouse and red shoes and socks.” Josephson was not impressed. He had presented Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and Hazel Scott, all of whom were known for their glamorous sophistication. Primus showed him her clippings and told him, “The person you see sitting here is not the person you'd see on stage, they are two completely different things.” Josephson remembered, “You form an opinion when someone comes looking for a job, how they come dressed, how their hair is combed, wanting to make a good impression. This woman came in not really well-groomed, as if she just had not bothered getting herself ready for an audition.
I was very unimpressed. I didn't know then that she was a graduate of Hunter College in biology and even then she was studying for her master's degree in psychology.” He thought, “Oh god, I can't present anyone who looks like this.”
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Josephson told her his record player wasn't working. “I just wanted to put her off. I didn't want to audition her. Well, she was tearful.” After she told him she was working for the National Maritime Workers Union as a clerk and that she couldn't afford to take another day off from work, he agreed to see her dance. “She took one leap, one leg behind, both arms outstretched, I thought she'd go through the wall. Her legs were very muscular, like a man's legs, power like iron, and bronze, her color.” Josephson preferred jazz tap dancing and cared little for ballet and modern dance, but admitted, “As little as I know about dance, and that was little enough, when I saw that leap I knew it was something. This woman, whom I had been trying to get rid of, knocked me off my ass.”
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He hired her on the spot to work at Café Society Downtown, and she opened in April for a ten-month engagement.

The reason Josephson did not find Primus physically attractive may have been that his notions of beauty were more along the lines of Lena Horne and Billie Holiday. Holiday noted that Josephson thought Hazel Scott was “too dark” until he heard her play. Eventually, Scott's talent won him over, and he would become physically attracted to her as well. She became his most successful star and the darling of Café Society Uptown. But soon Primus would herald a new kind of beauty for black women, one that would become common among modern
dancers and other bohemian artists, in particular. Primus recalled, “I had not, except in instances like Paul Robeson or Marian Anderson or Billie Holiday, come across as a beautiful woman because I was dark. . . . There were times, and I wore my hair quite natural, when I was accosted on the streets and those were the days when if you were fair you were bea-u-ti-ful if your nose was a certain way, you were bea-u-ti-ful and that was that.”
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Dancers live in and are defined by their bodies, and Primus's was the perfect body for the kind of dance that would ultimately call her. Beautiful and sculpted, with muscular quadriceps that propelled her into the air when necessary, it was not a body familiar to the Western concert stage. Katherine Dunham was considered the sultry beauty, but the press never spoke of Primus in those terms. Instead, she was “strong,” “powerful,” “earthy,” “stocky,” “pure.” In 1947,
Time
magazine identified her as “a squat, powerful Negro girl.” Four years later, the same magazine called her “a stocky, powerhouse dancer.”
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In the earlier article, Primus described herself: “My body is built for heavy stomping, powerful dignity.” On the pages of grant-making reports or even mainstream publications, her body was often described as “heavy,” even “overweight,” although she weighed only 115 pounds in her twenties. Even her contemporaries made note of her body. Dancer and dance historian Joe Nash recalled, of his first meeting with her, “This short, dark skinned girl . . . she didn't have the body of a dancer.” Another dancer, Muriel Mannings, noted, “Her body was different than most dancers' bodies. She was chunky.”
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A contemporary reader might be struck by the similarity of
adjectives used to describe Primus and tennis star Serena Williams, or former Olympic ice skater Surya Bonaly, both of whom are admired for their athleticism and power, but whose grace, femininity, and beauty have been questioned.

But Primus would pave the way for a different kind of physical type. If people like Josephson did not find her beautiful, some young women were inspired by her personal aesthetic. While a student at Primus's alma mater, Hunter College High School, where Primus came to speak, the young poet Audre Lorde sat mesmerized by Primus's tales of Africa—and her natural hair. Lorde left the auditorium and, on her way to her Harlem home, stopped in a barbershop and had her hair cut into a short natural style.

Black modern dancers would be among the first notable black women to wear their hair natural. The rigorous movement required of modern dancers made it difficult for them to maintain processed or straightened hair. For figures such as Primus, and later her student, a young Maya Angelou, unprocessed hair styles were born of necessity. Because these women carried themselves with an air of pride and confidence, their hair came to connote similar sentiments. They were among a rare group of black women who were able to defy convention and forgo straightening their hair. This would not be the case for the majority of black American women until the sixties. As late as 1966, Phyl Garland wrote an article in
Ebony
magazine about the new affinity for natural hair, citing Primus as an early champion: “This key element in the black female's mystique was, until recently, challenged only by a few bold bohemians, a handful of entertainers and dancing ethnologists
like Pearl Primus, whose identification with the exotic placed them beyond the pale of convention.” In this way Primus was a pioneer for women like Cicely Tyson, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Nina Simone who would be purveyors of the new sensibility during the “Black is Beautiful” sixties.
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Nightly at Café Society Primus worked on her choreography. She found inspiration from other artists and made contacts for future performances and other venues. There she honed her craft and became a part of the community of artists who performed there. As Primus would later explain, “Cafe Society is the place where my discovery became more than a one night thing.”
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At Café Society, Primus met and befriended Josh White and Mary Lou Williams, and she would dance to songs created and performed by both of them. Josephson teamed her up with White for “Hard Time Blues,” which Primus would perform at the 1943 Negro Freedom Rally. Williams, meanwhile, dedicated one part of her famed
Zodiac Suite
, “Capricorn,” to Primus, and Primus danced to that piece as well.

The most important collaboration between Primus and Williams was a piece called “The Study in Nothing,” which they performed on June 1, 1944, at Hunter College. They were both very serious artists, devoted to the development of their craft and the artistic expression of their ideas. Neither interacted playfully with her audiences, and for this, each would be criticized. Although both had experienced the sting of colorism in their own communities, Williams was the more
glamorous of the two, with her thick, straightened hair and her beautiful gowns, minks, and extensive collection of shoes. But here, they came together as artists, and their relationship provided them the space to take risks, to be inventive, to explore, and even to be playful. The piece was a humorous duet with piano and offered the women an opportunity to produce something experimental, abstract, nonrepresentational, and nonracial. Significantly, they did not create a work about being black women. Their shared race and gender seem to have freed them to transcend both of those identities, if only momentarily, to explore a more abstract, aesthetic collaboration. Unfortunately, the performance was not recorded, but those who saw it described it as one individual responding to the sound of a singular musical note. Dancer and audience chased the sound.
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Collaborations like this one made Café Society the most important performance venue for Primus during this time in her career. Primus's seriousness, along with her ambition, may have made her a difficult person to work with, but numerous artists, including John Cage, Langston Hughes, Owen Dodson, Mary Lou Williams, and Josh White, nevertheless did collaborate with her. Cage composed “Our Spring Will Come” for his work with Primus. It was to have been accompanied by the recitation of a Langston Hughes poem. The John Cage Trust describes the piece as “a lively and rhythmically intense work, set in a kind of rondo form.”
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Josh White was a frequent collaborator with Primus. In addition to performing at Café Society together, White and Primus toured throughout the
United States in the 1940s, and Primus would continue to include works set to his music in her repertoire for years to come.