American Fun (32 page)

In the summer of 1928, twenty-some days into one of New York City’s first non-segregated
dance marathons, when the crowd on the enormous
Manhattan Casino dance floor had dwindled down to four punchy couples, young gossip columnists
Walter Winchell and
Ed Sullivan zeroed in on dancer number 7, George “Shorty” Snowden. Their publicity drew fresh crowds of spectators who sponsored challenges between the couples. It was during one of these challenges that Shorty pulled a
breakaway and electrified even the weary dance band. Onlookers may have assumed he was just going “squirrelly,” a common term for marathoners losing their wits. But when
Fox Movietone News got Snowden on film, magnifying his blurring feet, they knew they were seeing something new. An interviewer asked him what he was doing. He called it “the Lindy” and kept on dancing, but as he explained decades later, he was just doing what his friends always did up in
Harlem, only possibly faster. “
It was new to them, and I was sure having a ball, doing whatever came into my head.” In other words, he was improvising.

When it caught on, the dance was often called the
jitterbug, but
Snowden’s invented-on-the-spot “Lindy” was uniquely inspired. It captured the dance’s sheer modernity. He named it, of course, for
Charles Lindbergh, who had been apotheosized since his transatlantic
flight. The Lindy animated reckless grace, and for this it owed more in its style and spirit to
Buster Keaton and
Charlie Chaplin. It answered the jazz solo’s fearless exploration and celebrated the thrill-seeking individual. In the months and years and decades to follow, when the
Spirit of St. Louis
possessed the dance floor and inspired Lindy Hoppers to leave the ground—with flips, rolls, throws, and swings—it reveled in the majesty of flight.

Back on Snowden’s Harlem turf, the
Savoy Ballroom, its owner,
Charles Buchanan, who had previously prohibited dancers from doing even the
Charleston (thereby spurring them on to invent the steps that became the Lindy Hop), quickly cashed in on Snowden’s celebrity. He awarded Snowden a lifetime pass and rechristened the ballroom “
The Home of Happy Feet.” In no time the Savoy’s 12,500-square-foot dance floor boasted, as Jean and Michael Stearns put it, the “ ‘hippest’ dance audience in the world” and was “the acid test of a true dance band.”

All facets of Jazz Age Harlem glittered at the Savoy, where a cut-glass chandelier adorned the marble lobby and all of New York braved its dance floor. Soon the Savoy, an acre-wide rent party, was open to just about anything, including spectacular
drag balls and
dance marathons. (Its Chicago iteration, in 1926, was home to
Abe Saperstein’s
“Savoy Big Five,” the choreographed basketballers who would soon become the
Harlem Globetrotters.) To accommodate the full range of its clientele,
Harlem’s Savoy held special nights—Mondays were “Ladies Night,” Tuesdays featured the club’s best dancers, Thursdays were “Kitchen Mechanics Night,” Saturdays packed in so many dancers that it was difficult to move, and Sunday was “when celebrities and movie stars arrived.” In an interview,
Pearl and Ivy Fisher distinguished between the “
segregated”
Cotton Club and the “open” Savoy, where “everybody went—whites and blacks.”
Lucky Millinder’s song commemorates the Savoy as a “joint” where people could “
grab a cook or mechanic” and “let [their] feet go frantic,” the great American dance floor where race and class tensions were sublimated into the having of fun.

From the beginning the Savoy sponsored bucking contests between
its two opposing bandstands. Legendary black artists like
Louis Armstrong,
Chick Webb, and
Fletcher Henderson went into hot but good-natured battle against white upstarts like
Bix Beiderbecke and
Benny Goodman. The jitterbugging thousands were the beneficiaries. With the advent of the Lindy, the bands’ competitive spirit spread to the dance floor, where neither the richest nor the most famous but only the most talented could cut it up in “
Cat’s Corner,” an area Snowden cordoned off in 1927 for only the hottest Lindy Hoppers.

8

J
. A. ROGERS
’
S PROMINENT
1925 essay “
Jazz at Home” reads like a sporting response to Duffus’s “Age of Play.” Both writers argue for pleasure’s social power, but while Duffus’s “play” involves movies and board games, the raw pleasures Rogers attributes to jazz—“
the nobody’s child of the levee and the city slum”—pulse with rebellious electricity. “The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow—from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.” Rogers admitted that jazz, like Duffus’s less offensive “play,” had begun to spread throughout American society, but that wasn’t his point. It mattered more that jazz “spontaneity” and “the perfect jazz abandon” came most easily to “the average Negro, particularly of the lower classes,” who “puts rhythm into whatever he does.”

Black writers of the 1920s often expressed this opinion—for better or for worse. Race leader
W. E. B. DuBois often regretted lower-class blacks’ open displays of “jazz abandon.” His friend and peer
James Weldon Johnson, however, seemed delighted that “
an average group of
Negroes can in dancing to a good jazz band achieve a delightful state of intoxication that for others would require nothing short of a certain per capita imbibation of synthetic gin.” Rogers, rather resembling Duffus, takes a middle road. A social conservative among young black urbanites, he warned that jazz was a “
poison for the weak”—especially for the poor black whose “amusement life is more open to the forces of social vice”—but allows that it also gives “recreation for the industrious” and “tonic for the strong.” And for this reason, in spite of “its morally anarchic spirit, jazz has a popular mission to perform.” Echoing his era’s progressive arguments for physical recreation, he sees in jazz a civic virtue that transcends race, class, and gender because it is rooted in a most basic instrument—the human body.

Rogers sees this joy as a poison and a tonic, but unlike Duffus he doesn’t want to interfere. Recklessly, democratically—at least in this essay—Rogers puts his trust in the people: “
This new spirit of joy and spontaneity may itself play the role of reformer.” His seemingly utopian vision, in which music and dance cause social reform, was at no time more plausible than in the 1920s, when the rhythms that freed slaves on
Congo Square were helping to warm Americans’ chilly attitudes—toward their own bodies and each other’s humanity.

The stakes were much higher for Rogers than for Duffus, nothing lower than political equality for blacks. He hoped that jazz might do the work peaceably. For of course blacks felt more than “joy and spontaneity.” For instance, in 1925, many felt deep reserves of rage. To be sure, the year before, W. E. B. DuBois, while acknowledging African Americans’ “spirit of gayety,” reminded readers that “
the first influence of the Negro on American democracy was naturally to oppose by force—revolt, murder, assassination coupled with running away. It was the primitive, ancient effort to avenge blood with blood, to bring good out of evil by opposing evil with evil.” Revolutionary figures like
Marcus Garvey kept this violent history in the public eye, lecturing and parading in military dress. But during this highly racist period in American history, when
eugenics was a popular academic position and the KKK, in 1925, had five million members nationwide, even the joyous revolt of jazz was an opposition by force: its practitioners stood down their frigid opponents with
blatant sexuality and loud racial pride. Under such conditions “democracy” had to be bullish—especially if it was going to be fun.

But jazz wasn’t destructive, jazz was creative. Published in a year when the pages of
Crisis
were filled with
lynchings, evictions, and other evidence of prejudice,
Alain Locke’s landmark
New Negro
anthology, in which Rogers’s essay appears, never ignored such vicious stakes but charted a more constructive heritage of
African-American revolt—from spirituals, folk dances, and Brother Rabbit tales to their cultural grandchildren in the Harlem Renaissance. One contributor, the novelist and
Crisis
editor
Jessie Fauset, traces the African-American “
gift of laughter” as it comes down from slave culture, through the “jesters” and “clowns” of minstrelsy, to the twentieth-century all-black musicals, where it “radiates good feeling and happiness.” When African-American comedians evolved from playing the “funny man” to what she calls “the state of being purely subjective,” they could enmesh the audience in a common pleasure that acted a lot like a jazz performance—or like antebellum storytelling circles. When black performers can be comical on
their
terms, she argues, the audience “is infected” by the performer’s “high spirits” and “excessive good will.” “A stream of well-being is projected across the footlights into the consciousness of the beholder.” Here, it seems, was the acme of Harlem Renaissance fun. At its finest moments, a culture born from struggle and trauma shot beyond resistance and mere rebellion. It struck syncopated harmonies of cross-racial experience—laughter, dancing, competition, and the impudent revolt of wild partying.

THE “NEW NEGRO”
or “Harlem” Renaissance was a surge in African-American cultural production that culminated in the 1920s. Among its likely causes—black resistance to lynchings and segregation, a rising black middle class with greater access to education, the mainstream popularity of jazz—the widest dispersal was the “
Great Migration” of southern blacks to northern cities,
some 555,000 in the 1910s alone. The sudden removal of so many rural families brought mixed fortunes—increased economic opportunity in the wartime economy, increased economic privation due to overcrowding, as well as new waves of racial
resentment. At its worst, during what
James Weldon Johnson famously called the “
Red Summer” of 1919—a year of severe labor shortages due in large part to veterans returning home en masse—twenty-five or more major
race riots, most of them instigated by whites, erupted from coast to coast and resulted in dozens of
lynchings, hundreds of other deaths, thousands of injuries, and an American society in disarray.

But even in the most cramped and impoverished neighborhoods of Washington, Philadelphia, and Chicago, a new African-American cosmopolitanism was taking shape. And if New York City set the era’s highest standards for rebellious, socially integrated fun, Harlem was its Main Street. This predominantly black uptown neighborhood—whose population by 1925 was denser by a third than anywhere else in all of Manhattan—teemed with conflict. It was nobody’s utopia. “
Long before the stock market crash,” writes the historian
Jonathan Gill, “black Harlem had become a community in crisis, leading the nation in poverty, crime, overcrowding, unemployment, juvenile delinquency, malnutrition, and infant and maternal mortality.”
East Harlem, with its largely
Latino population, didn’t fare much better. But the runaway popularity of jazz—as well as
Caribbean dance music—brought sudden revenue into the district, and while much of it stayed in the hands of white owners (such as the Mafia ownership of racially exclusive venues like
Connie’s and the
Cotton Club), a lot trickled down to locally operated bars and dance halls. The influx of wealthy and middle-class whites was only New York’s latest wave of slummers. Their presence was naturally galling to many Harlemites, who, while sometimes befriending them, also mocked, exploited, or ignored them.

Ed Small’s Paradise, with its dancing waiters on roller skates, was nearly as posh and expensive as Connie’s, but it was black-owned, color-blind, and popular for late-night Chinese food. As
David Levering Lewis points out, Small’s, like the
Clam House and other clubs along the Mob-dominated 133rd Street “Jungle,” sought “
white clients enthusiastically, sometimes even fawningly,” in hopes of getting a piece of the market. Farther uptown, at the more populist Panama, a large club with pianos and dancing girls, the clientele was deliberately split between “
the more of a quiet reserved type of entertainment” downstairs and the “rougher”
type upstairs. The enormous
Lincoln Gardens, however, traded ceremony for pleasure: one thousand patrons jammed the smoky floor and balcony, drank $2 pints of “licorice-tasting gin,” and were drawn like moths to
Louis Armstrong and
King Oliver’s
Creole Jazz Band. “
The whole joint was rocking,” recalled
Eddie Condon. “Tables, chairs, walls, people, moved with rhythm.… People in the balcony leaned over and their drinks spilled on the customers below.” Lincoln Gardens better resembled jazz’s natural habitat—the surging throngs in New Orleans’s steamy public halls. The most risqué (and fun) nightclubs such as the “
transvestite floor shows, sex circuses, and
marijuana parlors along 140th Street” were also least amenable to whites. More notorious white hedonists like
Phil Harris,
Mae West, and
Carl Van Vechten managed to “obtain entry” through “persistence, contacts, and money,” but generally these venues didn’t welcome gawkers. The most famous sex circus on 140th Street was either
Hazel Valentine’s
The Daisy Chain or
101 Ranch. A jewel in the crown of
Harlem’s thriving gay and lesbian scene, celebrated in songs by
Fats Waller and
Count Basie, Valentine’s show was centered on sex celebrities like
Sewing Machine Bertha and the transvestite “Clarenz” who performed acrobatics that “
catered to all varieties of sexual tastes.”