The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (69 page)

In jazz music, the double entendre went secular as it funneled sexual play into the aesthetic creations of black folk culture. Or should I say, the aesthetic creation funnels the sexual play of certain subcultures in black life, especially among working-class black folk. But the sexual did not exhaust the double entendre in the cultural realm, since black folk through our music signified on what we understood ourselves to be and played with those images, whether of the barbarian, the savage, and so on, even as we enlarged on the narratives of complex humanity that all great art promotes. We could parody the stereotypes of black identity even as we extended our creative freedom to engage our libidos, to revel in sexual mischief, to take utter joy in what Richard Wright called the “erotic exultation” of some forms of music. He was referring primarily to gospel, but I think it can be applied equally to early ragtime and jazz as well.

Another level of double entendre reflected the utter playfulness of linguisticality and orality at the heart of black culture. Long before poststructuralists who were hooked on European traveling theories of postmodernism talked about the playfulness of culture and language, black folk comprehended
jouissance,
the sheer hedonistic pleasure and delight of experimenting and playing with black cultural forms, including music. A crucial feature of double entendres was the articulation of culturally coded messages and styles that signified on white dominant cultural structures while promoting black self-definition. Even though the dominant culture may have viewed blacks as barbarians and savages, as dumb animals incapable of abstract reasoning or “high” culture, they nevertheless reveled in the robustly playful elements of black cultural creativity. At their best, black folk refused to get stuck in narrow Victorian modes of identity where they repressed consciousness of their sexual selves while exclusively engaging their spiritual nature. They didn’t buy into that bifurcation between mind and body. As critic Michael Ventura argued, African cultures often overcame the Cartesian dualism of the West because they contended that there was no such thing as being mental and spiritual over here and being physically embodied over there.

The double entendre was about black folk having their cake and eating it too, so to speak; it was about healing the rift between body and soul; it was about playfulness while contesting white power in signifying fashion; and it was about enjoying and celebrating their culture even as vicious stereotypes abounded. That was terribly liberating to black folk who had been indoctrinated with the belief that they were inferior, that they were, in the words of Margaret Walker Alexander, “black and poor and small.” You must remember that at the turn of the century, black popular culture was broadly assailed in magazines and journals. A title from one magazine asked, “Did jazz put the sin in syncopation?” The
Ladies’ Home Journal
argued that young people listening to jazz music would produce a holocaust of teen births. Now where have we heard that recently? There was an enormous groundswell against black and white Americans who embraced jazz music, especially as cultural guardians were attempting to control the sexual chaos and erotic frenzy of this rhythmic, syncopated music.

That’s because ragtime was associated with the brothel, and jazz music in the 1920s was associated with the speakeasy. Given my earlier analysis about how the physical and social contexts in which the music was played shaped its use, the brothel and speakeasy provided a space for blacks to exult in their own bodies. The speakeasy, the brothel, and other dens of ill repute are where ragtime and jazz were regularly played. So there was an association in the public mind of morally suspicious behavior and black music. This was not strictly a contention between blacks and whites, since during the Harlem Renaissance, upper-class Negroes were inveighing against the vagaries of ghetto gutter music. When you went to the cribs of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, they were playing Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms. They were not engaging the debased folk culture of the masses. Even politically progressive figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois,
the young A. Phillip Randolph, and Chandler Owens spurned jazz music. At some level, there’s an internalized self-abnegation, a disparagement of quotidian blackness displayed by the Negro upper crust who spurn black folk culture while uncritically deferring to European canons, codes, and norms. Thus the black cultural double entendre was directed against not only white supremacist culture but also the Negro bourgeoisie, which lacked serious appreciation for its indigenous art forms.

Was it starting to creep a little too close to home? In modern times, we see as many white as black kids buying rap music. Is that maybe an issue?

Absolutely! The degree to which ragtime and later jazz—especially through figures like Baby Dodds, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and later Louis Armstrong—reached out beyond the confines of black culture certainly sparked wide cultural controversy. There’s no question that when jazz penetrated the husk of white cultural circles, there was a great deal of consternation among the white artistic and political elite. Just as with hip-hop culture today, there was an enormous degree of anxiety about black art forms like jazz darkening white artistic enclaves and social settings. As a result, white elites stepped up the policing of boundaries between black and white cultures, even as jazz inspired interracial cultural exchange. The music facilitated what Jim Crow with its segregated social practices failed to prevent: different cultures connecting and interacting. Jazz helped promote the syncretic moment, the fused moment, the moment of cultural contact and cooperation between races that existed beyond the restrictions of custom, code, and law.

That’s why Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong, who was the young cornet player in King Oliver’s group, and others like them were dangerous to the white musical establishment, especially when jazz and its musicians flowed down the Mississippi, fanning out from the Crescent City to Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. The music and its musicians were now mobile, and many critics deemed them even more harmful because they could reach a much larger audience, especially white youth. Jazz culture was seductive to white kids, and they turned from the quadrille, the mazurka, the waltz, and the polka of their parents to the slow drag and the hoochie-coochie, while reveling in the blues of the Delta filtering into New Orleans from Mississippi. This explosion of African creativity constituted a veritable Negropolis, a black cosmopolitanism whose influence sprawled beyond its original indigenous borders to capture large segments of American society.

Hence the development of the Jazz Age, which in its mainstream cultural embodiment was qualitatively different from the ragtime and jazz juke joints. But it retained enough aesthetic ferocity, in both music and fiction, to scare some and shake up many others. F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected some of the ferocious and fertile impulses of the juke joint in the linguistic creativity of his novels, where slang leapt to the foreground, and his characters were not trying to close out the body.
In certain European canonical works, the body becomes irrelevant or merely instrumental, an appendage to the mind’s operations, merely instrumental. For instance, the body was good for producing wind for the brass instruments or for the muscle to stroke the string instruments in the classical orchestra. But the body itself was never as
present
in European classical music as it was in Negro hot spots, the indigenous dives of brown divas and majordomos—at least not when it was primarily interpreted by Europeans. I’m speaking here of musicians, with the singers who rose to prominence later, including folk like Caruso and Callas, being obvious exceptions. Basically, in European music, you saw the segregation of the body into measured utilities, where the hands were good but not the feet, where the lips were fine but not the eyes, and so on.

In jazz, the body was aesthetically desegregated, freed from the artificial constraints of taste, custom, and tradition. In jazz, the entire body was implicated and was truly integrated. The values of jazz include a profound vocal tonality, since the musical instruments were manipulated in varying degrees to sound like the voice. That’s why we love Lester Young’s and, later, John Coltrane’s, sound, because the very textures they evoke on the saxophone remind us of the human voice crying, sighing, laughing, speaking and shrieking, complaining, and expressing joy. Let’s move from the reeds to the brass. In a sense, the blues shouts and the field hollers get reexpressed, reemphasized, rearticulated in the longing, yearning, feral tones of the trumpet and the cornet. When you hear Louis Armstrong wailing on his trumpet and cornet, when you hear him cutting through the aesthetics of polite society with its measured, rigid, precise tonalities, lashing, as only Armstrong could, in a viciously insistent tone that suggested he was indeed “stomping the blues,” you hear the quality I’m talking about. It’s anger and joy, anxiety and peace in shuffling cadences that trade hope for despair as he’s trading twelves in King Oliver’s group and later his own.

And beyond jazz, in gospel music, for instance, when you hear the transcendent aesthetic possibilities that transmute suffering into ethical vision and religious passion, you’re hearing the full-bodied character of black music. Black music, and the contexts of black experience it introduced, were just too much for an often repressed mainstream society. And you don’t have to buy into stereotypes of the oppositional figures of the white savant and black savage, with the former a glutton for reason and the intellect, and the latter addicted to primal urges and nature, to get my point. The aesthetic priorities and intellectual musings of black artists (and for me, the two go hand in hand, especially when we’re talking about jazz) provided white youth a different and daring prism through which to view themselves. Remember, Du Bois had written in 1903, at least that’s when the essays in
Souls of Black Folk
were gathered, that it is a strange thing to see oneself, that is, the black self, through the lens of another world, a world that was in many ways a foreign, judging, hostile world. But what happens with jazz music and culture is that the prism is inverted, metaphorically speaking, so that now, in the 1920s, black culture provides the lens through which many whites begin to
view and understand themselves. That was a monumental philosophical reversal achieved largely by aesthetic means.

What was it that was bringing black folks from the rural South to urban centers in the North?

Economic opportunity was one thing that drew black people from rural agrarian culture, where they were brutally segregated on post-Emancipation plantations in sharecropping arrangements. Sharecropping was little more than the evolved form of slavery. You see, after Emancipation, 90 percent of black Americans lived in the South until the early 1900s and the great black migration North, to Chicago and Detroit and other big cities, in search of greater economic opportunity. Even before the great black migration, blacks had been drawn to urban centers like New Orleans, which was steeped in racial history. Congo Square was there; it was the place where black slaves had been sold on the auction block. Congo Square prefigured the urban cultures that coalesced around New Orleans in the late 1800s and early 1900s because it was where all these Africans from every part of the world were brought, or literally
bought
, together. There’s nothing like the oppressive commercialization and commodification of black culture to forge the solidarity of blackness, even if it was a defensive, protective, reflexive move, and to create modern blackness in ways it didn’t exist in Africa before the coerced diaspora, the forced migration.

But this new thing, this
tertium quid
, this not-European, not-African-butsomehow-American racial reality that formed in Congo Square, was the forging of the black Atlantic, as Robert Farris Thompson, Peter Linebaugh, and much later Paul Gilroy, have described it in their work. In Congo Square, music was played outside the control of the dominant white society. Blacks reappropriated the space of domination as a source of liberating aesthetic self-expression. The drum was crucial to this process. It was the dominant symbol, the dominant metaphor, of the convergence of political meanings and aesthetic articulation. In Congo Square, the rhythm of black life, with its percussive tonalities, was literally drummed into existence. That’s why the drums were outlawed: they were the language of black emancipation. The drums allowed blacks to facilitate community, to communicate valuable political messages in a percussive tongue. It was a testament to the fertility and generativity of blackness, even for those Creoles who were
passer blanc
, passing for white, although it was routinely the case that they were marked in their bodies with the outlaw(ed) meanings of blackness by the dominant society.

Still, there was something crucial about Congo Square to black identity. New Orleans provided a gumbo ya-ya of disparate black identities of African origins. People think when you say black, these identities are self-evident, but they’re not. They think the same for Africa, but when you say African, what are you really saying? Are you talking about East, West, North, or South African? Are you talking about Yoruba or Hausa? And in the African diaspora, things are no different.
When you speak of African religion, for instance, are you talking about Candomble from an Afro-Brazilian experience, or are you speaking of Afro-Cuban Santeria, or perhaps a Haitian expression of Vodoun? The gumbo ya-ya of black identity evokes the African appreciation for the integrity of multiplicity, which is essentially what black urbanity is all about. The black urban experiment of the early part of the twentieth century, in its edifying moments, was about mass black exodus to cities that were ports of call for the migrations, mixtures, and mergers of all kinds of black identities, both within indigenous U.S. populations and from all over the Americas, from Caribbean cultures, and later from British cultures as well. The expansion of economic opportunity that drew blacks to big northern cities from all parts of the country, indeed the world, had a concomitant virtue: it not only eroded the vicious de jure segregation to which they had been subject in southern apartheid, but it multiplied the rambunctious collocation of ethnic, regional, religious, sexual, gendered, and class diversities within black identity.