Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars 0807834343, 978-0807834343

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Introduction......Page 18
1 FROM UPLIFT TO NEW NEGRO MARRIAGES: Changing Ideals of Sexuality and Activism in African American Marriages, 1890–1940......Page 30
2 NEW NEGRO HUSBANDS......Page 70
3 NEW NEGRO WIVES......Page 100
4 THE EVERYDAY CHALLENGES OF UPWARD MOBILITY: Class Identity and Married Couples......Page 126
5 LOVE AND TROUBLE IN INTERWAR MARRIAGES......Page 156
Epilogue......Page 176
Notes......Page 182
Bibliography......Page 202
F......Page 212
W......Page 213

Citation preview

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n Marriages a c i r e Middle -Class African Am World Wars o w eT The University of between th North Carolina Press  Chapel Hill

Anastasia C. Curwood

©2010 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Merlo with hand-drawn title and Bello and The Sans display by Rebecca Evans. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Curwood, Anastasia Carol, 1974– Stormy weather: middle-­class African American marriages between  the two world wars / by Anastasia C. Curwood. p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-­0-­8078-­3434-­3 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. African Americans —Marriage.   ​ 2. African American families.   3. United States — ​History — ​1919–1933.  i. Title. e185.86.c987 2010  305.896ʹ073 — ​dc22  2010018365 cloth  14  13  12  11  10  5  4  3  2  1

For Mom and Dad

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Acknowledgments  xi  Introduction  1



Contents

1  from uplift to new negro marriages 

13

Changing Ideals of Sexuality and Activism in African American Marriages, 1890–1940

2  new negro husbands 

53



3  new negro wives 

83



4  the everyday challenges of upward mobility  109

Class Identity and Married Couples

5  love and trouble in interwar marriages  139

Epilogue  159  Notes  165  Bibliography  185  Index  195

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Illustrations

Harlem Renaissance men, 1924

61



Hilda Wilkinson Brown, In the House of the Mother

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Hilda Wilkinson Brown, In the House of the Father

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E. Franklin Frazier and Marie Brown Frazier, later in life

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Sarah Thomas Curwood, ca. 1940

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James Lawrence Curwood, ca. 1940 130



Robert and Katherine Flippin, 1939 144

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Acknowledgments This project began many years ago when I found a box of my grandparents’ letters from their courtship and early months of marriage. As a young history major, I was thrilled that my own family had participated in the historical events I studied in my courses. Since then, I have been at work on this project in one way or another. Because Stormy Weather has been a book long in the making, countless supporters have made it possible. I mention here some of those colleagues, friends, and family who have helped it come into being. Researching a world as private as that of marriage has been a challenge, but it has been eased by the wonderful sta∏ of several archives. The people working at the Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center at Howard University are uniformly helpful and friendly; I look forward to every visit. The e∏orts of the sta∏ — ​Dr. Ida Jones, Joellen El-­Bashir, Lela Sewell-­Ward, and Donna Wells — ​were invaluable to my work. I also found help at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; from Kathy Kraft and Kathy Jacobs at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University; from Beth Howse at the Fisk University Library; from Nancy Miller at the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Record Center; and at the Auburn Avenue Research Library, Atlanta-­Fulton Public Library System. At the beginning stages of this project, I was mentored by Shan Holt at Bryn Mawr College and Emma Lapsansky at Haverford College. When I reached Princeton University, I had the great fortune to

have Nell Irvin Painter as an advisor. An excellent reader and editor, not to mention a gifted historian, Nell had tremendous faith in the importance of this study. Her rigorous interrogations of my analyses forced me to ask diΩcult questions and explore ideas that went beyond conventional historical wisdom. Christine Stansell, Deborah Gray White of Rutgers University–New Brunswick, and social psychologist Deborah Prentice made important interventions that greatly improved the project. Other faculty who provided feedback or encouragement include Dirk Hartog, Kevin Kruse, Liz Lunbeck, Colin Palmer, and Deborah Nord. Helpful colleagues included Malinda Lindquist and Belinda Gonzalez, Meri Clark, Karen Caplan, Jolie Dyl, Crystal Feimster, Dani Botsman, Victoria Klein, Cheryl Hicks, Chad Williams, Anore Horton, Felicia Kornbluh, Sam Roberts, and Keith Mayes. I am also grateful for the support I received from Princeton’s Graduate School, the Department of History, and the Program in African-­American Studies, all of which provided valuable research assistance for the project. As a new faculty member, I have been welcomed warmly into the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, where I have found unparalleled research resources and collegial support. Tracy D. Sharpley-­Whiting and Gilman Whiting took an interest in my work at an early date and have continued to be extremely supportive as I have completed it. Ti∏any Patterson, Victor Anderson, Rosanne Adderley, Karen Campbell, Dana Nelson, and Susan Kuyper have provided crucial advice at crucial times. Tara Williams’s administrative support has been similarly indispensable. Under­graduate research assistant Nattaly Perryman transcribed many of the Curwoods’ letters. I have also been helped generously by my colleagues in the Global Feminisms Collaborative, in the Department of History, and at the Culture and Creativity Workshop at the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. Early in my academic career I benefited from the hospitality of Alan Rogers and my colleagues in the Department of History at Boston College. Important research assistance has come from the Mellon Foundation and the Social Science Research Council in the form of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate/University Fellowship, from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s dissertation and Career 

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Enhancement Fellowships, from the Ford Foundation’s Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship, and from Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science. I have gained not only financial assistance for research, which has been essential, but also access to a wide network of colleagues through all of these foundations. I cannot name all of my Ford and Mellon “family” members individually, but they have been a very important source of energy and feedback for this project. Sian Hunter of the University of North Carolina Press took an early interest in this project and has patiently waited for its completion, encouraging me the entire time. The anonymous reviewers for the University of North Carolina Press read and generously commented on this manuscript, thereby making it into a much better book. Other colleagues who have given their time to this project include Gina Hiatt and the Professors’ Writing Group, Davarian Baldwin, Ernie Chavez, Leslie Harris, Jonathan Holloway, Tera Hunter, Franklin Knight, Michele Mitchell, Clement Price, Christina Simmons, Judith Smith, and Ula Taylor. Helen Snively provided essential editorial assistance. Earlier versions of parts of Chapter 2 appeared in the Du Bois Review and AmeriQuests, and I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for those journals. Family and friends who have little involvement or interest in academia have sustained me nonetheless. I am grateful for support from Lainey Johnson, Diana and Adrian Huns, Catherine Archibald, Heather Gillette, Elizabeth Te Selle, Amy Wise, Annika Kramer, and Gail Seavey. Some of my family walk on four legs and have provided thousands of hours of their own kind of support: Zippy, Leo, Scout, Crescent, Hazel, and Taco the Wonder Horse. My aunt, Sarah E. Curwood, started me down this road when she gave me my grand­ mother’s letters almost ten years ago and has encouraged me ever since. My paternal grandmother, Sarah T. Curwood, who passed away in 1990, unwittingly provided the original inspiration for this project and modeled the life of a scholar and teacher. I also wish to thank ­Elnora Thomas Skelton, Susan and Charles Beckers, Ken Brown, Jennifer Stevens, and John Kellam. My brother James Alexander Curwood fixed my computer and read drafts. My parents, Wendy Zens and Steve Curwood, to whom this book is dedicated, have been my biggest supporters over more than three decades. They have modeled 

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invaluable skills of determination, curiosity, open-­mindedness, balance, and analysis and have helped me at every stage of this project. Finally, I am extremely lucky to have Carol Skricki as a life partner. She has walked alongside me through multiple stages of this project and has given bountifully of her support and encouragement. Thank you all.



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Introduction In July 1937, James and Sarah Curwood had an argument. The young African Americans had recently celebrated their first anniversary. But marital bliss seemed elusive just then. Sarah’s new volunteer job at Boston’s South End Settlement House, as a researcher on the labor concerns of African Americans, bothered James, a house servant on a summer estate one hour south of the city. For one thing, she represented herself as unmarried and lived with a group of other young researchers in the settlement house. And she was too busy to clean the rooms the couple rented in a boardinghouse, so that on his days o∏ he encountered a mess. Second, she met and associated with people he did not know, and he preferred that he knew every one of her acquaintances, especially the men. But perhaps most disturbing was Sarah’s ambition to get a permanent job at South End House and then return to school for an advanced degree. Instead, James wanted her to work as a domestic servant to pay o∏ the couple’s bills, including her education loans. When she had enrolled at Cornell University four years earlier, Sarah had likely hoped that such an education would provide her a ticket out of domestic service. She had developed an interest in economics and race relations and graduated a semester early with her Phi Beta Kappa key. The position with South End House’s Boston Summer Lab represented a good career move into the expanding world of African American professionalized race work. But James’s dissatisfaction grew. At first he bargained with her: if she followed his plan for her (presumably a solely domestic role — ​in his house or that of an

employer), he would be willing to put her through graduate school the following year. But he soon became frustrated. “When you came” to Boston, he wrote, “did you not forget all about your promise and began to live according to your own precepts[?] Instead of cleaning you made excuses; instead of conducting yourself as I forestated I wished, you did as you pleased and ridiculed my ideas as being old fashioned and out-­moded.” Lamenting that Sarah thought housework “beneath her,” James angrily declared, “If college can dehumanize a person as much as it has you, I pray God will guide me away from such a place forever!” Finally, he stated what he thought her problem was: “Although married you demand the same freedom of unmarried women.”1 This argument blew over, but the tension over marital roles in the Curwoods’ marriage never did. Sarah continued to pursue graduate work in education, and James was never comfortable with it. In addition, James’s violent behavior and substance abuse eventually culminated in his suicide and Sarah’s single parenting of their two children. In the mid-­1990s, I discovered the story of the Curwoods, my paternal grandparents, through several hundred letters that they had exchanged between 1935 and 1949, the bulk of which were written in 1935–37. Most of the letters document their courtship and early years of marriage, although there was a flurry of correspondence in the mid-­1940s when James was in the navy. They also corresponded with other family members. My aunt, Sarah E. Curwood, found the letters in the attic of the New Hampshire farmhouse that Sarah had purchased shortly after James’s death. My grandmother Sarah had died in 1990. As I began to read through the boxes of correspondence, I instantly became immersed in the world of the Curwoods. I immediately noticed that although they were both African American, in every other respect they came from two di∏erent worlds. My grandmother was raised in a middle-­class family in upstate New York, while my grandfather had grown up poor in Texas and then, at age fourteen, migrated north. Each had very di∏erent expectations when it came to the behavior of their spouse. Yet their shared enterprise showed me something else that captivated my historian’s instincts: 

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their story was simultaneously both deeply individual and inextricably connected with the historical context of their time and place. I found myself drawn to the drama of this young couple, laid bare in the letters that they likely intended for no one but the other to see. Their conflict and the intricacies of their intimacy make a compelling story of love, heartbreak, and human experience. But I was also aware of how much their personal story was situated in a matrix of race, class, gender, and sexuality, all within the context of a northern city in the 1930s. In this light, James’s anger that Sarah was spending time with people he did not know represents both the content of their marital conflict and the di∏erences between their ideas of appropriate gender roles. Sarah’s refusal to enter domestic service was a source of personal frustration for both spouses, but it was also the product of her awareness that African American women were exploited in such jobs and his understanding that domestic service was a job that most women took on when they needed money. The material and social conditions that surrounded the Curwoods pervaded the deepest, most personal aspects of their relationship. While this book contains the stories of a range of married couples and a multiplicity of opinions on marriage, my grandparents’ story has remained central to my inquiry. Their story appears in two later chapters of the book. What informs and grounds my entire analysis is my discovery that my own grandparents simultaneously confronted both their own struggles for marital intimacy and their status as upwardly mobile African Americans in a highly racist society. They showed me that, while marriage is an intimate relationship, it is also one to which each spouse brings his or her own social and cultural status and aspirations. This book shows that, for middle-­class or aspiring middle-­class African American couples, marital relationships were interwoven with both public and private pressures, which sometimes existed in tension with one another. African Americans could not escape the e∏ects of racial and gendered power relationships, but they were nonetheless in private relationships that reflected the individual humanity of the participants. Throughout the book, I demonstrate how the public-­private tension played out in many arenas, including racial identity, class identity, gender roles, the 

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emerging social sciences, northern and urban migration, economics, and sexuality during the period between World Wars I and II. between the wars, American society faced a period of cultural upheaval, one that African Americans could hardly escape. Within the crosscurrents of evolving social and cultural norms, black people such as my grandparents sought both to fit into larger society and to define themselves on their own terms. African Americans who were newly urban, northern, and midwestern were especially consumed with how, by living up to class and gender role ideals, they could improve the standing of the race. It was in marriage that these ideals converged, both in public and in private. But living up to class and gender ideals through marriage was virtually impossible, in no small part because African Americans were aiming at a moving target. Several factors kept that target moving. First, sexual and marital norms in America as a whole had changed rapidly during and after World War I. Although the nickname “The Roaring Twenties” is simplistic, it does reflect many realities: urbanization, new sexual freedoms, the rise of youth culture, equal rights, feminism, and artistic innovation. Books, films, and magazines debated the role of marriage in modern times. Starting in the 1890s but intensifying in the 1920s, spouses began to expect more emotional fulfillment from their marriages. This new emotional expectation extended to sexual fulfillment: sex was not merely for reproduction but should provide spouses with pleasure and intimacy. Also, the divisions between men’s and women’s marital roles became less stark. In the twentieth century, women continued to expand their status in political and economic arenas.2 Some African Americans, like some white Americans, disapproved of these new trends. Given the ideals of restrained sexuality that had animated many black political voices at the turn of the century, African Americans sometimes saw the experiments with new gender and sexual roles as dangerous to the race’s public relations. As the interwar period continued, economic depression further destabilized the gender lines that black and white Americans alike had worked so hard to draw. The Great Depression was a period of crisis and flux in the economy as well as in gender relations. Fighting 

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back, some black men began to theorize that women and wives ought to prioritize work inside the home and refrain from participation in paid work or public culture. If men’s rightful place was at the head of the household, then women needed to take note of the destructive force that their economic and political autonomy had on the “natural” gendered state of things. In the 1930s, that social groundwork of less rigid gender roles laid in the 1910s and 1920s met the economic reality of male unemployment and underemployment. Although ideals had not always matched reality in the 1920s, the disparity became even more glaring in the 1930s. Second, African Americans migrated to cities like New York and Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s. As they developed new, more assertive political and cultural ideas, they coined a term for themselves: New Negroes. New Negroes emerged out of the energy of this Great Migration, the name often given to the movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban South and North. New migrants brought new perspectives and ideas. In particular, New York’s Harlem was a center of innovation and activity. In the 1910s and 1920s, New Negroes creatively blended the old and the new, the rural and the urban.3 New geographic mobility occurred alongside new modes of class mobility. Although older ideals of uplifting the race through bourgeois respectability began to fade, becoming a refined member of the middle class was still a worthy goal. “Middle class,” in the case of early-­twentieth-­century African Americans, was a subjective status linked to cultural identity at least as much as it was to objective indicators of economic status. For a race that experienced pervasive economic discrimination, noneconomic elements were part of class identity. Furthermore, the middle class was evolving. Membership in the middle class had been, before the Great Migration, based on elite ancestry and adherence to Victorian cultural norms. Especially after World War I, income, wealth, and occupation provided middle-­class status, and membership in one of the Old Families was far less important. Many of these new professionals and entrepreneurs found a market niche serving segregated communities. Still, both old and new versions of the black middle class shared a basic element: distinguishing themselves from the black work

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ing class and poor.4 New middle-­class black people still, like their older counterparts, sought to counteract perennial stereotypes that equated blackness with hypersexuality. Their definition of middle class combined both economic status and sexual behavior. As a result, ideal masculinity and feminine behavior became very important to upwardly mobile New Negroes. Using the outlets available to them in print, they glorified self-­suΩcient or even militant masculinity and supportive, soft femininity. The reward for adhering to combined gender and class standards of decorum was earning the status of being a credit to one’s race. Third and finally, black people themselves were not of one mind in defining an ideal marriage. Many were concerned about the past and continuing racial assumptions that their own people held about marriage and black sexual deviance. Others urged that the old marriage ideals be modernized, by empowering either black men or black women or by granting more importance to romantic love and sexuality. although, or perhaps because, my family participated in creating a New Negro marriage, I find the story of interwar African American marriages compelling for its own sake. Gender roles and racial thinking underwent tremendous change and scrutiny in the interwar period. How to choose a marriage partner, how to behave as a husband or a wife, and how to use marriage as a supportive institution for the New Negro project — ​these were consuming issues for the people who walk these pages. The fact that both public and private factors were in play when New Negroes attempted to resolve these matters meant that sometimes reality did not match ideals. This discontinuity required actual couples to adapt, part, or sometimes create their own marital ideals. Most used a combination of these strategies to negotiate the intersection of history and subjectivity. However, because African American marriages were often complex and contradictory,5 they have attracted little scholarly attention, especially during the period between 1925 and 1960. The 1960s saw the beginning of an explosion of scholarship on black families, much of it in response to a perceived failure of those families. The scholars in the 1960s and later largely ignored marriages and families during 

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the previous thirty years; instead, with few exceptions they looked back to slavery as the repository for all answers about the current state of black families. The most famous of these scholars was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose The Negro Family: The Case for National Action inspired critical scholarship. But many of Moynihan’s critics made the racial past the central factor in the arrangement of black married people’s lives, an oversimplified approach that reflected the politics and social theory of the time. The interior experiences of those marriages have received little attention. Studying marriage from the inside out, as this book does, is the practice of beginning with the subjectivities of marriage’s participants and placing those historical actors within the contexts that shaped their marital relationships. It is indispensable because it helps us to overcome the tunnel vision that often a∏ects the history of African Americans. The literary theorist Claudia Tate developed the term “racial protocol” for the assumption that African Americans’ experiences can be reduced to racial politics and that individual subjectivity carries little importance.6 As a result of the racial protocol, much writing about African Americans focuses entirely on racial struggle and not on the human experiences that would move the analysis beyond a two-­dimensional representation of African Americans’ lives. African Americans themselves have often avoided violating the racial protocol, which has contributed to the lack of information about the history of their private lives. Dissembling, or hiding private feelings from public view, has been documented as a key survival strategy for people who have historically been denied their own private space.7 Unfortunately, hiding interior lives from public view has often led to the belief that black people lack interior lives altogether. And, as Ti∏any Patterson explains, a history of private life is important because it gives us glimpses of “the rules and norms that governed a community.”8 This book corrects that situation. I probe the inner lives of African Americans during this period and highlight the heterogeneity of those lives. New Negro marriages were created at the intersection of human individuality and the pressures of racism. At the moment of intense self-­consciousness during the New Negro era, husbands and wives had to get along on a daily basis. Private life involved all the ele

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ments that make up an intimate relationship, among them conflict, a∏ection, and negotiation. African American middle-­class married couples lived just like other middle-­class married couples of any race: they tried to make ends meet, to raise children, to preserve a∏ective bonds, and to appear respectable. They shared with all couples the tasks of acting out appropriate gender roles and satisfactorily balancing the power in the relationship. At times, being black seemed to have little to do with these day-­to-­day interactions. Yet, race and racism seeped into the lives of these couples in ways that were unexpected and not always consistent from one couple to another. For the black American couples I study here, marriage included dealing with racism from individuals and institutions, dealing with intraracial di∏erences in skin color, finding financial support for a respectable lifestyle, and negotiating over sexuality within the context of long­standing stereotypes of black men and women.9 These New Negro marriages are a powerfully fertile laboratory in which to assess the interactions of multiple identities with private life. In designing a modern marriage for a new era, New Negroes did not merely expect their marriages to reflect the new times; they expected them to help change occur. New Negro men fully expected New Negro women to play a supportive role as they sought to rehabilitate black manhood. New Negro women, as educated black women in previous generations had, wanted marriages that would allow them to fulfill their own capacities as full participants in New Negro life. For all these reasons, the marriages became both a mirror of the times and a generator of change. Stormy Weather is the title of both a song, most notably sung soulfully by Ethel Waters in 1933, and a film of ten years later. Ted Koeh­ ler, the song’s lyricist, also cowrote the film’s screenplay. This film, starring Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, is set in the years between 1918 and 1943 and articulates and encapsulates the gendered anxieties and romantic ideals of the interwar period. In the film, which was basically a vehicle for virtuoso singing and dancing and admittedly thin on plot, Horne and Robinson play Selena Rogers and Bill Williamson, respectively. Selena and Bill meet the evening after Jim Europe’s band parades through Harlem in 1918; Bill had served with Selena’s brother, who was killed in World War I. Bill and Selena 

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instantly fall in love, but Bill is headed out of town to work. The two eventually have a chance meeting in Memphis, and Selena convinces the producer of her current show to give Bill a tiny part. However, Bill manages to steal the show one night and is launched into fame and fortune as a performer. Selena and Bill continue to court as they ride a wave of success. Although Bill wants to marry Selena, he assumes that she will give up her show business career and allow him to support her and their children. She refuses Bill’s o∏er of marriage and insists that she keep her career. The two remain apart until Cab Calloway, appearing as himself, invites Bill to a special benefit show to entertain departing World War II troops. There, he witnesses Selena’s heartfelt performance of the song Stormy Weather. Backstage, the two meet for the first time in years, and Selena expresses her wish to have children (and, by implication, leave her career). Their happy reunion extends to the stage, where they perform together, and the film ends with a grand finale of singing and dancing that includes Calloway, Katherine Dunham, and the Nicholas Brothers. Stormy Weather, the film, brackets and interprets the interwar decades as a time when women briefly stepped out of their appropriate roles and hints that the World War II era would once more contain women in the home and domestic, private roles. Its message is that love would conquer all, as long as the lovers followed appropriate racial and gender protocols. most of the surviving voices of New Negroes that are accessible today came from middle-­class or upwardly mobile African Americans, through literature, political writing, art, or preserved personal papers. These relatively elite New Negroes often claimed to represent all African Americans. I focus on them for several reasons. The first is crucial for a historical undertaking: little sustained source material is available on poor and working-­class couples. The best tool for looking into the interiors of African American marriages is correspondence and diaries, because there couples left records of the intimate workings of their marriages. Poorer couples, unfortunately, have left only fragmentary letters, and few if any diaries or legal documents, to archives. The public engagement and high degree of literacy of the 

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largely middle-­class couples in this study led them to contribute their papers to archives and/or to preserve them carefully. But other, more interesting factors led me to focus on middle-­class black people. Middle-­class, dual-­career black marriages presented a new set of challenges to older gender conventions. The ideas that members of the middle class had about marriage exerted considerable influence on thoughts about black marriage in general, because the middle class had access to public media. In reading their texts, we see that many were consumed with defining the parameters of middle-­class life. For all these reasons, the middle class also serves as a useful case study in self-­definition through gender, sexuality, class, and race. this book has two main parts. Chapters 1 through 3 focus on New Negro ideals of marriage, while Chapters 4 and 5 concentrate on lived experience, taking examples from the married lives of the Curwoods and other couples. Chapter 1 examines African American marriages at the turn of the twentieth century and then explains how marital ideals changed after World War I. The politics of racial uplift in the post-­Reconstruction period had dictated that African Americans hide their sexuality. Marriages served political and social purposes, not sexual ones. After World War I, American culture at large entertained more frank discussions of sexuality and changing gender roles, and African Americans joined the conversation. The proliferation of popular culture created by African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s serves as a barometer of changing attitudes toward marriage relationships. Both mainstream and black popular culture moved toward depicting more sexuality and expanded roles for women. However, older uplift and middle-­class ideals did not disappear; rather, they were blended with newer interwar trends. Chapter 2 describes the ideal New Negro husband. After World War II, many men sought to claim increasing authority over their households. As the three theorists in this chapter — ​the Messenger magazine, the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and the writer Jean Toomer — ​show, the sources of this authority could vary but the fact 

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of masculine power should not. Some argued that authority should come from financial earning power, but others saw the simple fact of maleness to be suΩcient grounds for husbands’ power, and that husbands merely had to claim it. Chapter 3 concerns the ideal New Negro wife. After explaining contemporary thinking about idealized New Negro wifehood, I make the argument that many women themselves had a contrasting, more encompassing view of their roles. While some New Negro men insisted that wives play a supporting role to husbands’ political and economic advancement, many New Negro women sought self­determination both inside and outside the home. The Great Depression brought more criticism and circumscription to wifehood, but women were also able to use the hardships of the 1930s as an opportunity to explore new models of personal autonomy and financial independence. The final two chapters explore the inside of marriages and analyze the interactions between cultural demands and the actual married lives of Sarah and James Curwood. Chapter 4 delves into the ways that class, work, and skin color a∏ected marital relationships — ​how couples arranged the economic and social capital of their households to maximize upward mobility — ​and then chronicles the struggles of the Curwoods to live up to ideal standards. Complex negotiations took place where everyday life and everyday marriages met ideals. Two areas in particular — ​intraracial skin color and class di∏erences, and how to financially manage a household — ​necessitated that the Curwoods incorporate their own circumstances into the peer­defined protocols of modern marriage. Chapter 5 delves most deeply into the interactions of public and private life and chronicles intimacy and sexuality. The featured couples, including the Curwoods, were part of a “love and trouble” tradition that incorporated both the bitter and the sweet into their emotional lives. While I seek throughout this book to introduce complexity and contradiction into the study of African Americans’ history, Chapter 5 in particular is a corrective to the racial protocol. Here, I give historical attention to human emotion and experience that are not exclusively defined by race and racism. 

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This book contributes to a new chapter in American history: the documentation and analysis of the inner lives of African Americans as multifaceted historical actors. I hope to initiate a historical dialogue on black people as individuals with rich, varied, and complex interior lives. This study of black marriages situates this most personal of human institutions in American and African American history.



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1

From Uplift t

o Marriages r g e o New N

d Activism y an in t i l a xu e S f o s es, 1890–194 Changing Ideal rriag 0 a M n a c i r e African Am

The Curwoods found themselves in a marital relationship during a time of changing ideals about marriages. Although they often saw themselves engaged in a personal drama of love and intimacy, their experience took place against a backdrop of contending prescriptions for how African Americans should mold their marriages for the good of the race. These ideals, as we shall see in later chapters, seeped into their daily lives together. They did so in the context of the changing importance of sexuality and race work (what turn-­of-­the-­century African Americans called civil rights) within an ideal African American marriage. Sexuality was becoming more central, while race work was no longer so crucial. At the turn of the twentieth century, for those of any race, African American public culture presented female chastity and morality as the cornerstones of a respectable middle-­class marriage. In addition, marital partners were often assumed to be teammates working to promote the progress of the race. Like white Americans, these

African Americans thought that a strong family life was the basis for Progress, though they added racial uplift to their list of Progress’s fruits. Between 1920 and World War II, however, this would change. African Americans’ views on marriage became a complex blend of older uplift mentalities and newer pragmatic standards. From a previous emphasis on respectability, African Americans developed a limited acceptance of sexuality separate from reproduction and began to believe that respectable women might earn wages. These changing attitudes toward marriage and, within it, sexuality were by no means uniform and undisputed. Although many Americans (including African Americans) became more comfortable talking about reproduction and sexuality, and even sexuality as separate from reproduction, many remained cautious about losing older standards. For African Americans, discussions of sexuality could be especially fraught because of old stereotypes of black hypersexuality. By World War II, then, the uplift function of marriage would combine with a complicated mixture of romance, more visible sexuality, evolving gender roles, and middle-­class racial strivings.1 In this chapter, I first examine African Americans’ middle-­class sexuality and gender ideals between Reconstruction and 1920. In this era, “chastity and continence” (code words for sex inside marriage and for procreation only) were seen as the prerequisites for both family health and racial health. I then look at husbands’ and wives’ collaboration on the advancement of the race. These uplift-­era marriages were a model to aspire to and, especially for women, could be an entry into race politics. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss shifts in marriage and sexuality ideals in U.S. culture after World War I, both in the larger culture and among African Americans specifically. Earlier imperatives of respectability and strictly defined gender roles came into uneasy coexistence with more tolerant, but more ambiguous, views of sexuality and husbands’ and wives’ roles. Finally, I describe marriage as it was represented in the literature and popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s. This discussion shows how the tug-­of­war between older and newer romantic and sexual ideals played out in the imaginations of African Americans who were the Curwoods’ contemporaries. 

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changing ideals of sexuality and activism

Uplift: Respectable Husbands and Wives Between 1890 and 1920, the nature of racial politics and the Victorian ideals of the dominant culture placed a priority on appropriate enactments of sexuality. Middle-­class African Americans at the turn of the century saw marriage as a signifier for sexual morality in a time when all black people were stereotyped as immoral. Michele Mitchell has vividly described the minefield of sexual behavior that African Americans negotiated. She argues that elite African Americans in the late nineteenth century sought to show how black women had overcome the sexual legacy of slavery. Slavery, they said, had encouraged black women’s depraved sexuality and distorted relationships between black males and females. Therefore, they demanded that women demonstrate a chastity that was beyond reproach and that men show appropriate manliness — ​which included heading a patriarchal household. Any expression of sexuality could raise fears that a black person would be seen as morally degenerate.2 African Americans responded by turning inward and focusing on domesticity: poor households plagued with illness and illegitimate children should be replaced with morally upright ones containing patriarchal gender relations and well-­raised o∏spring.3 Middle-­class blacks also believed that the marital relationship itself helped lift the race: it demonstrated moral values and provided the support that each spouse needed to perform di∏erent forms of race work. Couples made their marriages into a very public and explicit tool for dealing with racism. They agreed with those middle-­class white Americans who also believed that morality in family life was the cornerstone of morality in public life. The moral virtue of women in the home, where they created a comfortable sanctuary for their husbands and children, radiated outward into society. This womanly virtue was defined by personal behavior, particularly sexual chastity before marriage and fidelity afterward.4 As the idea of specialized gender roles emerged, so did the ideal of companionate marriage. Although this term will appear later in this chapter in its 1920s incarnation, at the turn of the century it referred to an ideal of mutual respect and friendship between spouses. The 

changing ideals of sexuality and activism

15

ideal of a love match, as opposed to an arranged marriage, had developed during the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century had added to this the notion of marriage and home as places of refuge from the world. Late in the nineteenth century, Victorian ideals of marriage emphasized romance and intimacy as more important than ever before. In the words of the historian Stephanie Coontz, “The Victorians were the first people in history to try to make marriage the pivotal experience in people’s lives and married love the principal focus of their emotions, obligations, and satisfactions.”5 Love became the most vital ingredient within marriage. One corollary of this turn-­of the-­century shift was that traditional gender hierarchies within the home began to soften.6 If mutual love and respect were the basis for successful marriage, then men could not logically be the undisputed authorities in married couples. Furthermore, changing ideas about gender roles contributed to the elevation of romantic love as a model for marriage. In the middle classes of all races, women’s political and economic activity in temperance and feminism combined with a general spirit of reform to promote this new ideal of shared love and respect in marriage. The 1890s marked an important shift in women’s economic history. Contemporary writers invented an archetype called the New Woman, which referred to a female individual who advocated woman su∏rage and sexual freedom (or the emasculation of men, according to detractors). Particularly among white women and the middle class, more married women entered waged labor during that decade because of falling numbers of births, the mechanization of household labor, more educational options, and the increase of feminized jobs, that is, jobs that were assumed to be for women only, in factories.7 Men played new roles, too. Men were no longer expected to drink, gamble, dally with other women, and remain emotionally aloof. Men no longer exercised unilateral, patriarchal control; now husbands and wives were, at least in theory, best friends. But this did not mean that companionate marriages were egalitarian. Men were expected to be the sole economic providers and women were expected to be emotional and physical caretakers, looking after the feeding and moral teaching of their families.8 Some associated women’s incursions into educational and professional realms with “a general failure of nerve 

16

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among young men” and prescribed physical improvement — ​bodybuilding, sports, and “the strenuous life”— ​to combat this. Tellingly, these e∏orts were not a reaction against women only; black people, immigrants, and labor activists all provoked anxiety that white Anglo­Saxon American men had lost control over their domestic a∏airs.9 White Americans had long attempted to control African American sexuality and families.10 This began during slavery, though meddling in the family a∏airs of black Americans did not stop after the Civil War. Indeed, the federal government’s role intensified in the latter half of the nineteenth century, amidst worries about the morality of newly freed slaves and their ability to assimilate. The state first took an active interest in African American families during Reconstruction, when the Freedman’s Bureau pushed freedpeople to marry. The belief that slavery had instilled a lack of modesty and a proliferation of licentiousness was widespread, and freedpeople were generally assumed to be ill-­equipped to regulate themselves morally without the stabilizing influence of masters. Northern volunteers — ​of both races — ​worked with the freedpeople and sought to regularize their morals. Meanwhile, the Freedman’s Bureau policy addressed the supposed moral primitiveness of freedpeople by exhorting and coercing them into legal marriage.11 One legal manifestation of the sexual stereotypes of black people, and black women especially, was American miscegenation laws. Passed in the seventeenth century, they were designed primarily to prohibit interracial marriage, not sex (although some states did prohibit both).12 This prohibition benefited white men, because the laws’ emphasis on marriage rather than sex allowed white men who were sexually active with African American women to avoid responsibilities for any children these unions produced. Had they coupled with white women, they would have been pressured to legally sanction their behavior through marriage. White men were under no pressure to do the same with black women; the onus of maintaining respectability fell entirely on the women. When African American women were victims of white men’s sexual predation, they fell into a no-­win situation in the context of contemporary culture’s emphasis on women’s virtue. Usually black women who had sexual contact with white men were assumed to be lascivious Jezebels.13 

changing ideals of sexuality and activism

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Northern Republicans’ language regarding marriage for African Americans reflected the legal and moral assumptions about marriage for all Americans. After the Civil War, white politicians, clergy, educators, and journalists became alarmed at an increasing number of divorces among people of all races. Missionaries in places such as India, Hawaii, and China juxtaposed their Christian values of monogamous marriage with the alleged heathen behavior — ​polygamy, child marriage, concubinage — ​of the nonwhite peoples of those countries. Immigrants became a prime target for marital education, and the ideal immigrant was a male head of household who contributed to society by supporting his wife and children. By the turn of the century, marrying (and not divorcing) was increasingly seen as a moral credential, evidence of civilization, and a marker of respectability.14 Middle-­class African Americans crafted their own response to these gendered ideals about marriages and families and the ongoing sexual victimization of black women.15 They developed a project of racial uplift designed to illustrate that African Americans were in no way inferior, and that they were capable of assimilating the ideals of white civilization and Western Progress. These elites argued that the existence of class stratification was evidence that African Americans were progressing as a race. To both men and women, status and respect seemed fundamentally linked to the moral superiority that marriage granted, and marriage in a very real sense provided financial security and emotional support. Therefore, for middle-­class African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, marriage, in addition to its emotional functions, illustrated the fact that black people could be sexually moral and supported spouses engaged in accomplishing the work of uplift.16 african americans also had their own visions of the “new” gender ideals. For African Americans, New Womanhood was not so new, in the sense that married black women had long worked for wages and middle-­class women had long undertaken public work. In addition, “New Negro Women,” as Margaret Murray Washington (Mrs. Booker T. Washington) presciently called them in 1895, were actually somewhat suspicious of New Women. Like New Women, New Negro Women enacted poised, bourgeois womanhood. Unlike New Women, 

18

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who placed their own sexual and career self-­interests over others’, New Negro Women were invested in uplifting the race as a whole. Central to their work was nurturing refinement and respectability in the home.17 The National Association of Colored Women (nacw) was founded in 1895 at a conference called in response to a recent newspaper attack on black women’s morality and character. A major priority of the nacw was to engage in public relations concerning African American women’s sexualities.18 Members of the Women’s Convention, the auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention formed in 1900, also sought to portray black women as nonsexual. They agreed to exhibit “temperance, cleanliness of person and property, thrift, polite manners, and sexual purity.” Women were charged with taking care of their homes and maintaining their cleanliness and discipline.19 Several varieties of ideological glue held these women’s organizations together: they cast themselves as sexually moral, they attempted to teach their version of sexual morality to nonelite African American women, and they believed that women and men were not the same but had equally important complementary roles in society. In an era when black men were disenfranchised, black women sometimes saw themselves as responsible for the advances of the race, through their hard work, defense of their families, and commitment to education.20 The morally upright behavior of the race’s high-­achieving members would show just how wrong racist and sexist accusations of promiscuity and criminality were. It was not only whites who made such accusations; many black men, too, had absorbed the stereotypes.21 Meanwhile, Black Best Men performed upstanding black masculinity. The Best Man was an archetype invented by southern white supremacists during Reconstruction as they sought to bar black men from voting. African Americans seized on this small window of political power and sought to foster the development of Black Best Men. A Black Best Man, in the words of Glenda Gilmore, “pursued higher education, married a pious woman, and fathered accomplished children. He participated in religious activities, embraced prohibition, and extended benevolence to the less fortunate. He could collaborate on social issues across racial lines, as women of the wctu [Woman’s Christian Temperance Union] did. He could hold a modest number 

changing ideals of sexuality and activism

19

of political oΩces.”22 Central to this ideal of racial uplift through individual behavior and striving to attain middle-­class status was the criterion of a patriarchal family. At the heart of uplift ideology was the e∏ort to dispel the images of male degeneracy and shiftlessness that black stereotypes, notably minstrelsy, promoted. Calls for citizenship were often couched in the language of “manhood rights,” an indicator that African Americans believed that their progress as a race was connected to the ability of black men to live up to gender ideals.23 However, both the New Negro Woman and the Black Best Man ideals only indirectly addressed white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and racial violence. Seeking to avoid hostility by preparing for an evaluative white gaze, these ideals were inadequate to remedy racism. Margaret Murray Washington and others hoped in vain that cleaning up poor black people’s homes would present a better image of the race. Ultimately such a strategy did not abolish white supremacy, but idealizing the home did provide some sense of security to African Americans who faced extreme racial violence, powerlessness, and humiliation.24 Uplift Ideals: Chastity, Continence, and Marital Bliss

Given this history, then, by the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans were seeking to refute racist stereotypes through their own behavior and by instructing the less-­privileged African Americans suspected of loose behavior. Black women embarked on their own project of showing moral behavior within their families. This included demonstrating that they possessed unimpeachable sexual morals.25 African American clubwomen believed that chaste and moral behaviors were worthy investments that would pay lavish dividends. They argued that personal happiness was the hard-­earned reward of married life. The nacw promoted this view of respectable womanhood in its oΩcial periodical, National Association Notes. This newsletter, edited by Margaret Murray Washington, stressed female gentility and chastity and monogamous marriage. For example, the happy outcome of such behavior was predicted in a 1917 article called “The Home,” by M. S. Pearson. Pearson made home life sound like heaven on earth. Home was, she waxed poetically, “where the heart’s dear ones are. 

20

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Where it loves to linger and repose. Where associations cluster sweet with beautiful memories, where the ills and sorrows of life are borne by mutual e∏ort, and its pleasures are equally divided. But no picture of home life is ever complete without the ‘one woman and the one man.’ ” To her, people naturally had a “soul mate” and marriage was life’s most “sacred bond.” Those who found love were enjoying not only the pleasure in the relationship but the possibility of making a home and family together, which she called “the pivot of all social and national life.” In careful language, she also alluded to sexual pleasure. She charged wives with bringing their husbands “back to courtship’s sweet and dreamy thresholds of unseen temples where he loses the confusing perplexities of the day and finds mental diversion and rest.” Thus husbands and children will walk the right path because wives, much as Ulysses played sweet songs to distract his sailors from the seducing songs of the Sirens, “will give out that sweeter music of the heart, played on the harp of love, by the fingers of faith, which will hold them stronger than hoops of steel.”26 The clubwomen used their status as moral, married women as a key marker of morality and respectability. Through their own roles as loyal wives, they could show that African Americans lived in proper marriages and that the clubs’ activities included working on those who did not. They made a key assumption: that marital status in itself signaled respectability. Thus, black women’s roles in the home became an embodiment of service to the race. The importance ascribed to marriage as a moral credential also appeared in such publications as courtship and marriage manuals. Marriage became the goal itself, not simply the means to a rightly lived life. Golden Thoughts on Chastity and Procreation Including Heredity, Prenatal Influences, Etc., Etc., intended for black audiences, was first printed in 1903 and was popular enough to be reprinted several times until at least 1914. The authors, Professor and Mrs. John W. Gibson, cautioned young women on the dangers of sexuality and the necessity of marriage if they were to develop as upstanding members of society. The male counterpart to this worthy female was a man who would do any sort of work, even a menial job, to support his beloved wife, reinforcing the idea that marriage signified a woman’s chastity 

changing ideals of sexuality and activism

21

and a man’s healthy responsibility. The authors clearly meant to imply that such behavior would lead to success of the race. In the foreword, Atlanta physician and columnist Henry R. Butler predicted the coming of a new aristocracy — ​a people powerful in strength, morals, culture, wealth, and refinement — ​among African Americans. He pointed to the illustrations throughout the book depicting happy, well-­dressed men, women, couples, and children as the essence of the message.27 The book’s chapters were arranged in order, from childhood to marriage to parenthood. Each step along the way was intended to serve as proper preparation for a moral married life. Girls were counseled to avoid slang and cultivate their beauty. As young women, they were cautioned that some men would attempt to take sexual advantage of them and that their own modesty and sexual chastity would protect them. Kisses and other signs of a∏ection, however innocent, should be avoided because they could lead to forbidden premarital sex. Boys were exhorted to avoid masturbation and promiscuity and to refrain from marrying if they were alcoholic, a∆icted with a sexually transmitted disease, or unable to support a wife and children.28 The authors of the book, and proponents of racial uplift in general, hoped that such immaculate private conduct would lead to an improvement in the public perceptions of African Americans. In hindsight, we can see that white supremacists did not respond at all to these attempts at acceptance. However, behaving in moral and mannerly ways was a point of pride for many elite African Americans that probably enhanced their racial self-­esteem. And maintaining impeccable personal conduct was not their only strategy. Race work was an important component as well. The Uses of Marital Relationships in Race Work

At the turn of the century, many middle-­class couples used their marriages as working relationships for doing service in communities, with the goals of advancing the race and bringing manners and morals to poorer blacks. Both black men and women used their marital status and their spouses for support in their race work. They were not equals, however; their roles usually followed a male-­female hierarchy. One aspect of this inequality was a political double standard. If African American women hoped to perform race work in public, 

22

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they stood the best chance of success if they were married. Single women carried severe handicaps in public life, for they were assumed to be sexually loose if they appeared in public without a man’s protection. The respectability and credibility that marriage bestowed allowed several women, whom I describe below, to push forward their agendas of racial improvement. African American women activists tended to be married or widowed far more commonly than their white women counterparts. Eighty-­five percent of a sample of black women welfare activists in the first half of the twentieth century were married (only 34 percent, however, had children). Half of these were married to well-­known black men. Most had been politically active before marrying and had established their own credentials and reputations.29 The partnerships that these working couples formed sometimes corresponded to the patriarchal hierarchy of men and women in marriages and of heterosexual (but sex-­segregated) political and social organizations. When she was a member of a couple involved in race work together, a woman often served as the auxiliary to her husband or as his second in command, as the stories of Frances Watkins Harper’s fictional heroine Iola Leroy, Margaret Murray Washington, and Lugenia Burns (Mrs. John) Hope show. Still, these examples show that middle-­class black wives could use the very fact of their marital status to press their cases in political action. Indeed, at times they needed their marital status to ensure that white reformers would hear their concerns. They took on issues such as neighborhood cleanups, elimination of vice, public health, children’s welfare, and improvement of home life. These issues brought them into contact with white women, who were concerned about similar problems (though of course they carried their own sets of expectations) and initiated interracial cooperation, a key feature of racial advancement.30 Frances Watkins Harper (1825–1911) was a famous and respected political activist, poet, and orator. As a member of Baltimore’s free black community, she rejected a life of leisure for one of activism for black and woman su∏rage. After receiving an impressive education, the young Frances Watkins toured the Northeast, giving abolitionist speeches, assisting on the Underground Railroad, and publishing many poems and political articles. She was adamant that an unmar

changing ideals of sexuality and activism

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ried woman could be an invaluable asset to society; in her 1859 short story “The Two O∏ers,” she traced the lives of two cousins, only one of whom married. The married cousin wed in haste to a wealthy, seemingly loving man whose permissive upbringing eventually led him to drink and gambling. The unmarried cousin, although she was an “old maid,” was a writer and activist who carried out a “high and holy” mission to improve the lives of all around her.31 Clearly, Frances Watkins was convinced that marriage was not necessary for a woman’s fulfilled and dignified existence. Nevertheless, in 1860 she did marry Fenton Harper from Cincinnati and lived for a time as his wife on a farm that she had helped him purchase. She bore him a daughter and helped raise his three children from a previous marriage, but when Fenton died four years later, Frances Harper moved back into a heavy schedule of writing and political appearances.32 In 1895, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s novel Iola Leroy explored the theme of personal fulfillment in marriage running parallel to the goal of race advancement. Iola, the light-­skinned African American protagonist, had a strong desire to help members of her own race, a trait that she and Harper shared. The novel romanticizes the cooperative work that a married couple could do. Harper’s own marriage, however, coincided with the period in her life when she was least politically active. Still, Harper wrote about what her audience at the turn of the century would grasp: the ideal of romantic love coupled with racial uplift. Iola fell in love with her fiancé not merely as a result of physical attraction but also because she saw mirrored in him her own desire to help the former slaves. His professional and middle-­class status as a doctor would both invest the couple with moral authority to be leaders of their community and enable them to set up a practice where they would come into contact with poor and working-­class patients. The narrative contains elements that situate Iola in her society. First, she is at the top of the color hierarchy because of her light skin. In the narrative, Iola discovers only upon her white father’s death that her mother is black and a slave and that she herself is also a slave. Having been raised as white, and appearing to be a white woman, she attracts the romantic attentions of a white doctor in the Civil War hospital where she works as a nurse. Iola’s status as a nurse also labels 

24

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her as a civic-­minded woman who values a career. Eventually the doctor proposes, but Iola refuses because he wants her to pass as white as his wife. This plot device illustrates a third element, showing that Iola cast her lot in solidarity with African Americans. Toward the end of the novel, however, Iola meets a young light­skinned black physician who falls in love with her and proposes marriage. This is the final element in Iola’s identity; her marriage to a black professional situates her firmly in the middle class. Iola enthusiastically accepts the black doctor’s proposal at the end of the novel. She realizes that life with him would enable her to pursue a higher calling in conjunction with romantic bliss: “But as the waves leap up to the strand, so her soul went out to Dr. Latimer. Between their lives there were no impeding barriers, no inclination impelling one way and duty another. Kindred hopes and tastes had knit their hearts; grand and noble purposes were lighting up their lives; and they esteemed it a blessed privilege to stand on the threshold of a new era and labor for those who had passed from the old oligarchy of slavery into the new commonwealth of freedom.”33 Iola envisions her happiness in marriage as dependent on the contribution that she and her husband could make to the race, together. Harper wrote fulfillment of Iola’s love of her race into the novel’s happy ending, linking romantic love to race work and implying that an ideal African American marriage was one that improved the prospects of the race as a whole. Real-­life couples pursued race work in tandem, too. Booker T. Washington and Margaret Murray Washington ran the Tuskegee Institute together from 1890 to 1915, she as lady principal and he as principal. His career is well documented. He encouraged self-­help and industrial training at Tuskegee, he negotiated with white philanthropists for funds, and he even participated in a behind-­the-­scenes legal e∏ort against segregation.34 Her accomplishments are less well known. She was twice president of the nacw, organized the Tuskegee Woman’s Club for wives of faculty and other women associated with the school, and lobbied the state of Alabama to provide social services for poor and rural black residents. Claiming moral authority as Mrs. Booker T. Washington (both as a married woman and as an extension of the famous educator), she was able to gain a hearing in 

changing ideals of sexuality and activism

25

interracial groups in the South and to demand fair treatment of herself and other members of the nacw from white southerners. In Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington functioned like a “Victorian father” both at home and on campus. Margaret Washington helped her husband run the school by reporting faculty and student misdeeds. After the Washingtons married in 1892, her role as lady principal paralleled her role of wife: she took care of sta∏ and students on a day-­to-­day basis and told her husband of problems and goings-­on demanding his attention. Once married, she became head of women’s industries. Distinguished visitors to the campus, such as Julia Ward Howe, were usually entertained in the Washington residence, where Mr. Washington would receive guests and Mrs. Washington would see to their accommodations.35 Within the confines of her patriarchal marriage, Margaret Washington made use of her Fisk education and her status as a woman married to a famous public figure. She seemed to fully embrace her role as helpmate. Still, her activities as a clubwoman sometimes diverged from the public stance of her husband. She sometimes raised civil rights issues where he did not. At the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, while he was delivering his famous conciliatory speech, she served as the vice president of the National Women’s Colored Congress, which was attempting to forestall the racial segregation of railroads. However, Margaret Washington and southern nacw members in general were more conservative regarding race and gender issues than northern members. At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, she publicly denounced the segregation of African Americans in local restaurants and canceled a scheduled nacw session in one of the exhibition’s halls in protest. But, when the press covered the story, she denied that she had initiated the action, perhaps on her husband’s instructions.36 She also established a community outreach program through Tuskegee that specifically addressed women’s education. Her political and community activities arose from her belief that, even as she supported her husband’s policies, she had to balance her own interests in women’s rights with her husband’s political goals. These examples show that their marriage enabled both spouses to accomplish what they could not have done alone. But Margaret Washington’s independence had its limits. Her role as a wife was 

26

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decidedly primary; that as an activist, secondary. Booker T. Washington was the main attraction, the principal of the school and the head­lining speaker. He always went over his speeches, including his famous Atlanta Exposition speech, with his wife. She filled a vital administrative position under her husband, helped establish Tuskegee satellites such as the Night School, and expanded his reach by addressing women audiences. Furthermore, Margaret Washington was important to her husband because, like many other wives of self­made men, she was from a more privileged background. She thus brought sophistication and polish to the Washington household, giving it more social status than he could have garnered alone.37 Another couple, John and Lugenia Burns Hope, also epitomized an ideal of black married couples’ cooperation in liberation work. John Hope was a prominent educator and race leader in Atlanta who became the first black president of both Morehouse College and Atlanta University.38 Lugenia was the product of a black middle-­class family in Chicago (one antedating the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s). Having moved to Chicago in the 1880s, the Burns family joined the elite group of black Chicagoans who enjoyed good schooling and professional opportunities. She attended the Chicago Art Institute, worked as a bookkeeper and dressmaker, served as the secretary of a charity organization called the King’s Daughters, and was an assistant to the director of another charity organization that gave lunches to workers in the Loop district. She met John Hope, then a theology student at Brown University, at a party associated with the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The two courted until 1897, when they married and moved to the South. Had Lugenia remained in Chicago, she might have married a wealthy man and enjoyed prominence in social circles there. Perhaps what had attracted her to the decidedly nonwealthy Hope was the opportunity to move between a middle-­class, intellectual world and the surrounding communities, or her recognition that he was a rising star in African American politics and education. Although John Hope came from modest roots, he was well on his way to joining the growing black middle class of educators and political leaders.39 John Hope’s institutional aΩliations aided Lugenia, whose career in community service expanded after their marriage. She followed 

changing ideals of sexuality and activism

27

John to Tennessee and later to Atlanta, where she and their children lived on the campuses where John was a faculty member. In Atlanta, John became the first African American president of Atlanta Baptist College and, later, president of Atlanta University, and Lugenia’s ambitions for a career in community service burgeoned. As the president’s wife, she had access to white and black city and national leaders who could deliver recognition and resources to her community service e∏orts. Urged by Atlanta University professor W. E. B. Du Bois, she attended a conference, the Welfare of the Negro Child, in 1899. Afterward, she organized wives of faculty and other neighborhood women into community service organizations, opening kindergartens and community centers. These groups eventually evolved into formal organizations, most notably the Neighborhood Union, which did settlement work on the West Side of Atlanta starting in 1908. Lugenia and her colleagues performed the work of many Progressive Era women of all races, focusing on children’s education and welfare and initiating physical and moral neighborhood cleanups.40 Though Lugenia’s career was illustrious, she remained in a supporting role to her husband. She focused on the women’s spheres of home life, namely children’s health and neighborhood sanitation, while her husband managed the male world of academic institutions. Lugenia supported John’s career as a prominent educator. When guests arrived at the Atlanta Baptist campus, she was the hospitality manager at the president’s house. She also counseled John, helping him choose the trips that would best promote the aims of the schools in either fundraising or contacts. Furthermore, John Hope had expressed his desire that her career would be her marriage to him and her assistance and interest in his a∏airs. “How I dream of you all day long when I move from place to place,” he wrote, “yet when I return you will be so busy that you will have no time to listen to me.” Thus her public activities became an area that the couple had to negotiate.41 The Di∏iculties of Dissemblance: Problems in Uplift-­Era Marriages

It was rarely easy for couples to work out their di∏erences. The heightened emotional expectations of companionate marriages could be dashed easily. Even the Washington and Hope marriages did not live 

28

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up to this ideal. Booker T. Washington visited prostitutes and died of syphilis. And despite their erotic courtship, John Hope wanted to withhold sex and instead enjoy literature and conversation with Lugenia.42 But some couples’ marriages ended because of discord. In the late nineteenth century, courts had begun to recognize spousal abuse as valid grounds for divorce. Between 1867 and 1906, 218,520 wives were granted a divorce for that reason. The poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar and his wife, Alice Ruth Moore, separated in 1902.43 They had tried to stay together for the sake of acting out a performance of romance, when in reality Paul had brutally raped Alice soon after they were engaged. Alice married him anyway, assuming that love itself would produce a happy marriage and that a happy marriage would create a happy middle-­class family. While the Dunbars enjoyed high emotion and thrills of possibility during their courtship, in reality domestic violence, despair, and financial problems ended their relationship. The ideal of domestic happiness and the maintaining of appearances were enough to keep Alice by Paul’s side through many physical and sexual assaults until one finally caused her to leave him. Their charade worked; in the marriage manual Golden Thoughts, mentioned above, the Gordons portrayed Dunbar as a successful man because of his “purity, industry, and education.”44 In another prominent late-­nineteenth-­century family, T. McCants and Charlotte Stewart divorced after he deserted her and their three children in 1890. He abandoned them near his family in South Carolina, filed for divorce, and stayed in New York City, where he sat on the Brooklyn Board of Education for four years. In 1898 he moved to Hawaii, then Liberia, then London, and finally St. Thomas, where he died in 1923.45 The divorce deeply traumatized Charlotte; it must have done the same to the children, McCants, Carlotta, and Gilchrist. T. McCants had not given Charlotte any indication of his desire for a divorce; she found out that her husband was divorcing her through a friend who had mailed her a clipping about it from New York. Charlotte kept working as a teacher to make ends meet, but she told no one of the divorce in order to keep up appearances. T. McCants stopped paying for the house in which Charlotte and the children lived, and they were evicted. The legal process became complicated, 

changing ideals of sexuality and activism

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with delays and countersuits. Eventually the divorce became final, and both spouses remarried.46 Their son McCants was fourteen years old at the time of the messy divorce and carried emotional scars the rest of his life. When he was forty years old, he finally asked his mother about the divorce. She disclosed the details and gave him some advice: “Watch and never let even the least bit of evil hang around your house,” she warned. “If your wife has high ideals, help her to keep them. Never lower her standard of rights. Help her to live up to the highest ideals by your endeavor to reach them too. It is beautiful for a man to follow in the light of a pure woman’s love.”47 McCants took these words to heart, putting enormous pressure on himself to live up to his mother’s ­ideals and to avoid his father’s failure. He would aim for a middle-­class, respectable, and stable family life. Sometimes money troubles were at the root of marital discord. A respectable marriage, even if not especially romantic, could prove satisfying as long as the money held out, but it could founder in the absence of financial comfort. The sociologist Horace R. Cayton noticed as a child in Seattle in the early twentieth century that his parents were “married for mutual advantage rather than love.” Whenever he asked his mother if she really loved his father, she would reply that she respected him and that was suΩcient. They had struck a bargain: the marriage enabled his mother to leave the South, and his father was able to marry into a very fine family (in 1870 his father-­in-­law, Hiram Revels, had become the first African American U.S. senator). Both Caytons were prominent in the community: Susie Revels Cayton worked for racial uplift through cultural activities, and Horace Cayton Sr. was the most prominent political leader among African Americans in Seattle. Horace Cayton Sr. was a newspaper editor and publisher, and until he began to publish views that angered the city’s whites, the Caytons lived in a large home in the white section of the city with a Japanese servant. When Horace Sr. fell from favor, however, the family was forced to quit their comfortable home, and in young Horace’s eyes, the elder Cayton lost authority within the home. The Caytons discovered that their bargain had not included Susie Cayton’s utilizing her poor housekeeping skills while Horace Sr. worked as a janitor in an apart

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ment house they owned. Furthermore, the reality of racial discrimination meant that the Caytons’ status as educated and wealthy could not overcome their status as Negroes. “Mother had never forgotten that she was the daughter of a United States Senator,” Horace Cayton observes, “and that her family belonged to the aristocracy of free Negroes, nor had she ever completely accepted the fact that Dad was not only the son of a slave but had even been a slave himself.”48 As these examples show, in middle-­class social circles from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ideal of married life had been a middle-­class, respectable couple working together on personal and community goals to lift up the race. By the end of World War I, African Americans would still be concerned with the respectability of women and families. Marriages would still carry expectations that they would advance the race. But as the twentieth century progressed, men and women began to question the ideal of selflessness in marriage. The satisfaction of the individual — ​economically, emotionally, and sexually — ​became more important to Americans in general, including African Americans. Migration, new urban centers of black life, an explosion of new forms of popular culture, and changing gender roles all worked to reshape how African Americans thought about their marital relationships. New Negro Marriages: Blending Uplift with the Jazz Age Between the world wars, African Americans steeped in uplift ideology were joined by a new generation that had been shaped by the national and international events of the Great Migration, World War I, and the Great Depression. As James Curwood did, many African Americans migrated north and contributed to developing cultural and political movements, energized by participation in the Great War. Furthermore, nationwide discussions of reproduction and sexuality — ​on the topics of eugenics, sexually transmitted diseases (std s), and birth control — ​joined debates over the nature of marital relationships between men and women. As women, including Sarah Curwood, asserted their financial and political independence, they further destabilized older models of 

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marriage and family. Increasing numbers of married women began to work for wages, and women’s roles as political adjuncts to their husbands changed with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In addition, changes in the technologies and distribution of popular culture meant that large numbers of people were exposed to the ideas within commercial entertainment. For African Americans specifically, the 1920s brought changes that a∏ected notions of racial identity. African American demographics had begun to shift dramatically during the Great Migration in the 1910s, from the rural and urban South to the urban North. Migrants found new kinds of work in industrial centers, more freedom for political expression, and voting rights in northern cities. As Ira De A. Reid noticed in 1943, the energy of black activity had expanded in the preceding decades; in his words, black communities had moved from an attitude “of moral hesitancy to one of dynamic forthrightness” in the preceding decades. Reid rightly remarked that the arts and literature grew enormously between the two world wars, along with formal demands for justice from national courts and legislatures and on the international stage. “The Negro had learned how to run a war on the home front,” Reid remarked admiringly.49 Much of this new resolve arose as a response to the so-­called Red Summer of 1919. Persecution of returning black World War I soldiers and racist riots in twenty-­six cities, the largest in Chicago in 1919, underscored the fact that the cities of the North were not exempt from violence targeting African Americans.50 New Negroes were racially aware, militant, and fearless. They turned away from the accommodation and humiliation demanded by Jim Crow and racial discrimination and sought to demonstrate their humanity and agency to the world. Made up of a combination of northern African Americans (such as Jessie Fauset and Jean Toomer) and southern migrants (such as Charles S. Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston), New Negroes were modern black people. Their activity centered around Harlem in New York City, but the New Negroes’ impact was felt as far away as Paris, France, and Taos, New Mexico. With the advent of the New Negro, notions of racial politics changed. The increasing centrality and power of organized labor and black men’s civil rights organizations in African American politics tended to 

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overshadow black women’s political methods. Once black men could earn good wages, vote, and join unions, black women lost their relative public standing. Meanwhile, racial politics still adhered to the older gender roles: husband as leader, wife as helpmate. Furthermore, black Americans remained conscious of a usually hostile white gaze; many were anxious to present a respectable image of marriages and families to the public. Within the so-­called Progressive Era, or modernist period, Americans were obsessed with preserving and increasing the country’s economic and international influence. Many Americans turned to biological solutions to the problem of maintaining what they saw as the country’s genetic superiority. Daylanne English has called attention to U.S. culture in this period, especially in the 1920s, as being “saturated” with eugenics, the “science of breeding better human beings.”51 She has written that “in the 1910s and 1920s eugenics was so pervasive that it became nearly invisible as an ideology” and finds eugenic thought in the works of such authors as W. E. B. Du Bois and Nella Larsen. Furthermore, eugenic thought crossed racial lines and was used by proponents of African American racial uplift as well as white supremacists and anti-­immigration activists. Modernity and the Harlem Renaissance had inseparable ties to eugenics.52 Discussions of human reproduction and sexuality took place in other arenas, too. Within daily life, sexual pleasure within marriage became much more acceptable and even expected. Confined at first to a fairly small group of Greenwich Village bohemians in the first two decades of the twentieth century, more liberal attitudes toward sexuality eventually filtered out into mainstream culture. Chief among these were the idea that premarital sex was not altogether taboo (as Victorian-­era thought had it), that birth control would allow couples to enjoy nonprocreative sexuality, and that women were capable of (and entitled to) experiencing sexual pleasure.53 The 1910s had brought the development of a feminism that emphasized female self-­determination and a single moral standard for men and women. At the same time, the social hygiene movement, helped by the government’s desire to protect members of the armed forces in World War I, began a frank discussion of std s. The growing birth control movement sanctioned nonprocreative sex as a woman’s right. 

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The attention to contraception combined with the developing psychological discourse and led couples to expect a complete and satisfying relationship within marriage, based on mutually enjoyable sexual activity.54 Although sex outside marriage continued to be seen as inappropriate behavior, a few African Americans publicly condoned sexual pleasure within marriage. Black female novelists such as Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset began to introduce sexuality into the lives of their female characters.55 Instead of being hapless victims of racism and white patriarchy, their characters became more multidimensional and had desires and even faults of their own. Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright also questioned the mythology of marriage as the only path to self-­fulfillment and critiqued it as antithetical to personal freedom.56 On the other hand, the middle-­class African Americans who matured at the turn of the century still held sway over the younger generations. Author Margaret Walker Alexander came of age in the 1920s and 1930s. She learned about marriage from her grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier. Elvira had married a preacher and, in turn, encouraged Margaret’s mother to marry a Methodist minister. She taught Margaret that respectability was a chief benefit of marriage. Elvira, Margaret recalled, did not enjoy her own marriage but did gain social standing from it. In Margaret’s view, “The aspirations of the black people to the middle class, the bourgeois,” motivated Elvira to try to marry Margaret o∏ to a man of Elvira’s choosing.57 Stereotypes about African Americans’ overactive libidos had not disappeared in the aftermath of the Great War. In the 1920s climate of greater permissiveness toward sexual expression, however, the supposed greater sexuality of black people would become an object of fascination instead of outright censure. After seeing mid-­1920s Broadway musicals that featured salacious, exotic versions of life in Harlem, white seekers of titillating entertainment went uptown to find stimulating nightlife.58 Furthermore, African American men and women still encountered familiar tensions between protecting women’s sexual reputations and embracing more sexual expression. This was particularly the case when men sought to defend their own wives from sexual victimization. The leading artist of the Harlem 

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Renaissance, Aaron Douglas, during his first months in New York, counseled his wife-­to-­be, Alta Sawyer, on how best to protect herself in his absence. “I’ve thought a lot about that fellow insulting you,” he wrote in a 1925 letter, “and I have come to this conclusion. You must learn to say things that will cut. . . . I know it’s not very nice to be giving you such advice. But, in lieu of a man, a woman’s tongue is the best protection she has. Use it.”59 Men’s e∏orts to protect their women family members took many forms, some less successful than others. Elizabeth Cardozo Barker recalled that in the 1910s her father sent her and her sisters to convent school in Virginia, where the nuns discouraged careers. Instead, she was told that she should marry early to avoid “the sins of the world” or return to the convent as a nun. As a result of this advice, she says, she married when she was eighteen, in 1918; but the marriage failed, and she and her husband separated in 1925.60 Perhaps no issue signified shifts in thinking among all Americans better than sexuality without procreation. Birth control and std s, barely mentioned within polite society in the early years of the twentieth century, became more explicit concerns after World War I. American reformers, black and white, became concerned about std s around the time of the war. Usually the carrier of the disease was assumed to be male. Starting in 1899, states placed legal sanctions on marriage for persons infected with std s. Michigan was the first, and by the 1930s at least twenty-­six states and territories had attached criminal punishment to individuals who married while knowingly carrying syphilis or gonorrhea. Eight states mandated premarital medical tests for men. Eventually women were required to take tests, too.61 African American advocates of uplift could not ignore this crucial barometer of immorality. Married status helped prove respectability. If std s disqualified a prospective bride or groom, being married signified that a spouse had passed this test and was, in fact, sexually moral. Furthermore, medical and other advice columns in African American periodicals o∏ered strong words to those who might carry disease. Starting in 1914, Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, the medical columnist in the Chicago Defender during the 1910s and 1920s, wrote often about the dangers of std s. 

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Williams published one column that year titled “Damaged Goods, Marriage.” A twenty-­three-­year-­old man had written that a doctor had diagnosed him with syphilis three years earlier and that he had taken an herbal remedy that he bought at a drugstore. Though his sore had cleared up in three weeks, he still had “headaches, swollen glands in groins, about my elbows and my armpits. I have a little dizziness once in a while, and a throbbing in my head, but I am able to work right along. I am engaged to a young lady, and she is anxious for us to get married. Would it be safe to marry her? I don’t care much about children.” Williams answered in his column that the man was in the tertiary stage of syphilis and that “you have no right to get married. If you should marry this lady, who is so anxious, she in a very short time would be a widow or have you to support. . . . You are liable to give the same disease which you say you had three years ago to her, which would be a great crime.”62 Williams continued his warnings about spreading std s in subsequent columns, especially in the 1920s. In 1923, he lamented the fact that too many African Americans did not recognize the seriousness of syphilis and gonorrhea, which led to sterility, disfigurement, and death. “Often the infection would be the cause of so infecting the poor, innocent wife,” he warned, “that she has to be compelled to go to the hospital and undergo a serious abdominal operation — ​perhaps having her tubes and ovaries removed — ​thus rendered for life an unnatural person; with [the] organs removed she is neither a woman nor a man — ​and this is all due to the ignorance or unwillingness on the part of the diseased person to the matrimonial alliance, who did not have the courage to persist in the treatment until thoroughly cured or forever forego getting married.”63 In other words, he implied, a man who infected a woman with an std (he did not consider transmission from women to men) would rob her of not only her health but also her very femininity. Men needed to come clean about their std s. “If you have been so unfortunate to have contracted gonorrhea and have any reason to suspect it, although it may be a disgrace, it is not as great a disgrace as for you to hide it, court, contract marriage and marry some innocent girl or woman and thus infect her,” Williams wrote in another 1923 column. Not only was it imperative to protect wife and children, but “plain talk” was needed to combat 

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std s and thus to reduce the foundations for accusations that Africans Americans were members of a syphilitic race.64 In his cautions about men infecting their “innocent” wives, Williams echoed Margaret Sanger. She had advanced the same argument in her 1919 pamphlet What Every Girl Should Know. Blaming parents who assumed that their pubescent boys must gain sexual release as soon as they reached puberty, Sanger lamented the high incidence of std s that boys, thus encouraged, contracted from premarital sex. As a result, she said, “there is more venereal disease among innocent, virtuous wives, than among prostitutes.”65 Contracting an std from her husband devastated not only a woman’s health but also her biological womanhood itself. In the 1930s, a less exuberant, more sober approach to sexuality matched the more somber tone of life in the Great Depression.66 Still, more people, African Americans included, had come to see sexual expression as an integral part of marriage. Indeed, the 1930s marked the beginning of wider acceptance of birth control among black people. Censorship laws that had restricted the dissemination of birth control materials were now invalidated. Advocates of birth control who influenced policy attempted to integrate it into New Deal social welfare programs, and economic hardship made it more acceptable for middle-­class and upper-­class families.67 Margaret Sanger opened a Harlem branch of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau with money from the Rosenwald Fund. To gather the support of middle­class African Americans, she recruited prominent African Americans as well as white philanthropists to serve on the clinic’s advisory council. She succeeded: the Amsterdam News endorsed her clinic.68 Sanger also garnered the support of a powerful ally. W. E. B. Du Bois articulated his argument for the importance of birth control in a special 1932 issue of Sanger’s Birth Control Review. The low income of black men and women discouraged marriage, he said, encouraged separation and divorce, and led to a high proportion of unmarried adults. This, in turn, encouraged “naturally resultant lowering, in some cases, of sex standards” because men and women were not able to satisfy their sexual impulses within marriage. Birth control, however, could solve this problem. Black Americans must be educated about proper birth control “so that the young people can marry, have 

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companionship and natural health, and yet not have children until they are able to take care of them.” Contraception would allow young couples to be sexually active without fearing that the birth of a child would disrupt their financial stability. Du Bois called for changes in laws and in the attitude of churches in order to make this education possible.69 He endorsed birth control in moral terms: he emphasized that it would lead to increased morality and would not be used by unmarried sexual partners who wanted to be free of the responsibilities of marriage. This public endorsement by such an influential figure both signaled the growing acceptability of birth control and acknowledged that marital passion existed within black communities. In addition to the increased interwar discourse about sexuality, love and romance also received renewed, and sometimes anxious, attention. Since the 1890s, marriage had increasingly been seen as an emotional relationship, and by the 1920s, “marital happiness” was a central expectation of marriage partners. A “modern marriage” combined both the stability of domesticity and the excitement of sex and romance. Divorces (which occurred at the rate of 1.13 per 1,000 of the total U.S. population in 1916 and 1.54 per 1,000 in 1926)70 occurred not only when a partner did not live up to formal expectations, such as fidelity and breadwinning, but also because of more subtle, emotional issues.71 In addition, notions of a sharp divide between men and women, or husbands and wives, continued to dissolve. Fewer people believed in biological, innate di∏erences between men and women that would lead to their playing very di∏erent roles. Perhaps even more importantly, women were demanding more power over their own sexual and economic lives. Simultaneously, a heterosexual youth social culture had developed, and more young people engaged in premarital sex.72 Not surprisingly, some observers experienced increased anxiety about the future of marital roles, while others were happy to see the changes. Contemporaries began to theorize about what might happen to marriage. Sociologist Ernest R. Groves published a cautionary and conservative view in The Marriage Crisis (1928). Beginning with the premise that publicly aΩrmed monogamous unions of one man and one woman for life defined marriage, Groves doubted that divorce by mutual consent would solve marriage problems. Instead, he 

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pointed to a series of facts: young people were ill-­prepared for marriage, marriage was no longer seen as permanent, marriage was not up to the challenge of fostering happiness alone, and people had become more oriented toward pleasure than meeting obligations. The solution, he wrote, was to help married couples through counseling, education, family therapy, and nursery schools for young children. Better health care and housing would also help. Groves placed the blame for the current marriage “crisis” on conditions of society that replaced older standards of mutual a∏ection with new expectations of carefree pleasure.73 On the other hand, in The Companionate Marriage, Ben Lindsey, a juvenile court judge and prison reform advocate, argued for no­fault divorce and legalized marital birth control. Lindsey and his coauthor, Wainwright Evans, criticized traditional ideas of women as men’s property and oppositional gender relations (men defended their “honor and manhood”; women protected their men from rival women). Recognizing egalitarianism and the idea that marriage should be mutually fulfilling, they called for the “right to divorce by mutual consent for childless couples” and an end to censorship of birth control methods within marriage.74 The lack of consensus over the social role of marriages in society in these books echoed the tension between older and newer ideas that played out in popular culture as well. Popular Culture and Changes in Marriage

New and conflicting discourses about the nature of marriage coincided with an unprecedented expansion of popular culture. The 1920s and the creation of the New Negro coincided chronologically with an increase in advertising culture and a burst of film, musical, and literary creativity. Indeed, it was migrating African Americans who brought jazz and blues northward to large cities such as New York and Chicago. Greater mass production and industry and the development of new technologies and forms of mass media brought all cultural forms to everyone across the United States. Homogenized consumer goods were widely available, and recorded music, radio, films, and popular fiction created shared cultural experiences.75 Fiction writers, musicians, and filmmakers delivered their own images of 

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modern marriage. Outside the lecture hall and scholarly and political essays, the business of creating entertainment and lighter diversions also drew lines of demarcation around appropriate and problematic marriages. Among popular culture’s favorite themes were romantic love and glamour. Underlying these primary themes were undercurrents of concerns with class identities, appropriate gender roles, sexual expression, and race. Though they created an illusion of being sexually adventurous,76 music, film, popular dance, and popular literature tended to reinforce and reinscribe normative heterosexual behavior. All forms of popular culture placed a heavy emphasis on romantic love combined with specific gender roles. African Americans, too, participated in this proliferation of popular culture. They were often ignored in mainstream productions of music and film, but “race records” and “race films” distributed entertainment created by and intended for black people. Still, social and sexual behavior remained fraught with racist stereotypes, and popular culture in the 1920s was no sanctuary from racism. Indeed, films, music, and fiction were sometimes mechanisms for African American self-­policing, especially in matters of marriage, sexuality, and family. While some performers, such as blueswomen and -­men, embraced expressive sexuality, some forms of popular culture strongly warned against deviant sexuality, such as sex before marriage. African American popular culture, and especially films, promoted a specific model of sexuality. Appropriate sexuality consisted of one man and one woman, both middle class, who were exclusive sexual and household partners to each other.77 If they were living in the same household, the man and woman should be married. The husband should be in charge of major decisions and financial contributions to the household. The wife should be in charge of daily household finances and decisions. The primary focus of the wife’s supportive role should be the husband’s career, as long as he fulfills his obligation to be a provider. Finally, the husband and wife should love each other romantically. They should seamlessly blend their emotional and sexual attraction to each other with a particular economic relationship and their household management. This fairy-­tale story of a successful heterosexual partnering found 

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expression in, for example, the marriage of Yolande Du Bois to Countee Cullen in 1928, but their marriage also shows how an ideal facade could hide deviations from prescribed norms. W.  E.  B. Du Bois’s daughter, Yolande, persuaded her father to allow her a lavish ceremony with fifteen bridesmaids, a maid of honor, and more than 500 invited guests. As Du Bois’s biographer has written, the wedding “was the Harlem social event of the decade.”78 It was covered extensively in the national African American press, representing as it did the pinnacle of both black middle-­class marriage aspirations and middle­class conspicuous consumption. However, the fairy tale was not to last. Countee Cullen, as it turned out, was gay — ​and in the midst of conducting a relationship with his best man. The couple broke up several months after their famous wedding.79 Despite real life’s lack of conformity to ideals, fantasy versions of marriages pervaded black popular culture. Race films, or films created by and for black Americans, and some of the all-­black-­cast Holly­ wood films of the 1920s and 1930s carried strong messages about appropriate marriages. These films concentrated less on the realities of married life and more on romance. The plots usually betrayed an assumption that if both members of a couple were middle class and respectable, the marriage would succeed. This emphasis on respectability reflects the origin of race films in an e∏ort to combat denigrating images of African Americans, in mainstream Hollywood films in general and especially in D. W. GriΩth’s Birth of a Nation (1915). White­created films perpetuated negative stereotypes such as apelike, oversexed, stupid, and lazy black men and women. In response, black filmmakers such as the Johnson brothers of Lincoln Motion Picture Company and Oscar Micheaux produced fairly moralistic scripts that self-­consciously avoided racial stereotypes and presented upstanding, respectable black characters. Their topics were often intermarriage, migration, and skin color, and their characters succeeded in life by avoiding unwholesome pursuits such as drinking, gambling, and promiscuity. The starring actors, especially the women, were usually very light-­skinned.80 Within this context, examples of marriage were studiously respectable. In race films, romantic love and a compatible class and color match were assumed to create happiness. Often, the plot brought good, upstanding people into contact and conflict with 

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shady characters (often shown to be shady through their involvement with drinking or gambling), with the respectable character emerging victorious. Usually these films ended at the moment of a happy marriage to an appropriate partner. In some cases this good match overcame the consequences of a bad match earlier in the film. Scar of Shame (1927, Colored Players Film Corporation) was a silent film tale of just this narrative. It contained all of the ingredients that made marriage so fraught: class, skin color (discussed further in Chapter 4), gender roles, strivings for upward mobility, and notions of romantic love. The film implied that poor marital matches led to ruined lives, and that the best marital partners are those who have been brought up to appreciate the “higher things in life,” that is, highbrow culture. Lower pursuits, predictably, are symbolized by drink, gambling, and jazz — ​and harsh treatment of women. The heroine was abused by her gambling, drinking stepfather before she crossed paths with the hero, who defends her from further abuse while complaining that many men do not know how to treat “our” women. This choice of words clearly reflects his belief that black women collectively belong to black men, who are duty bound to take good care of black women’s honor and bodies. The film’s plot is this: Alvin Hillyard, a young composer, intervenes when his beautiful but poor neighbor Louise is assaulted by two men, including her stepfather, in one day. Alvin and Louise become engaged and marry, but class di∏erences quickly intrude into their happiness. Louise’s antagonists devise a plot to get her away from her husband so she can appear in their cabaret. They play on class di∏erences between Alvin and Louise, sending a telegram claiming Alvin’s well-­to-­do mother is ill. Worried, Alvin immediately prepares to visit his mother, but, embarrassed about Louise’s modest origins, he refuses to take her along, saying, “You — ​don’t belong to our set!” Heartbroken and humiliated, she begs him to let her accompany him, but he leaves. Louise then rips up their marriage certificate, removes her wedding band, and begins to pack. By the time Alvin realizes he’s been tricked, Louise has an appealing alternative to her “dicty” (i.e., snobbish) husband; she accepts the cabaret job. When Alvin returns and discovers his enemies leaving with Louise, a gunfight ensues and Louise is shot. Alvin is sent to prison for attempted murder. 

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But all is eventually set right. Alvin, in a feat of resourcefulness, escapes from his cell. “Aided by race ambition,” according to the film’s captions, he assumes another name and opens a music school. Soon he falls in love with a student. Her father, a lawyer, encourages them to marry, but Alvin lives in fear that his past will catch up to him. Indeed it does, but the result is exoneration for him. Alvin’s future father­in-­law turns out to be the attorney for the nightclub where Louise performs. When Louise and Alvin next meet, she tries to blackmail him into returning to her. Alvin’s refusal turns her manipulative rage into a broken heart. In despair, she commits suicide, leaving behind notes that absolve Alvin of wrongdoing. Relieved, he is now free to marry his new beloved. The narrative poses Alvin as a middle-­class hero trying to do the right thing whose goodness eventually rights the wrongs that were done to him. Louise’s story, and the moral of their marriage, is less clear. She seems to be a character who is essentially good but whose young life was marred irreparably. The filmmakers explain this in a caption attributed to Alvin’s new father-­in-­law: if she had had the “proper training” and learned “the higher aims, the higher hopes” in life, she would have lived. Louise’s proximity to disreputable people had made her unfit for marriage to a respectable man and led to her ultimate demise. A related theme in African American films was the power of bad women to lead men astray or good women to redeem them through a suitable marriage. Scar of Shame shows this vividly, as does Hallelujah (1929), one of Hollywood’s first all-­black films. In Hallelujah, two brothers take a sharecropper family’s cotton to town to sell, but one of them, Zeke, loses the proceeds in a card game when he falls under the trance of a light-­skinned fast woman, Chick, played by Nina Mae McKinney. Chick continues to captivate him, even after he decides to become a preacher. Eventually, Zeke is saved by his Christian faith and the love of a good woman, in this case the darker Missy Rose. In an interesting twist on the usual color hierarchy, here the lighter woman is the temptress and the darker one is chaste and moral.81 Indeed, Zeke approaches Missy Rose earlier in the film and forces her to kiss him. But later, once they become engaged, Missy Rose gladly allows a kiss. She shows by example that mar

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riage allows her to keep her dignity and purity while allowing sexual behavior. Fiction of the 1920s also addressed marital matchmaking. This interest in love stories made fiction popular, and themes of love appeared in many novels of the New Negro era.82 Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, two of the Harlem Renaissance’s more prolific novelists, devised plots that contained marriage trajectories.83 Men wrote marriage plots into novels, too. In 1925–26, the Messenger, a labor magazine, published The Letters of Davy Carr, a serialized novel by Edward Christopher Williams, a Howard University librarian.84 The novel details gender and skin color relations within the African American upper class in Washington, D.C. The narrator, Davy, is an impeccable, respectable, upstanding veteran of World War I. He is educated, cultured, chivalrous, and a good conversationalist and writer. The novel takes the form of letters from Davy to his war buddy Bob. The Messenger editors implied that the letters were authentic, and they printed an extensive disclaimer that names and identifying details had been changed. As a result, most readers likely thought they were reading about real events and may have tried to determine the characters’ identities. They might well have taken the events in the novel as models for their own behavior in social and romantic situations. Indeed, the novel would have rung true in many ways. Williams himself lived in the social world of Washington’s African American elite and would have been familiar with its models of courtship, manhood, and womanhood. The novel’s plot is a love story in which neither character realizes how much the other is interested. Davy meets Caroline and constantly remarks on her impish, vivacious personality and good looks. Though it becomes clear that Caroline has fallen for Davy, he takes a long time to realize it and continues to be his usual chivalrous, friendly self. The reader is supposed to notice that he has also fallen for her, even before he himself is aware of it. By the end, he finally realizes that she loves him, and he confesses his love for her. Williams depicts Caroline and Davy as perfectly suited for each other. Both are witty and well educated, and both are from a genuine (not artificial or conspicuously consuming) black middle class. They move in the same social circles, and Mrs. Rhodes, Caroline’s mother, 

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unreservedly approves of Davy. Thus Williams’s version of the romantic ideal consists of two necessary components: compatibility of class and social circle, and the emotional alchemy that transforms suitability into amorous love. Although the characters’ class positions are hardly representative of all black Americans’, the events of the novel would likely have resonated with the readers of the Messenger. Thinking they were reading a true story, they could well have enjoyed the glimpse into well-­to-­do society. The dramatic plot line and cli∏hanger chapter endings also kept readers coming back for more. In contrast to films and fiction, popular music after 1918 seemed to put forward a devil-­may-­care attitude toward love and romance. Music left out the cautionary tales of inappropriate matches in favor of a model of star-­crossed lovers. Even during the Great Depression, when one might expect music to grapple with the pressing problems of society, love and romance actually gained ground as the most popular lyrical focus in commercial music.85 Where films showed how a mismatch in class or education level could cause unhappiness, popular music urged lovers to go ahead with their true-­love unions, despite any worldly concerns. Simultaneously, race records — ​recordings by black artists that were explicitly marketed to black audiences — ​began to emerge in the early 1920s. Many were the so-­called classic blues that evolved from minstrelsy, vaudeville, ragtime, and rural blues. Middle-­class African American composers such as W. C. Handy had adapted these forms into popular songs and marketed their music to the sheet music industry and nightclub singers in the 1910s. By the 1920s, recorded music had taken over. In 1920, Okeh Records had a smash hit with blues singer Mamie Smith, and recording companies saw the potential profit from records made by and for black people. Between 1923 and 1929, large record companies, such as Paramount and Columbia, caught on to the market and had race record divisions. The black­owned, smaller, independent race label Black Swan was founded in 1921.86 Many of the lyrics were about love and romance, and they provide important insights into romantic ideals. Despite this, however, many early blues singers conspicuously avoided the subject of marriage and domesticity. Emerging from the vaudeville tradition, Ma Rainey 

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and Bessie Smith took on more earthy themes like voodoo and overt sexuality but did not discuss being a wife or mother. Indeed, some portrayed marriage as undesirable. In one of her few references to marriage, “Hateful Blues,” Bessie Smith sings, “Gonna take my weddin’ butcher [knife], gonna cut him two in two.”87 These songs reflect tension between ideals of bourgeois domesticity and a more frank attitude toward sexual expression and relationship conflict. Smith combined both music and film when she appeared in the 1929 film St. Louis Blues. A musical short that featured W. C. Handy’s famous 1914 song of the same name and a simple plot of love gone wrong, the film made no mention whatsoever of legal marriage. Ironically, despite her image as an autonomous and self-­assured woman, Smith’s one film appearance shows her as a desperate and weak spurned lover.88 St. Louis Blues opens with Bessie’s man, Jimmy, arriving home at the boardinghouse where they share a room. However, he has with him a new light-­skinned girlfriend (played by Isabel Washington Powell), with whom he is cheating on Bessie. Bessie returns home and ruthlessly runs out both the new girlfriend and the janitor, who comes to break up the fight. But when she turns to Jimmy, her tough facade crumples and she begs him to stay with her. He pushes her away and leaves her sadly lamenting, “My man has a heart like a rock cast in the sea.” The scene shifts to her singing the same line over a drink in a nightclub, where she performs the whole song. Then, while the other guests are dancing and reveling, Jimmy returns and takes Bessie into his arms. Her ecstasy and relief keep her from noticing that he is reaching into her stocking to steal her money. Ever the player, he pushes her aside and leaves once again, and Bessie returns to her lovelorn funk at the bar.89 The film vividly shows how falling in love could override other, more pragmatic considerations or even codes of conduct. Imagining Marriages in the Great Depression

In the 1930s, African American producers of popular culture presented black marriages as mainstream and respectable. Whereas films and music of the 1920s had depicted thrilling, but sometimes misguided, romance, in the 1930s they gravitated toward more conventional themes. Heterosexual, patriarchal couples received the most 

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flattering attention. For example, when the famous singer and actor Paul Robeson married the socially skillful Eslanda Goode, the event was high profile and glamorous. In 1931, a young Shirley Graham (who would later marry W. E. B. Du Bois), described her visit to the Paul and “Essie” Robeson home in Hampstead, just outside London. Her human interest piece, designed to show the lifestyle of one of the New Negro icons and his family, was unabashedly positive. Although Robeson himself was not at home, his house, wife, and child represented him by proxy and, by their attractive appearances and obvious class, showed him in a very flattering light.90 Graham fills her article with powerful symbols of domestic stability and prosperity. Arriving for her interview, she presses the “modest button” that rings the doorbell of the “vine covered, brick house in Hampstead, one of the most beautiful and exclusive suburbs of London.” She is escorted by a French butler to a book-­lined room where she meets Essie. Paul’s room is “wholly masculine as befitting a big man,” and Essie’s is filled with the correspondence that she must answer as Paul’s manager and secretary (although she still “finds time to direct her household with its sta∏ of servants and to oversee the activities of her little son”). Even Paul Robeson Jr. is a credit to his parents. Graham notices that “he is unusually tall and carries his broad shoulders well back while he walks proudly on sturdy, rounded legs.” Essie Robeson receives a tremendous amount of praise, which by extension belongs to Paul as well for choosing such an impeccable wife. Graham remarks that this is the crowning jewel of Paul’s success: “He has genius, he has brains, and he has a wife” (her emphasis). “Essie is cordial, bright-­eyed, alert.  .  .  . She was modest and self­e∏acing regarding the success that had come to her husband. She merely smiled that little secret smile which one sees only on the lips of an utterly happy wife.” Not only is Essie attractive and modest; she has also written an articulate biography of her husband that is on a par with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work.91 However, as Martin Duberman has revealed in his biography of Robeson, their marriage was vastly di∏erent from the idealized picture. Paul and Essie seemed to hold a∏ection for each other, but their marriage was rocky. He had realized that the light-­skinned Essie, who had a sharp mind and an instinctive grasp of public relations, would 

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be an asset to his career. In turn, she was aware that if she combined her skills with Paul’s raw talent and charisma, she would become the wife of a very important man, with all the comfort and accolades that would bring. Still, she had to live with the painful knowledge that she was not the apple of his eye. He had extramarital a∏airs throughout his career. While Shirley Graham was walking with Paul’s son on Hampstead Heath, he might have been at rehearsal — ​but it is within possibility that he was visiting his mistress. Importantly, Graham gives no hint whatsoever of anything less than a happy heterosexual and faithful couple raising their child in a wholesome home. In music, artists who were most commercially successful also presented a respectable public image. The Great Depression put many race record labels out of business, and the successful black artists were those who were mainstream enough to move to larger labels.92 More acceptable to middle-­class New Negroes was Columbia Rec­ ords singer Ethel Waters, who was accustomed to singing softly into microphones rather than shouting into theaters. Waters was a former Black Swan artist, signed when the label rejected Bessie Smith as too “cultural.”93 Waters survived the Depression by crossing over to white audiences with songs by white Tin Pan Alley composers like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Harold Arlen. She sang in an intimate way about romance, injecting emotion into her words. Waters was a chameleon, a quality that served her through decades of show business. She began by singing bawdy blues, but her clear, bell-­like voice injected respectability and sophistication into the songs she sang. In this respect she was unlike Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, who growled their lines in a racy vaudeville style. Still, she made allusions to sexuality. In 1928 she recorded “My Handy Man.” It consists of a list of things that her beloved can do, ingeniously alluding to the sexual possibilities within domesticity. Waters brags that he “shakes my ashes, greases my griddle, churns my butter, strokes my fiddle . . . threads my needle, creams my wheat, heats my heater, chops my meat. . . . I wish that you could see the way he handles my front yard. My ice don’t get a chance to melt away, he sees that I get that old fresh piece every day.”94 Under no illusions about the crucial value of sexual fulfillment to a good relationship, married or otherwise, she could take the more sophisticated sexuality of the 1920s and 

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channel it into her music. The blues lyrics were sometimes racy, but her delivery brought a more urbane sensibility. In the 1930s, Waters moved into popular songs and jazz and, in fact, created some of the first jazz vocals out of pop songs. Later still she starred in musicals and movies and, even later, sang gospel. It seems that her jazz singing brought sexuality to a more acceptable, trendy level.95 In 1933 Waters recorded “Stormy Weather,” a blues song that two white men wrote for her to perform at the Cotton Club. The lyrics are romantic and wistful: Don’t know why There’s no sun up in the sky Stormy weather Since my man and I ain’t together Keeps raining all the time. Life is bare Gloom and misery everywhere Stormy weather Just can’t get my poor self together I’m weary all the time, the time. So weary all the time.96 Waters’s mournful tone and the sorrowful lyrics suggest that life is not worth living if romance is going badly. However, for all of her focus on love, even Waters had an uneasy relationship with marriage and domesticity. In fact, her 1921 record contract with Black Swan had stated explicitly that she could not marry.97 The label’s executives feared that marriage would cause her to give up her singing career, which would be financially disastrous to her label. In 1923 she wrote a song called “Ain’t Gonna Marry,” possibly inspired by this event. Or it could have been inspired by her lack of romantic interest in men.98 Films in the 1930s had much in common with those from the late 1920s but emphasized middle-­class marriage ideals even more. Some added cautionary tales of crime and criminal activity — ​the enemies of happy marriages. For example, The Girl from Chicago (1932) was a story of courtship and marriage, but it was also a crime drama. Where 

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Scar of Shame, from the late 1920s, cautions against a bad choice of marital partner, The Girl from Chicago depicts the advantages to be had from making a good choice; together the “good” couple fights lawbreakers and gangsters. In this case, a Secret Service agent falls in love with an intelligent woman who helps him devise traps for the criminals he is chasing. Although audiences must have thrilled to the crime adventure in the film, they were also exposed to normative ideas about how people fall in love and marry and to the advantages to the race of having a husband-­and-­wife crime-­fighting team. Late in the decade, Moon over Harlem (Edgar Ulmer, 1939) presented yet another dramatic story of criminal activity derailing a poorly matched marriage and of a well-­matched couple vanquishing those criminals. In this case, a widowed mother, Minnie, marries the dashing but double-­talking Dollar Bill. He turns out to be in the numbers racket and a gambler, and he also sexually harasses Minnie’s daughter, Sue. Minnie herself is an upstanding woman who works as a maid in one of the posh nightclubs in Harlem, but she insists that Sue attend school rather than enter show business (which she could do, as she has light skin and “good hair”). Sue dates an honest young man, Bob, who coincidentally is leading a movement to eliminate racketeering in Harlem. Although Minnie’s own daughter and friends try to warn her about Bill, Minnie insists, until it is too late, that he is a good man. She walks in as he is sexually assaulting Sue, but Minnie blames Sue and puts her out. Soon, Dollar Bill begins to abuse Minnie; when he gets into an altercation with some other gangsters, Minnie is shot to death. At the end, Dollar Bill himself is shot in a gang conflict, and Sue and Bob, now her fiancé, stand to inherit Minnie’s small estate. As in Scar of Shame and The Girl from Chicago, the well-­matched pair lives happily ever after, while the poorly matched pair meets death and unhappiness. The most important aspect of the match is class identity, which conflates both socioeconomic status and proximity to criminal behavior. Poor Minnie is somehow unaware of her new husband’s shady background, but her daughter, who has been raised properly, is able to escape being dragged into a sexual and criminal underworld. By World War II, African Americans had moved from equating 

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good marriages with only piety, chastity, and race work; now they had added new ideals of sexual and emotional fulfillment. White filmmakers echoed their ideals, too. In 1943, not one but two full-­length Hollywood romances featuring African Americans premiered: Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky. Stormy Weather had a predictable and gendered pattern of lost love followed by a joyous reunion and presumed domesticity; Cabin in the Sky was about the importance of staying together happily and living righteously. Starring Ethel Waters as a long-­su∏ering wife and Lena Horne as a temptress and homewrecker, Cabin in the Sky portrays the struggle of good (faithful marriage and industriousness) and evil (gambling, extramarital a∏airs, and slothfulness) within the soul of one husband. His wife’s prayers earn him a probation before he is sent to hell for compulsive gambling, but then a misunderstanding between them causes their separation and the husband’s backsliding. In the end, just as the husband is about to be banished below, his wife’s piety saves him once more, this time for eternity. as late as 1943, then, African Americans were still carefully treading the line between respectability and sexual expression. But the pendulum, at least in popular culture, had swung toward respectability and heteronormativity again. Between 1890 and World War II, black Americans had created an uneasy blend of self-­conscious respectable marriages and newer ideals about romance and sexuality that encompassed nonprocreative sexuality and women’s more egalitarian roles. These ideals were inextricably tied to class identities and strivings toward upward mobility. From the pages of the nacw newsletter to those of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review to the films of Oscar Micheaux, African Americans sought to define models of marriages that would encompass both their hopes for racial advancement and their desires of romantic happiness. These models were incomplete without prescriptions for appropriate gender roles within marriage, the subject of the next two chapters.



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2

o Husbands r g e New N

As African Americans discussed the place of sexuality and race work in interwar marriages, they also sought to define marital roles for husbands and wives. They used ideals of masculinity and femininity as touchstones for how married men and women ought to act. As we will see in the final two chapters, some of the Curwoods’ most searing debates were over the behaviors that each expected of the other; in this they were not unlike countless other American and African American couples of the time. For husbands, perhaps the most consistent marker of success was maintaining authority, financial and emotional. In many ways this emphasis was neither new nor unique to African Americans. Along with work, husbands’ dominance over wives and children represented men’s primary claim to full participation in mainstream American society. This belief had been further inscribed into American norms after the Civil War. As Republicans in Congress discussed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, they often mentioned the need to ensure that newly freed black men had the right to rule their households as an essential step toward civic participation. Northerners thought that, through this step, marriage would foster citizenship among men who had recently been slaves. And federal policymakers made male­headed households the basic unit of society. To this end, the Freed-

man’s Bureau encouraged contracts between freedmen and employers as part of a family wage system that enabled husbands and fathers to own the fruits of their wives’ and children’s labor and promoted a healthy work ethic in men who had a family to support.1 The idea of male financial leadership within households persisted through the later decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. What was new after World War I was the ideal of male New Negro political leadership, in which men “[took] charge of the racial household” and also of their individual households. New Negro men claimed freedom of mobility — ​geographical, social, and political.2 This philosophy bled into attitudes about wives’ roles in marriages, the subject of the next chapter. At the same time that black women sought to develop their own mobility — ​an increased presence in the professions, politics, and the arts — ​nostalgia about women’s withdrawal from the paid labor force and public life actually gained power.3 After 1929, the Great Depression would make maintaining financial authority, which many saw as signifying emotional authority, much harder for all men. After a brief discussion of the masculine New Negro ideal, in this chapter I look at three places where New Negro men constructed husbands’ roles: the pages of the magazine the Messenger, the writings of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and the unpublished journals and correspondence of the writer Jean Toomer. These three sites contradicted one another at times, especially with respect to the appropriate role of breadwinning, but all of them named authority over the household as the hallmark of the New Negro husband ideal. The Ideal of the New Negro Man Although the descriptor “New Negro” applied to both men and women, the ideal New Negro was male, and New Negro men prioritized the rights and responsibilities of manhood as central to the New Negro project. Language emerged that privileged enlightened consumer consumption and the sexual and physical capabilities of the body as hallmarks of masculinity. Older notions of manhood as defined by success in the commercial world were ridiculed as bourgeois and stifling. Many of the key figures in the Harlem Renaissance, the 

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artistic expression of the New Negro, were jaded at the conformity and materialism they saw in respectable middle-­class black families.4 Still, many were eager to experience upward mobility. For example, Alain Locke cast the artists and writers in his famous anthology The New Negro (1925) as producers and full participants in capitalism who were transforming their talents and experiences into financial independence, a prerequisite to early-­twentieth-­century masculinity. Locke explained that “the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken” and that the New Negro was throwing o∏ internalized racism and dependency on whites and emerging as a self-­actualized man.5 In many ways, then, Locke’s New Negro ideal was a project in the “assertion of manliness.”6 A vivid representation of a gendered New Negro can be found in the portraits by the German immigrant and modernist artist Winold Reiss that Locke chose to include. Reiss made portraits of selected authors within the volume: Locke, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and five others. Only one was female: Elise Johnson McDougald. Portraits of three other prominent African Americans were also included: Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, and Mary McLeod Bethune. Then there were several portraits of unnamed women, or “types.” These included The Brown Madonna, Ancestral, and From the Tropic Isles as well as “Type Sketches of Negro Women,” The Librarian and The School Teachers. The presence (or absence) of women is unmistakable: two of the eleven named portraits were of women, as were all of the anonymous type sketches. All the men in Reiss’s portraits were named. This strategy clearly indicates that men’s roles were far more central than women’s roles.7 The younger, newer generation of New Negro men whom Locke showcased in portraits and in written pieces in the volume added the old imperative of making a respectable living to a new concern with promoting their art as a path to manhood. Locke cast New Negro artists and writers as skilled producers of their craft and as pioneers, recognizable symbols of manhood.8 New Negro men also recognized masculine brawn and capacity for violence — ​as Rooseveltian Rough Riders or World War I soldiers — ​as part of belonging to American masculine norms, though men had to show that they could balance this raw power with civilized refinement.9 African American organizations reinforced gender roles within 

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their activities and memberships. At least two organizations, the Prince Hall Masons and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia), emphasized the necessity of men’s economic independence and the imperative of protecting and providing for black women and children. Men reclaimed their identities as manly men: heads of families, statesmen, and agents of their own lives. Many black women, having experienced vulnerability and negative attitudes toward their physical appearance, relished the opportunity to be protected and seen as beautiful. This outlook did not disappear among the next generation. Even younger men just coming of age in the 1920s who rejected the unia’s and the Masons’ ideals of self-­restraint and respectability did not entirely abandon a model of masculinity that cast the male as breadwinner.10 Men themselves were not the only people theorizing appropriate roles for husbands. Amy Jacques Garvey, the wife of Marcus Garvey, had strong feelings about men’s roles as breadwinners, even as she advocated for women’s participation in politics. Her voice is one of the few surviving among New Negro women who articulated their visions for the roles of New Negro husbands. As associate editor of the Negro World, the unia’s magazine, she published a series of editorials in 1923 and 1924 delineating appropriate marital roles for spouses. Although most of her ideas concerned women, she also lectured men on their proper roles and did not hesitate to criticize in sometimes harsh terms. According to Jacques Garvey, many men lacked ambition and motivation in race work and in their own careers, thus overloading their wives in the public world of politics and work. Furthermore, men failed to properly protect women and to appreciate wives’ e∏orts in race work and in the home. Men should, she argued, fulfill the breadwinner role so that women could, if they so wished, remain in the home. If men would adequately support their families, then women could be freed from degrading domestic work in white women’s homes and be in charge of the domestic life within their own homes. Jacques Garvey was not alone in calling men to task about their need to live up to the bargain. The clubwoman Fannie Barrier Williams, too, urged men to adequately protect black women in order to be worthy of those women’s respect.11 On the other hand, W. E. B. Du Bois criticized what he saw as ex

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cessively high expectations of spouses among New Negro women and men. New Negro men had been spoiled by their hardworking parents and overinvolved mothers, he wrote, and they expected not only mates who would nurture them and take care of their households and children but also wives who would be comfortable with glamorous entertaining and socializing. Meanwhile, New Negro women expected prospective husbands to have good looks, money, and education. Du Bois wrote that the right qualities were seldom found in the right combination in any given prospective spouse, and so compromise was necessary. He implied that, unfortunately, New Negroes were unwilling to compromise and many conflict-­ridden marriages were limping along for the sake of conforming on the surface to class and gender ideals.12 Others agreed. In 1932, Horace R. Cayton, who would go on to coauthor the 1945 opus Black Metropolis, wrote to an engaged friend that he was somewhat dismayed at his friend’s decision to get married and even at the engraved invitations that signified his friend’s strivings for respectable appearances. “Why should a good bohemian like you stoop to a petty bourgeois gesture like that?” he wrote. “Why, why because it’s the thing to do, and it’s much easier to print invitations than to argue; and it will be much easier to have children and build a little home.”13 Cayton was skeptical about traditional rituals of marriage. A marriage might be acceptable if it was “a relationship between two individuals with each keeping [h]is individuality, rather than the conventional blending of the two into the mythical one.” But such a marriage was diΩcult because it “is possible only between sophisticated and intelligent people and in a relatively liberal community.” Cayton wondered if his friend’s marriage would be enlightened or “a conventional thing with babies, installment payments, mutual distrust and back alley love a∏airs (I am not without guilt in the latter).”14 Some of Cayton’s skepticism likely came from his own failed marriages and his history of tumultuous relationships.15 However, most New Negroes concerned themselves less with moderating their expectations and more with meeting them. This was no small task as they simultaneously sought to reject old ideals of Victorian conduct but found themselves unable to escape elements of them. They wanted marriages that reflected love and mutual respect 

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but thought that the old uplift mentality was stifling to genuine marital relationships. While old definitions of manhood had prioritized the selfless traits of character and self-­control, new ones emphasized the ability to a∏ord leisure activities and consumer goods for the family, as well as sexual aptitude.16 Still, African Americans seemed unable to escape older models of male breadwinning and masculine leadership within marriages. The following three examples — ​of editorial and fictional writings in the Messenger, of the sociological work of E. Franklin Frazier, and of the unpublished writings of Jean Toomer — ​show how male domination within families remained entrenched as an ideal. The Ideal Husband in the Messenger Appropriate models of men’s behavior and courtship appeared in the pages of the Messenger, edited by black socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, in the 1920s. We have already met the quintessential New Negro Davy Carr in the serial novel The Letters of Davy Carr.17 Carr’s behavior toward women perhaps illustrates a manly ideal that readers of the Messenger would have found admirable. His cosmopolitanism and unfailing social skills (even in the absence of a steady job, although he is a writer who has already proved his manhood in the military) are a model for New Negro men everywhere. He is witty in conversation with women, and he notices the beauty of Washington women in almost every letter; but he seems to be above manipulating women into dating him or engaging in sexual behavior. In fact, women approach him rather than the other way around. His restraint and decorum seem irresistible to them, especially to Caroline. While she impishly teases him, adopting first the nickname of Old Bear, then Old Grouchy, and then Godfather, he puts his hands in his pockets or lights a cigarette and smiles bemusedly. They play the parts of the modern, emancipated woman and the cultured man who can tame her wildness somewhat. Although Caroline and Davy fall in love, she must wait for him to realize that he has fallen in love with her so that he can propose marriage. Ultimately, their courtship is successful and they become engaged. 

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However, both Messenger editors undoubtedly knew that the typical roles for men and women did not always conform to reality. Editor A. Philip Randolph had considerable financial support from his wife, who ran a successful beauty parlor in Harlem. In fact, she provided the start-­up funds for the journal.18 Randolph used the pages of the magazine to advocate for unions. He went on to lead the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which he founded in 1925. A central demand of the Brotherhood was for a wage that would support a wife and children on one man’s income. Like the unia, the organization looked to the past, not to the 1920s ideals of the New Woman, to determine ideals for men and women. The Brotherhood took this demand forward a step by strongly endorsing “manhood rights,” the right of a man to be the economic head of a family, and encouraging African American men to keep their wives at home. Working-­class black men began to discourage their wives from engaging in waged work and independent political action. Men in the Brotherhood emphasized marriage as a right and as a support of their manhood and citizenship. On a practical level, “manhood rights” meant access to equal pay for equal work, a living wage, and healthy working conditions. The phrase “manhood rights” fell out of favor in the 1930s, and Randolph later invoked the image of the Black Worker — ​who was assumed to be male.19 These ideals of male breadwinning and family leadership had a long history within organized labor and in socialism. At the turn of the century, black men had been almost completely excluded from unions. White men participating in organized labor had long pressed their employers for a family wage, insisting on enough income to support a nonworking wife and children. Even in radical socialist politics at the turn of the century, the idea of women’s domesticity still dominated. Although socialist women disagreed on their roles, no comprehensive feminist critique emerged of the sexual division of labor.20 Therefore, the Brotherhood men drew on a long tradition of labor rights framed in terms of men’s patriarchal rights over wives and children. Within the Brotherhood, a gendered division of labor buttressed black men’s authority as breadwinners. As it pressed for better wages and working conditions, the Brotherhood also sought to create inter

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racial class solidarity and mobility among (male) workers. Although it was a working-­class organization aΩliated with the American Federation of Labor, its members had a middle-­class identity. Within the African American workforce, they earned comparatively high wages; a job as a porter was a highly respectable position. The fact that Brotherhood wages could support a wife at home during a crippling economic depression was one manifestation of members’ higher-­class status.21 In the years of the Great Depression, the ability to keep a wife at home, out of the labor force, would become a rare commodity. Unemployed or low-­paid men were demoralized if they could not support their wives; they felt worse still if they were unemployed and their wives had jobs.22 Many men felt that financial problems led to their loss of status with their wives, less frequent sex, and the appearance of failure. Now New Negroes began to accept the idea that smaller families were healthier and that sexual behavior need not be procreative. A host of black men expressed their opinions in the June 1932 Birth Control Review. W. E. B. Du Bois, George Schuyler, Charles S. Johnson, and several others (notably, only two of the thirteen contributors were women) wrote articles for this “Negro Number.” Most of these authors attempted to bolster birth control as an appropriate option for black Americans because they believed that voluntary parenthood would lead to healthier children, thus improving the race.23 Within this climate of change, two New Negroes wrote extensively on men’s and women’s roles in marriage: E. Franklin Frazier and Jean Toomer. Both men expressed disapproval of women’s expanding roles — ​Frazier from a sociological perspective, and Toomer from a psychological one. Although their views were not held by all New Negro men, their reasoning illustrates the possibilities within contemporary thinking about men, women, and marriage. Frazier’s Writings The eminent sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (1896–1963) believed that racism could be eradicated through black men’s “work and wealth.”24 He saw honorable work as the path to real manhood, and he criticized dual-­breadwinner households. In his Depression-­era 

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Harlem Renaissance men: (left to right) Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher, and Hubert T. Delaney, on the roof of 580 St. Nicholas Avenue,

Harlem, on the occasion of a party in Hughes’s honor, 1924. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

landmark studies of African American families,25 Frazier implicitly and explicitly argued that if men were not the breadwinners and dominant decision-­makers in their families, something was wrong. He measured the health of African American families by looking at the power and independence of their male heads. Frazier belonged to a group of urban sociologists who sought, according to Marlon Ross, to blend scholarly objectivity and racial self-­promotion in order to demonstrate their own masculine credentials. Their strategy for managing the Jim Crow doctrine of inherent black inferiority was to disseminate dispassionate scholarship about the black masses, paying particular attention to how these masses fulfilled gender and sexual roles. This strategy was an alternative approach to accepting the stereotype of black masculine aggression and violent power.26 

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Contrary to what some of his critics have assumed, Frazier saw no inherent inferiority — ​moral, mental, or physical — ​within black people. He did, however, believe in the inferiority of women as heads of families. He was alarmed at the economic and decision-­making power many black women held within their families. His racial analysis, revolutionary in its time for its strong endorsement of nurture over nature, pointed to distorted gender relations, disempowered black men, and deviant sexual behavior as legacies of slavery. This pernicious inheritance dealt black families a blow from which they were only slowly recovering. Frazier was a native of Baltimore, Maryland. He distinguished himself academically in high school in Baltimore and was admitted to Howard University in 1912. At Howard he became a radical activist, with a socialist and antiracist bent. He was an oΩcer of the university’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and of the Social Science Club, and he was a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. All three clubs attracted many socialist students, a reflection of the nationwide popularity of socialism in the early decades of the twentieth century. His classmates thought of him as a daring activist. On one occasion, Frazier opposed the arrangement of Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural parade, where colleges and universities were to be segregated by race, with white schools at the front and black at the rear. The parade organizers compromised by allowing Howard to bring up the rear of the white college section. Frazier’s Howard comrades accepted the decision, but he remained outraged.27 After graduating from Howard in 1916, Frazier began teaching math at Tuskegee, which frustrated him with its Victorian atmosphere and racial accommodation. He was asked not to carry books across campus, lest he seem too intellectual, and the school quietly paid the Alabama poll tax for him, which he had refused to pay on principle. He left in 1917, frustrated but with a new interest in civil rights. He subsequently took a series of other teaching jobs, including posts at the High and Industrial School in Fort Valley, Georgia, and Saint Paul’s Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia. In 1919 Frazier began working on his master’s degree in sociology at Clark University. His thesis, “New Currents of Thought among the 

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Colored People in America,” optimistically predicted a rise of racial activism and militancy among African Americans.28 Over the next two years, Frazier seldom stayed in one place for long. He won a scholarship to study at the New York School of Social Work, where he conducted an extensive study of longshoremen, and a fellowship from the American-­Scandinavian Foundation to study rural folk high schools. In the summer of 1922 he got a job teaching summer school at Livingston College in North Carolina. There he met his future wife, Marie Brown, a fair-­skinned daughter of a Winton, North Carolina, Baptist missionary and educator. After a whirlwind courtship, the two married that September.29 After his marriage, Frazier’s career continued its upward trajectory. The Fraziers immediately moved to Atlanta, where Frazier took a job teaching at Morehouse College. He was also to serve as acting director of the Atlanta School of Social Work. But the situation changed suddenly when Garry Moore, the school’s director, died unexpectedly. Frazier suddenly became the school’s head and subsequently transformed it into a vital program for black social work students at the same time that he was beginning his own research into African American families. He also traveled extensively as a lecturer, took courses at the University of Chicago in the summer of 1923, and contributed to the Crisis, New Masses, Opportunity, and the Messenger. At Atlanta, Frazier’s outspoken views against southern racism provoked a professional conflict that eventually caused him to step down.30 This incident and his published writings on race relations gave him a reputation as a controversial and opinionated scholar, which limited his professional options. He had scared o∏ some prospective employers, particularly in the South. His friend W. E. B. Du Bois tried to help him get a job at Fisk for the 1927–28 academic year, but Fisk’s president Thomas Jones decided that Frazier was not diplomatic enough for the South.31 Luckily his friend Charles S. Johnson had encouraged Frazier to consider full-­time graduate study at the University of Chicago, where Johnson had studied under the famous Robert Ezra Park.32 In the spring of 1927, Frazier learned that he had been awarded a Ph.D. fellowship at Chicago. He arrived that June and immediately began work. While he was at Chicago, Frazier wrote his first sustained criticism 

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of the black middle class. “La Bourgeoisie Noire,” published in V. F. Calverton’s 1929 Anthology of Negro American Literature, sought to explain why African Americans were not aligned with radical labor politics. As an example, he criticized the New Negro cultural movement of the 1920s as both insuΩciently engaged with economic issues and “emasculating” to black men whose art was used as entertainment by white audiences.33 This lack of attention to working-­class politics and concerns came from the social history of black people: elite African Americans did not see themselves as allied with the working class, while rural blacks were ignorant domestic servants who could not help but take on capitalist values, and African Americans had often been excluded from industrial jobs and thus from engaging with the radical labor politics among industrial workers. Instead, African Americans sought to reap capitalism’s benefits in the form of consumption, subscribing to bourgeois ideals.34 These criticisms of African Americans’ consumption extended into Frazier’s later prescriptions for appropriate gender roles between husbands and wives. Frazier’s first book was his 1932 Ph.D. dissertation, The Negro Family in Chicago, in which he divided the Chicago Black Belt into small geographical units and examined family life in each zone, demonstrating the degree to which specific family patterns corresponded to specific community characteristics. Frazier pointed out that upwardly mobile and less recent immigrants tended to move outward, away from areas where the newest migrants predominated.35 Residents of the outer zones showed greater financial and family stability because, Frazier argued, they had more established “traditions.” By this Frazier meant that men headed their families. Furthermore, their relatively high rates of homeownership let the patriarchs transmit their property to their descendants.36 Frazier extended his argument about the importance of male­headed families into his third book, The Negro Family in the United States (1939).37 But now skilled laborers had become his family heroes, with the right balance of male power at home. A male-­headed household stood for a stable family, one that was in its rightful place in the social and cultural order.38 Frazier thought that once racial stratification was dismantled, gender stratification could assume its proper form within families. Racial stratification itself could be dismantled 

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through class solidarity — ​the alliance of the white and black working classes — ​so male workers could attain economic independence. Because Frazier had observed the (almost) common denominator of a strong patriarch in the better-­o∏ residents of the Black Belt that he described in his first book, he zeroed in on gender relations. But members of the middle class of the outer zones no longer appeared to be the most evolved. They were overly oriented toward consumption, and middle-­class women were too dominant. Dominant women, as matriarchs, became the most important and most dangerous force within African American family life. Although he sought to avoid making value judgments about black families, Frazier was, indeed, making a value judgment about appropriate forms of gender stratification: men should hold the economic power in healthy families. Thus the basic narrative of The Negro Family is that a system of maternal power developed under slavery, but a patriarchal system should now eclipse it. Patriarchal organization had begun to develop among antebellum free blacks, and now healthy patriarchy should spread to more of the population, as black people moved into the industrial age. As Frazier conceived of black families, the forces of gender, matriarchy, and patriarchy overlaid the dichotomies of disorganization and reorganization, feudalism and modernity, civilization and savagery, and naïveté and worldliness. Frazier made no apology for his patriarchal ideals, and none of his colleagues expected him to. He saw this analysis of gender roles as the most important aspect of his work — ​so important that the book’s original title was “In the House of the Mother,” as he wrote to his publisher in 1937.39 That title named the main problem with black families as Frazier saw it. The Negro Family in the United States presented five evolutionary stages on the way to patriarchal norms. Each stage was illustrated with a linoleum cut by the Washington, D.C., artist Hilda Wilkinson Brown. Beginning with slavery, in Part 1, “In the House of the Master,” Frazier showed how the Atlantic slave trade stripped slaves of their African cultural heritages. The domestic slave trade further separated blood kin, with the bond between mothers and children best able to withstand this strain. In Part 2, “In the House of the Mother,” Frazier explained how the role of the dominant mother continued after 

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emancipation. A few former slaves who had lived in families where “the role of the father was firmly established” were able to maintain patriarchy after emancipation and were sometimes able to buy land. In contrast, former slaves who had not been able to set up such families often broke the bonds between men and women once they were free.40 Frazier used the linoleum cut for this part on the book’s cover and promotional brochure. Brown’s illustration portrays a woman with large breasts, one hand on a child’s back, the other on her shoulder, and a second child facing the woman. In the background are two young women. All of the figures, including the children, appear to be female. The theory of gender roles that Frazier outlined in this section was key to the entire book. As late as 1937, he was still planning to use the title “The House of the Mother.”41 This title captivated him because his book hinged on the concept of progression away from matriarchy and toward patriarchal family organization. When Frazier moved to Part 3, “In the House of the Father,” he began to discuss the families that had achieved some degree of patriarchal organization and, by extension, had more acceptable morals. He first described former slaves who managed to break the matriarchate by economically subordinating women upon emancipation. Whether they signed a contract with employers that included the labor of the whole family, purchased their own property in order to supervise the family’s labor, or had purchased the freedom of wives and children during slavery, freed men gained patriarchal authority.42 Moving on, Frazier showed how freemen (those not enslaved before the Civil War who might be of mixed race) were able to achieve economic independence and own property and, by extension, have what Frazier saw as a stable family life.43 Finally, he included two more examples. The first was the isolated groups of multiracial people of white, black, and Indian ancestry, many (but not all) of whom did not consider themselves to be African American and who observed “well-­authenticated and virile traditions.” The second was the group of homeowning families he called “Black Puritans,” who preserved patriarchal morals even as surrounding families did not or could not.44 The linoleum cut for Part 3, “In the House of the Father,” shows a very masculine image of a man. His shoulders are thrown back, ac

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Hilda Wilkinson Brown, In the House of the Mother, linoleum cut. Illustration for Part 2 of Frazier, Negro Family in the United States. Image courtesy Lilian Thomas Burwell.

centuating his bare, muscular chest. He holds a hoe (or a spear), below which is a female child. Behind him is a woman, eyes cast downward toward her nursing infant. Where the portrait of the mother, for Part 2, conveys a child-­centered world of nurturing, that of the father situates male power at the center with female nurturing as a background. Frazier thought that the image of motherhood was more integral to his work, as the original title and the relationship at the center of his tale. In Parts 4 and 5, which he called “In the City of Destruction” and “In the City of Rebirth,” respectively, Frazier explained how urban life was destructive to morals and, in particular, to male family leadership. Seeing migrants as naive, he attributed their transformation into gamblers, pimps, and criminals to the loss of a folk outlook on life. To Frazier, departure from the small communities of the rural South engendered an individualistic outlook on life and a hedonistic attitude toward sex. The consequences were illegitimate children, rebellious and delinquent youth, and easy divorce that cast families into disarray. In Part 5, Frazier made it clear that his family ideal was the “Black proletariat,”45 the name of the book’s penultimate chapter. Although the black working class contained a wide range of occupations and levels of family organization, he found much hope here for his vision of the modern male-­led black family. He looked mostly to artisans and industrial workers who would, he predicted, be able to realize class politics and change the terms of the fight for racial equality, initiating black and white working-­class cooperation in the struggle against exploitative employers.46 Also, as A. Philip Randolph believed, Frazier saw that unionized workers seemed to correlate with organized families. Black proletarian families were evolved families that had authority, made possible through the father’s earning of a family wage. These families, he hoped, would hold the key to more economic (and by extension, civil) rights for African Americans, through both politics and a tradition of class and race pride.47 Frazier saw the black proletariat as an indicator of new morals among working-­class African Americans. When men held industrial jobs that paid enough to strengthen their authority at home, their families would begin to assimilate into the values of white workers, espe

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Hilda Wilkinson Brown, In the House of the Father, linoleum cut. Illustration for

Part 3 of Frazier, Negro Family in the United States. Image courtesy Lilian Thomas Burwell.

cially the ideal of women staying out of paid work.48 Masculinity, in Frazier’s view, was symbolized by a man’s ability to exercise economic and legal leadership within his family. There was little new major scholarship on black families after Frazier’s Negro Family in the United States was published in 1939. When the topic reemerged as a compelling field, Frazier’s was the name that was most publicized. Most notably, he was linked with the 1965 U.S. Department of Labor publication of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, more commonly known as the (Daniel Patrick) Moynihan Report. Moynihan was assistant secretary of labor and had been named director of the OΩce of Policy Planning and Research in 1963. Moynihan assumed that any family whose father or husband was absent was broken.49 While Moynihan did not echo Frazier on every point, he kept Frazier’s strong belief that men should be the heads of families, and that any family without a male head was deficient. Jean Toomer as Gender Theorist The Harlem Renaissance novelist Jean Toomer (1894–1967) also wrote on gender and marriage and, like Frazier, focused on maintaining husbands’ authority. Although he intended to incorporate his work on husbands and wives into a book, it was never published. By the time he wrote it, he had withdrawn from New York literary circles and had no income of his own. Toomer then survived the Great Depression by drawing on the family wealth of his second wife, Marjorie. He sought male power without male productivity. His writings from the 1930s show how he insisted on maintaining masculine authority even as he was not the family’s breadwinner.50 Nathan Pinchback Toomer, as Jean Toomer was first named, was born and raised in the household of his maternal grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback. It was a solid upper-­middle­class home that emphasized ideals of racial uplift, morality, and respectability. He lived under Pinchback’s roof for many years. Jean’s father, also named Nathan, deserted his mother, Nina, who later died of appendicitis in 1909, when Jean was fifteen.51 Pinchback was domineering, and Jean disliked this. As an adult, he would liken his upbringing to a “strait-­jacket of middle-­class morality,” prefer

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ring the white bohemian and literary world to that of the black bourgeoisie.52 Nathan Toomer, Jean’s father, was a man of uncertain means. Pinchback suspected that Nathan was only after the Pinchback family money, of which there was little by that time, but Nina, enamored, married him anyway. Nina was twenty-­six, and Nathan, past fifty, had already been married twice. At first, things went well. Nathan bought a house and put the deed in Nina’s name. Nina became pregnant with Jean. Then Nathan disappeared, perhaps realizing that there was no Pinchback fortune. Nina and her young son moved back into her father’s house, where Pinchback became Jean’s surrogate father.53 Nathan’s desertion would have been humiliating among the black bourgeoisie (though his was far from the only such family to experience a desertion), and young Jean would probably have been aware of the family’s disgrace. Jean Toomer led a peripatetic existence in the 1910s, completing his secondary education and dabbling in higher education. He attended the respected M Street High School in Washington, D.C., later the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. After graduating, he attended the University of Wisconsin for less than a year, then the Massachusetts College of Agriculture at Amherst, then the American College of Physical Training in Chicago; he also took classes at the University of Chicago. In Chicago, which he reached in 1916, he began reading Herbert Spencer. In a foreshadowing of his gendered ideas to come, he delivered a lecture at Chicago titled “The Intelligence of Women,” which so o∏ended his audience, including the college’s dean of women, that he was forced to stop speaking.54 He left Chicago for Washington, D.C., and then New York, where he took a final set of classes at New York University and the City College of New York. A period of racial soul-­searching and ambivalence led him to start writing in 1920. He began to call himself “American,” explaining that he gained much artistic inspiration from his connections to an African American world, but that his own racial identity was fluid. At this point, he still spent time with black people. In fact, the major events of his personal life took place in the black summer resort of Harpers Ferry, where twenty-­eight-­year-­old Toomer fell in love with sixteen­year-­old Mae Wright. 

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A surviving letter to her concerns African American beauty and warnings of an “Anglo-­Saxon ideal.” White ideals of beauty, plus the pursuit of material gain for its own sake, easily overshadowed the equally beautiful appearances, minds, and emotions of black people. Unfortunately, he felt, African Americans themselves (and here he referred to the black bourgeoisie who summered in Harpers Ferry), perpetrated the worst insults against black people’s aesthetics. Because she was one of the few people “whom [he] can touch in a personal way,” and because of his own “unique racial and social status,” Toomer saw it as his “privilege and duty” to teach her how to construct her own self-­image that did not adopt white beauty standards.55 He also criticized conventional, economic standards of manhood, complaining that too many people labeled anything “crude” and business-­oriented as masculine.56 Although Toomer also wrote an impassioned letter to Wright’s parents, requesting their permission to court her, no further evidence of their relationship’s continuation exists. But his early observations of gender roles would remain influential in his later life. Toomer’s most formative experience as a writer occurred in 1921. That summer, he spent several months in Sparta, Georgia, as the acting head of a black agricultural and industrial institute. He returned full of language describing his experience and wrote much of what would become his famous novel, Cane (1923), on the train returning north at the end of his stay. It was, however, one of the last times that he would immerse himself in African American life. Cane became both Toomer’s greatest success and the scourge of his attempt to live an unraced life. Critically acclaimed but selling only modestly, Cane inaugurated the Harlem Renaissance, the flourishing of African American artistic and literary production in New York in the 1920s. After a reissue and revival in the 1960s, it is now one of the most famous novels by a black writer. By the mid-­1930s, he had become convinced that there were no Negro or white races but simply, as he put it, an “American” race.57 Therefore, he theorized “American” masculinity, and even global masculinity.58 Still, racial anxieties interlocked with gender anxieties in his writings; at the time of his most focused writing about masculinity and femininity, he was living in a community where his race un

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settled his relationships with his friends and neighbors. He had been born into a well-­connected family of the Washington, D.C., elite, and his novel Cane is widely recognized as a seminal work in the Harlem Renaissance, but in the 1930s Toomer sought to free himself from racial categories altogether. Ironically, the man credited as an example of supreme African American literary achievement was ambivalent about his racial identity. At this point he increasingly saw his black heritage as only one of several ethnic and racial threads in his ancestry. Not long after he published Cane, Toomer left the African American literary world for the much whiter one of the Greek-­Armenian spiritual teacher George Gurdjie∏. Toomer tried his best to distance himself from his black ancestry. He would list himself as white on his marriage certificate in 1931, and he refused to contribute to Nancy Cunard’s anthology of African American literature, explaining to her that he was not black.59 For ten years after the publication of Cane, Toomer remained involved in Gurdjie∏ ’s world, traveling to France several times to learn from the master, participate in his courses, and eventually teach others. In so doing, he left behind the Harlem Renaissance and, some have argued, his creative inspiration.60 He also acquired many of the ideas that he would use to justify his superiority as a man to women. Toomer took it upon himself to teach others about Gurdjie∏ ’s work, especially the women he was involved with.61 Teaching made use of Toomer’s natural charisma and magnetic personality and brought him an abundance of female admirers.62 In the summer of 1929, Toomer had an epiphany: all of his feelings and goals were related to the “ideal of the patriarch.” He realized that all of his e∏orts, and his very nature, were pulling him toward becoming a patriarch.63 He began to fantasize about leading a life where he had both financial security and a wife to shelter within it. He wrote about his romantic prospects in his journals as he traveled to and from France to visit Gurdjie∏. Worriedly weighing his options, he concluded that casual a∏airs did not satisfy his considerable sexual appetite. Having conducted three such a∏airs in two months, he was frustrated with periods of sexual feast and famine. The man, in his opinion, needed a steady diet of sexual release. The combination of sexual needs and the ideal of the patriarch led Toomer to the solu

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tion of marriage. He conceived of marriage as an undeniable need, because “my nature desires it.”64 Rather than continuing to work on African American–themed writing, he turned to questions of power and control along gender lines. As someone who did not play the role of financial provider, Toomer saw masculine authority as biologically determined. The responsibilities of masculinity included ensuring that naturally ordained gender roles governed the relations between men and women. Toomer fell back on reductive theories. To him, gender, unlike race, was not at all fluid and changeable. The masculinity that Toomer saw was fairly reductive, even for his time: men as hunters and providers, more rational and more intellectual than women. Women, in his opinion, were domestic, subservient, and irrational and had lesser critical faculties than those of men. He saw a major problem, though: women seemed to be trying to break out of these roles, and that was detrimental to society. He also claimed that masculinity and femininity were universal across racial lines. Toomer had been obsessed with gender for many years. Even casual readers of Cane will notice that his female characters are essentialized and exoticized.65 Through the 1920s and 1930s Toomer saw himself as an expert of sorts on gender. In some ways, he was ahead of his time, expressing interest in early forms of family therapy and models of communal learning. He documented at least one occasion when he acted as couples therapist to some friends, and paramount in his analysis of their situation was his emphasis that their gender di∏erences, or rather their obliviousness to them, was responsible for their marital strife. In fact, when his first wife, Margery Latimer Toomer, died after childbirth, her obituary noted that she was the wife of “psychologist” Jean Toomer. When Toomer had met Margery Latimer, he had thought that she could help him live out his dream of patriarchal marriage. Also a writer, Margery was white and immersed in New York bohemian culture.66 The two spent the summer of 1931 together in Portage, Illinois, in a communal living experience that she organized and Toomer led. The stated purpose of the experiment was to dismantle the false restrictions of civilization and to allow the residents to exist in a more elemental authentic state. Toomer’s secondary project was 

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Margery’s improvement and remodeling. Her insecure, emotionally volatile temperament contributed to her willingness as a pupil and her trusting surrender to Toomer.67 But their ensuing marriage was tragically short. Not long after the new couple arrived at their chosen home of Carlsbad, California, Toomer’s racial identity caught up with him. A reporter published a sensationalized account of their marriage, revealing that it was interracial and exposing the so-­called free-­love commune in Portage.68 The local papers in California and in the Midwest covered the scandal extensively, and even Time magazine sent a reporter to investigate. The Toomers received hate mail and racist literature, and for a time Margery’s parents were forced to leave their home in Portage to escape the furor. Then Margery died giving birth to their first child. Toomer’s response to single fatherhood illustrates much about his views of men’s roles within families. It simply never occurred to him that he could take care of his baby daughter (also named Margery) without a wife in his household. He temporarily abdicated his role as a father for Margery and left her with friends in Chicago. Although heartbroken over the loss of his wife, he seemed to take no comfort in the company of his daughter. His first attempt to realize his “ideal of the patriarch” had been ruined both by the reemergence of his racial past and by his wife’s death. He was unhappily wandering between the Midwest and the East Coast when he met his second wife, Marjorie Content, in 1934. She was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker in New York, and he met her though a network of bohemian New York artists, intellectuals, and writers.69 Importantly, when each had entered this world over a decade earlier, its male members had been consumed with the iconography and ideal of the New Woman while subtly preserving male privilege. A darker side of men’s anxiety to prioritize their own needs had accompanied the exhilaration of the birth control movement, woman su∏rage, and women’s economic independence. Despite the increasing power of feminism, women were still expected to subordinate their own independence to care for their husbands and children at home. New Womanhood did not yet possess a language to critique the ideal of domesticity; the spirit of adventure and innovation typically did not extend to leaving this ideal behind.70 Toomer 

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took this pattern to heart, cherishing the ideal of domesticity. Unlike his fellow bohemian men, however, he openly disdained female autonomy. As he had with his first wife, Toomer sought to improve Marjorie psychologically. However, he explained to her that she would never be and should not be intellectual, because that would go against her “feminine intuitive type.” It was more important for Marjorie to keep her “womanness” than to “give [herself ] to the world.” He warned her that too many contemporary women were becoming too individualized and losing the “specialness” and “privateness” that women should have. This resulted in the extreme condition, in his view, of women being able to do everything, and of men being unable to do anything for them. This destroyed the base of human life that, Toomer thought, was the “right relation between man and woman.”71 Toomer’s implication was that women should be happy within a domestic life where a husband was the sole decision-­maker. His expectations of his new wife reflected this, even though she owned the house that they occupied and her father’s money was the couple’s only source of income. Once he was married again, Toomer wanted his daughter with him. He collected Margery, who was now two years old, from her interim custodians. The newlyweds were faced with raising a child who was nearly a stranger to them both, but they tried to behave as though they had all been together for years. “Argie” (Margery Latimer Toomer) was to call Marjorie “Mother,” and Marjorie was to act as Argie’s primary caretaker.72 Toomer used not only his own but others’ relationships as a laboratory to test his theories. In a foray into couples therapy, he based his diagnosis and treatment on essentialized gender roles. He told his friends Charles “Chaunce” and Katherine “Tockie” Dupee that much marital conflict could be solved if only men and women understood their di∏erences and did not see their partners as intentionally obtuse. Men and women simply failed to understand each other’s basic natures. He set about showing this dynamic to the couple: “I explained to Tockie what the male-­nature, the man-­nature, wants to do for his woman — ​and what happens to man when the abnormalities of life cut across and violate this want. Her eyes opened. I saw her looking at Chaunse [sic] as if she had never before seen, certainly 

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never understood many things about him before. I could see something happening in her. Then I told Chaunce what the female-­nature, the woman-­nature wants to do for her man, how she wants to live — ​ and what happens to woman when the abnormalities of life cut across and violate this want.” It seems that Chaunce was unemployed after unsuccessfully trying to sell insurance, but Tockie was still employed and faced with returning home each day to her demoralized husband. The “wants” Toomer described, therefore, were for Chaunce to escape the feeling that “he wasn’t doing enough for Tockie” and for Tockie to stop doing too much for herself. Chaunce should not be threatened by Tockie’s paid job as a social worker, as long as Tockie respected his masculine needs.73 Toomer continued to develop his theories of marital gender roles after the couple moved to a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which they had purchased in 1936 using Marjorie’s family money. At this time the area was known as an artists’ and writers’ haven, and Toomer was intent on not just writing there but also undertaking a grand social experiment. This experiment was to follow the template of Gurdjie∏ ’s communal living and learning model from Fontaine­ bleau, France, where Toomer had spent some months in the early 1920s. Enabled by his father-­in-­law’s cash, Toomer bought the farm, assigned everyone chores, and set up an institute with grand ambitions for human development. Most of the people Toomer lived, worshipped, and socialized with were white; but his racial identity remained unresolved, and at times it was a source of discomfort. Indeed, Toomer’s anguish about his racial identity intensified. Although the Toomers’ interracial marriage aroused little overt hostility in Bucks County, there was some degree of racial anxiety in nearby Doylestown. Neighbors found him mysterious and a bit suspicious, partly because of his ambiguous racial status. Many participated in a neighborhood fiction about Toomer’s race, maintaining the pretense that he was East Indian even when they knew better. Toomer closed o∏ racial inquiries by being deliberately opaque.74 Jean Toomer wrote so much about gender roles in marriages at this time that it appears his new marriage to the independently wealthy Marjorie spurred him to justify his position of leadership within it. During a period of prolific writing between 1935 and 1940, 

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Jean wrote a substantial body of (unpublished) work on the meaning of marriage and appropriate relations between husband and wife. He was at work from 1935 to 1937 on two projects called “As the World Revolves” and “The Function of Man to Woman” that chiefly concerned relationships between men and women. The draft fragments from “As the World Revolves” explore the essential natures of men and women, the problematic violations of these natures, and the purposes of marriage. Jean’s beliefs about the distinct natures of men and women were encapsulated in a statement he handwrote on an otherwise blank sheet of paper: “Women are the allies of Nature. Men are the allies of God. Thus both God and Nature are represented in the human court.”75 This concept received a detailed exposition elsewhere in the manuscript. In illustrative sections of “As the World Revolves,” he theorized men as inherently creative, while women were limited to the basic biological desire to mate. Both body (women) and spirit (men) deserved recognition, though they were separate and manifested themselves in di∏erent sexes. Because women gave birth to children, they were made for “body-­life,” though they might occasionally stray into the realm of the spirit and “taste intellect.” Men, on the other hand, were required by “Great Life” to function in the “spirit-­life.” Therefore, both man and wife (and he does specify wife, rather than woman), live together, function in their own separate worlds, and join for “acts that require the union of two sexes.”76 Jean outlined men’s world in a section titled “The Hunter and the Farmer.” He explained that men possessed a basic impulse to hunt, and once they had hunted for and successfully caught a woman, they should turn their hunting instinct into an endeavor of cultivation. He believed marriage freed men from having to hunt for sex and could free their minds for higher pursuits (or at least that is what he had attempted to create for himself ). He theorized the married stage of men’s lives as analogous to farming and went so far as to say that the transition from single to married was not unlike the transition from nomadic to agricultural society. As farmers, men should cultivate food, women, and the world.77 Jean’s role for women was misogynistic. Women, he wrote, “want men genuinely to be their lords and masters. They want to be taken — ​wholly even sometimes ruthlessly taken — ​and they 

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want to be ruled.” Because men in the modern world are failing at this, some women have been forced to take on male characteristics and have been fooled into thinking that they no longer want to be treated as women.78 If, however, a woman is trained for marriage to a man occupied with the life of the mind (“a genius,” in Jean’s words), she will benefit. Jean thought that women possessed a “false self,” “individualism,” and “pride of independence” that blocked a deep relationship with their husbands. If successfully trained, they would discover and overcome their own egotism and thus develop healthfully as women and wives.79 In Jean Toomer’s opinion, modernity had unfortunately distorted these rightful gendered functions. For him, his bohemian peers’ modern idea that man and woman could participate in each other’s worlds led to much su∏ering. “Man” asked “woman” into his world, but woman did not really want to enter: she only pretended to and resented the pressure to feign interest in things “outside of her natural sphere.” Likewise, man lacked the courage and the social support to tell woman he hated “being dragged into her a∏airs.” This problem was man’s fault, because he had designed lives based on material things devoid of spirituality or intellect. Woman was left with a life lived solely in the corporeal realm. This tragic error had led woman to become more powerful than man, and man feared that, if he protested this state of a∏airs, woman would look to another man to satisfy her needs. Woman deplored the situation as well, because what she really wanted was to stop feigning enjoyment in science, intellect, and work outside the home. She su∏ered “because natural unions and natural divisions of labor have been abolished among the more ‘advanced’ members of Western Civilization,” who marched under the “blind banner of Equal Rights.” These trends had introduced so much confusion, he believed, that society was headed far beyond widespread divorce and toward insanity.80 Men’s and women’s violations of their essential natures had bred distrust between the sexes. Again Toomer placed the blame squarely on men’s shoulders, explaining that all men recognized in one another a lack of honor and principle. Therefore, an atmosphere of suspicion existed among men, who knew that their fellow males would tempt their women to infidelity (Toomer himself had betrayed at least one 

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friend by conducting an a∏air with his wife). Furthermore, men had developed a heightened sense of unpredictability in life. In a bald statement of his beliefs about men’s and women’s biologically determined sexual di∏erences, he wrote, “Each man has been a dog more than once in his own life. Hence he suspects that more than once his wife will be a bitch.” Men’s dishonor was not the only factor at work, however. Toomer also blamed the birth control movement. In his opinion, contraception deprived women of the discipline involved in childbearing. He mourned the loss of the sexual double standard, complaining that women were “now as free for vice as men.” He lamented, “They can fuck whom they want, and, at the end of each such assignation, do just as men, that is, wipe their organs, forget about it, and go on their way, untroubled by conscience, unworried by fear that their act of pleasure may have put a baby in their belly.” Toomer thought that women had not yet had the chance to develop a sense of sexual morality and that their “head-­brains” might never be strong enough for self-­control. Men, too, had not yet adjusted to the new situation of women’s sexual freedom (the implication was that they had not been able to bring women’s sexuality under control). Distrust, therefore, was an inevitable result of the loss of biological incentives to fidelity.81 In the interest of restoring wives’ and husbands’ proper marital roles, Toomer delineated a gendered division of labor. He did concede that the experience of marriage for men and women had some commonalities across gender. For instance, marriage advanced the journey toward self-­knowledge for both spouses. Partners became aware of their own psychological traits, both positive and negative, and of their own talents and abilities. Partners who brought out the worst in each other did not belong together. If beneficial e∏ects predominated, then the two would meet in spirit, and to the extent that the beneficence of marriage enriched the partners, the marriage had the capacity to improve the world. However, Toomer insisted that a marriage’s ability to improve the world depended on a gendered division of labor. Jean thought that the husband had a special talent to work for a cause greater than the individuals in the marriage, a cause he termed “Impartial Work.” The wife was best at relating to other persons; she facilitated recreation and rest, or “Personal Life.” 

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Men could motivate women to do Impartial Work, while women could motivate men toward creating Personal Life. Each partner was grounded in his or her individual area of expertise, however. Women should support men in their worldly endeavors, and men should lead women to self-­improvement.82 He summed up his theories on the purpose of marriage as a household of “virtual patriarchy.” The man was to be the head, the woman was to be his helpmate, and the man’s responsibility was to evoke certain “attitudes and feelings” in his wife and his children so as to foster the growth of all in the household. The man also “presides at the meal table,” and by this giving of actual food, he symbolizes more spiritual nourishment of his family.83 Man needed this authority in his family, and the consequences of failure were dire. Toomer thought that man, faced with a lack of power at home, would be driven into the outside world to look for power; he would attempt tasks too advanced for him. The result would be widespread incompetence: not only ine∏ectual husbands and fathers, but also ine∏ectual leaders and statesmen.84 No less than the fate of society depended on husbands’ authority. Toomer’s retrograde gender ideas went beyond those of his white bohemian peers and the gendered ideas of contemporary black scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier. The other intellectual men took female domesticity and men’s privileges for granted while publicly celebrating woman su∏rage and the New Woman. But Toomer’s ideas were frankly regressive. Using psychological, philosophical, physical, and spiritual arguments, he set out a rigid definition of patriarchy and compelling reasons why men were superior to women. The manuscript material reflects his theories about the naturalness of men’s and women’s di∏erences and the particular responsibility of men to maintain the upper hand in gender relations. Toomer sought to theorize across races and saw his perspective as unraced, despite a racial context that suggests otherwise. In contrast to his beliefs about the fluidity of race, Toomer regarded gender as inescapable. Therefore, regardless of a husband’s economic or racial status, his maleness entitled him to leadership in the family. Although Toomer and Frazier shared notions of husbands’ roles and authority, a significant di∏erence between the two was that Frazier assigned 

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masculine breadwinning responsibilities to husbands as a prerequisite to their authority, while Toomer did not. To Frazier, masculine authority was earned along with a paycheck, but to Toomer maleness alone was suΩcient to grant powers of family leadership to a husband. all of the above theorists illustrate that New Negro men held a variety of sometimes contradictory perspectives on what made appropriate black husbands — ​breadwinning, forceful manly aggression, dispassionate analysis, or biological superiority to women — ​ but they agreed that men should be in charge of the racial household and shared this perspective with many New Negro men. Too, all of them would have been familiar with the tension between respectability and updated gender roles. Though their conclusions came from their idiosyncratic biographies and their training as scholars or writers, and they would have witnessed recent changes in women’s roles, they all shared the same theory that men should hold more power than women. They all held this belief despite the significant financial support of their wives: the Messenger was partly financed by A. Philip Randolph’s wife, and Frazier and Toomer both married well. Such strong convictions suggest the tremendous power of the ideal of masculine authority. The uniformity of the belief that men should lead households and the race permeated the culture of the New Negro era and would have been impossible for everyday couples, especially upwardly mobile couples such as the Curwoods, not to notice.85 Such ideals confronted the changing ideal of women’s marital roles, and it is to these that I turn next.



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3

o Wiv es Negr w e N

Throughout the summer of 1937, James Curwood tried to convince Sarah to accept the role that he envisioned for her: a stay-­at-­home wife devoted to her husband’s comfort. In one particularly vivid version of his ideal, he wrote: I have known all along — ​every [sic] since I met you, that you are the type of woman who is best suited to love and be loved by your husband. I.E. [sic] you are fitted for home life and not a career. Hence my anxiety to capture you. You would of course acquit yourself admirably in any field [in which] necessity entered you, but you will make a much finer wife than you will a social or business executive. That is why I am anxious to get going myself. So that I can give you a home to fuss with and in which you can entertain your club friends, etc. You naturally need to be busy — ​it is your nature, but you actively need to be governed by you. You will make a swell club organizer in the church, and I am sure our members will adore you. You are so adorable. So it is all right with me if you wish to enter into domestic employment . . . for a year or so until our bills are disposed of.1

Her response, as she tried to rationalize her job with the Boston Urban League, was to invoke the necessity of advancing the race, an argument that she knew he would accept. In fact, she used uplift ideology to argue that she should work outside her home: “I want to spend my life in bettering the race,” she wrote, “i.e. bettering possibilities of the race — ​spiritually, economically, politically, etc. — ​I now have a chance to work on the economic aspect; later with you on the spiritual.”2 In her opinion, domestic service, while fitting James’s criteria for a job that would not develop into a career, was the last thing she wanted to do. She also rejected James’s restrictive vision of her as a socialite and clubwoman. Instead, she envisioned her professional endeavors on behalf of the race as working in concert with her role as a wife. Between the wars, many African Americans believed that married black women had three responsibilities: to themselves, to their families, and to the race.3 Most debate over wifehood centered around the appropriate balance of these three roles: Did service to husbands and families eclipse women’s attention to their own careers or interests? In the midst of women’s evolving roles in the interwar period, African American men and women attempted to define a modern role for black wives. Both men and women kept some notions of wifely domesticity, but others (mainly women) sought to drastically expand women’s public presence. The notion of striking a balance between domesticity and public activities was not new in the 1920s. Since the turn of the century, black women had been seeking professional work, bolstered by their families of origin and the expectation that they care for their communities. They had also assumed both paid and unpaid work on behalf of their families.4 In the 1920s and 1930s, however, New Negro wives found themselves negotiating changing roles for women in the wider American culture and, as seen in Chapter 2, dealing with the growing conviction that New Negro men needed the spotlight in public life while women should be confined to supporting roles. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 meant that electoral politics was no longer a legal connection between husbands and wives. For the first time, marriage was not a unit for governing Americans.5 In addition, after World War I, African American women 

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sought to continue their participation in the professions as the overall numbers of black professionals grew. Wartime jobs had not only brought more African Americans to the industrial North; they also allowed women of all races to work for more pay. Woman su∏rage brought a sense of opportunity and empowerment to would-­be women workers, as did the increased availability of contraception and divorces.6 Still, not all African Americans welcomed these changes. On the surface, New Negro men extolled the virtues of women, especially their wives, and assigned them to a supportive role. But those same men often belittled women’s demands for status. The old notion of the so-­called Women’s Era, that the fortunes of the race were tied to the fortunes of its women, gave way. At the same time, most of the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and the vast majority who received patronage and grants, were male.7 Not coincidentally, while black men were seeking to improve their status, some denigrated women’s growing political and economic power and predicted a black matriarchy. Others simply rendered women invisible. Others assigned women supporting, helpmate roles. Indeed, the ultimate supporting role — ​that of motherhood — ​appears on the frontispiece of Alain Locke’s The New Negro in the form of The Black Madonna, a medium-­brown woman with straightened hair holding a darker infant, suggesting that her husband, the father of the child, was darker than she (for more discussion of skin color in marriage relationships, see Chapter 4).8 This chapter begins with a discussion of men’s and women’s ideals of New Negro womanhood and the myriad ways in which New Negro women negotiated gender roles while striving toward a model of fulfilled wifehood. Fulfillment encompassed life both inside and outside the home. I then focus on the uncomfortable context of the Great Depression, when worries over men’s breadwinning abilities led to criticism of working wives. Nevertheless, black women were able to use the unsettled years of the Depression to expand their own possibilities. Finally, this chapter ends with a description of the life of Philadelphia lawyer Sadie Alexander, who was able to blend work and family into a fulfilling and full life. 

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New Negro Wives and Ideals of Women’s Domesticity Despite the present and past participation of middle-­class black women in paid work, many New Negro men (and men in general) recommitted themselves to the ideal of women in domestic roles. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia), for example, went so far as to make an explicit connection between racial purity and eugenic reproduction and women’s domesticity.9 Some, like E. Franklin Frazier, mistook responsibility for power and feared that working wives would upset the gendered balance of power in marriages. Others confused protecting black women with controlling them.10 Husbands might forbid their wives to work in a chosen profession or even become despondent when their wives’ careers went well.11 Though individuals were ambivalent about domesticity, stable married lives and supportive women were essential to the New Negro project. A 1923 editorial in the Messenger simultaneously extolled the spirit of the New Negro woman and made considerable demands on her. “Upon her shoulders rests the big task,” the editorial stated, “to create and keep alive, in the breast of black men, a holy and consuming passion to break with the slave traditions of the past; to spurn and overcome the fatal, insidious inferiority complex of the present, which, like Banquo’s Ghost, bobs up ever and anon, to arrest the progress of the New Negro Manhood Movement; and to fight with increasing vigor, with dauntless courage, unrelenting zeal and intelligent vision for the attainment of the stature of a full man, a free race and a new world.”12 The Messenger’s editors also asserted these fundamental di∏erences in other writings. In a Messenger article published that same year, Chandler Owen explicitly stated the di∏erences between men and women, arguing that men should focus on their wives, while women should focus on their children. “Women love children more, but men love women more,” he wrote. He also theorized that women were generally more faithful than men, expressed their feelings more, and were less “loose” in their choices of sexual partners.13 These ideas were borne out in A. Philip Randolph’s organization, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The Women’s Auxiliary of the Brother

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hood played a feminine supporting role to these endeavors, acting as consumers and housewives while men acted as breadwinners.14 In this climate of male dominance, women who did not adhere to the gendered script were sometimes ostracized. The censure of divorce in the climate of women’s changing economic roles could be loud and vociferous. Owen theorized in 1923 that women’s freedom from household duties increased the risk of marital infidelity. Modern inventions “lessen the time which a wife needs to give to the home,” he warned. And women’s growing economic independence from men, combined with the lessening need for women’s housework, loosened the binding interdependent ties of marriage and reduced the numbers of children born. Also, women’s greater time away from housework upset the balance of intimacy and separateness within the marriage. Just the right amount of contact — ​neither too little nor too much — ​would keep married couples happy with each other. Absence in itself was not a great danger to marriages, but a “too great propinquity, nearness, or presence of somebody else during this absence” was.15 In other words, women’s constant contact with other men in the workplace might undermine marriages.16 E. Franklin Frazier criticized relationships like his own: a middle­class marriage in which the wife held some economic power (his own wife was from a wealthy family, while he had grown up in economic hardship). He reserved his sharpest criticisms for such couples, from the 1920s to his inflammatory Black Bourgeoisie (1957). From all indications, Frazier was uneasy with his class status, and his socialist leanings led him to identify with skilled male laborers and the working class. Some of his discontent stemmed from his disapproval of racial accommodation, materialism, and isolation, which he saw as features of the middle class. And some of it likely came from the highly visible black women professionals who worked, he argued, solely to make more money to acquire more material goods. Part 5 of The Negro Family in the United States contains Frazier’s ambivalent analysis of how the middle and upper classes evolved in the context of urbanization, and his observations of gender relations among this black elite were not so rosy. In the northern city of migrants, as a wider range of occupations became available to African Americans, a new middle class based on certain occupations 

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emerged: businesspeople and white-­collar workers, professionals, and public servants. Many members were of mixed black-­white ancestry. According to Frazier, this led to “considerable confusion of ideals and patterns of behavior,” as people lacked the traditions of the old black elite families and “the folk culture of the masses” to rely on. Where the class markers of the old families were respectability and European “high” culture, the new “brown middle class” relied on personal achievement, in the form of consumption and income, as class markers.17 Now, he said, many women of the brown middle class worked for wages in order to maintain unrealistic consumption levels.18 Frazier’s problems with the middle class stemmed from his judgment that it had two interlocking shortcomings: it was overly consumption­oriented and it had distorted gender relations. Especially in cities farther north, husbands did not have proper authority as the sole breadwinners, and wives took jobs so they could buy frivolous objects like new cars, furs, and jewelry and could hire caterers for their parties.19 Sacrificing their rightful place in the gender hierarchy for the sake of a bourgeois status, they emasculated their husbands in the process and caused their marriages to stray toward moral deviance. Middle­class women colluded with capitalist exploiters and short-­circuited the growing class ­consciousness among African American men. Frazier also hinted that bourgeois egalitarianism in the brown middle class led to irregular sexual morals and extramarital partners. First he explained that status consciousness can sometimes involve keeping women out of the waged labor force. “Middle-­class Negro families,” he wrote, “reflect in their organization and behavior the diverse economic and social backgrounds in which they are rooted. In the economically better-­situated families the woman generally depends on her husband’s support, especially if she comes from one of the old mulatto families in which it is traditional for the wife not to work. Moreover, this is especially true in the South, where leisure on the part of the woman is more or less a sign of superior social status among middle-­class Negroes.”20 But he then disclosed that many of these couples had egalitarian relationships and did not follow the gender roles of the wealthiest members of the middle class. Some of them had unorthodox relationships. “On the other hand,” he warned, 

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“there is a fringe on the middle class — ​generally childless couples — ​ whose behavior approaches a bohemian mode of life. Husband and wife, both of whom are employed, not only enjoy the same freedom in their outside association and activities but, because of their so­called ‘sophistication,’ indulge in outside sexual relations. Although these people usually boast of their emancipation from traditional morality, it often appears that their actions are not based upon deep convictions”21 In other words, for these couples, egalitarianism was simply an excuse for lax sexual morality. Frazier was right that more middle-­class black wives were sharing economic power with their husbands. Increased access to professions was responsible for a small but steady increase in the numbers of African American professional women. But Frazier could not see the possibility that these women were sharing power with their husbands rather than emasculating them or causing sexual degeneration within the family. This fear of the emasculation of middle-­class men is very much the subtext of Frazier’s writings: egalitarianism would lead down a slippery slope to a loss of morals and the detriment of the black family. While Frazier devoted much of his writing to poor African Americans in desperate financial straits, his attention to middle­class families is crucial to understanding his arguments, because these people tended toward egalitarian relationships. And egalitarianism in marriage, he was sure, was a perversion of husbands’ roles within families. Other writers did not criticize independent women as harshly as Frazier did but nevertheless sought to reconcile models of male authority in marriage with women’s claims on self-­determination. Novelist Edward Christopher Williams belonged to this category. The female protagonist of When Washington Was in Vogue, Caroline Rhodes, is educated, fiery, and strong minded yet entirely feminine and, of course, beautiful. In other words, she is a classic New Woman, though sepia toned. Upon meeting her, Davy remarks that Caroline has “all the best and the worst points of the modern flapper” and finds her ideas about the “woman question” rather radical. He also describes her as “hard to control.” But he also seems quite smitten with her, especially her brown skin, her attractive feet, and her intellectual interest in 

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his books. And he seems to find fun in the tension between his more old-­fashioned ways and her “modern” ones.22 Apparently he feels the need to protest a bit against her rambunctiousness, but in reality he enjoys it. This New Negro woman has just enough self-­assurance and spunk to be interesting; but she is well-­educated and from a good family (though not trying to act white), so she is still a suitable person to flirt with and eventually marry. New Negro women paid homage to established gender roles, but they also expanded their influence beyond the domestic sphere. First, sometimes family finances dictated that they contribute to the household income. Many of them did so and managed to avoid domestic service: they shared their homes with boarders, took in sewing, and taught music lessons. Second, their community ethic demanded that they use what skills they had for the betterment of their communities and their race. Finally, some women insisted on using their education for service to their communities.23 The members of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters exemplified an approach of combining domesticity with public and activist work. They both celebrated women’s domesticity and inserted themselves into political and economic issues. They valued their status as wives, perceiving, as turn-­of-­the­century clubwomen had, that their status as housewives and not as workers was proof of their respectability. Brotherhood wives withdrew from the labor force, supported by the union wages the Brotherhood fought for. Both the men of the Brotherhood and the women of its auxiliary agreed that woman’s place was in the home, and to preserve this ideal, any income a wife might generate was called “pin money”— ​implying that it was not essential to running the household. The women of the auxiliary agreed that their citizenship rested in married home life with well-­employed husbands. But they expanded and organized their public and political activity. They developed trade unions and consumer education, and some branches even opened consumer cooperative stores.24 Reconciling customary gender roles with personal ambition could require some mental gymnastics. The writer Margaret Walker Alexander grew up believing that men and women had fundamental di∏erences, but that women could behave as men did, with aggres

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sion, pragmatism, and organization. She noticed that men, and here she cited Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, were typically organized on paper. If women possessed the same traits, interestingly, Walker Alexander then classified them as being “masculine”; in fact, she said that lesbians tended to be organized because of their masculine natures. Although she was not a lesbian, she mused, “Here I am a strange creature with a woman’s body . . . a man’s mind in a woman’s body. That’s a very peculiar thing to be.” Apparently it did not occur to her to change the definitions of “masculine” and “feminine” to align with her own experiences.25 While many New Negro wives sought to enhance, not redefine, their roles as wives, others deeply questioned the nature of husbands’ authority and male authority in general. They would not necessarily have called themselves “feminists,” but many women did believe in and act in accordance with feminism’s key tenets: they rejected sex hierarchies, understood that gender is socially constructed, and recognized that women are part of a social group.26 Feminists have often disagreed about whether equality with men equals sameness, or whether women possess uniquely feminine characteristics that should be recognized as di∏erent but equal. New Negro women, too, tangled over the meaning of equality, and many subscribed to di∏erent interpretations simultaneously. Some believed in the superior domestic skills of women, or at least in the necessity of their playing a domestic role; at the same time they demonstrated by word and/or deed that women’s intellect was equal to or even indistinguishable from men’s. African American women who took feminist tenets to heart sought to remodel marriage: it was the equal relationship between women and men, they argued, that was a hallmark of the modern Negro race and was necessary for racial advancement. New Negro Wives and Self-­Determination New Negro feminists, like New Negroes in general, were concerned with self-­determination, but they took a wider view of social justice. They could not separate their fate from that of other black and disempowered people, but they were also aware of the power that black 

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men held over them and the reduced choices they had because of gender subordination. This view played out in conceptions of marriage and wifehood. Many African American women thought that they could mold marriage to their need for self-­determination. Not only could they move marriage out of the way of their autonomy; they could even use it to enhance that autonomy. Becoming a wife was a choice to make in life — ​and it was but one part of a fulfilled life.27 Women who were deeply invested in self-­determination did not see their marital status as intrinsically opposed to their goals. Assuming that women’s intellectual and other skills were at least as good as those of men, they allowed that some women would choose not to have children and would instead devote more time to public activities. Wives who were inclined to self-­determination required personal autonomy and access to personal fulfillment outside that provided at home. Amy Jacques Garvey, wife of Marcus Garvey, is perhaps the best­known advocate of self-­determination for New Negro women. In the pages of Negro World, the publication of the unia, she warned against letting men circumscribe women’s roles. “The doll-­baby type of woman is a thing of the past,” she warned, “and the wide-­awake woman is forging ahead prepared for all emergencies, and ready to answer any call, even if it be to face the cannons on the battlefield.” She took black men to task, accusing them of appreciating white women more than women of their own race. By doing so, she argued, black men were failing at their own agenda of racial advancement, and she warned that if black men did not “strengthen your shaking knees, and move forward . . . we will displace you and move on to victory and to glory.”28 Jacques Garvey’s biographer, Ula Taylor, utilizes the concept of “community feminism” to explain Jacques Garvey’s views and place her in historical context. Community feminism has two key ideas at its core: that self-­empowerment is a goal and that black women’s activism is oriented outward, toward the race and community. Activists blend their roles, choosing from a combination of intellectual and activist work and wifehood and motherhood. Black feminist thought embraced loyalties to both race and gender, rather than one or the other. Taylor’s concept of community feminism means seeing femi

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nism as a stance not only for the self but also for the collective. The self and the collective interact and are not exclusive; the same is true of domestic and public roles for women. Taylor has discovered that Jacques Garvey insisted on her empowerment within the unia, and not merely for the sake of having her voice heard, although she did experience frustration when she was discounted or ignored. Rather, she thought it essential that she be given power and relevance within the organization for the sake of the work itself. She explicitly denied the intellectual inferiority of women and argued that women needed to step in where men were failing at helping the race.29 To the charge that home life would su∏er from women’s political ambitions, she argued that women’s involvement in politics would improve the world that the home was situated in. She wanted to help both men and women, but she was under no illusion that they needed identical assistance. Jacques Garvey was not the first to demand leadership positions for women, but hers was an important departure from older strategies. Anna Julia Cooper, for example, had envisioned female leadership at the turn of the century in A Voice from the South, a work that also called for black women to maintain strict standards of respectability. She argued that black women should become assimilated into dominant American notions of feminine propriety. Jacques Garvey, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with accommodating whites and, like other New Negroes, advocated a new militancy and fearlessness with less emphasis on respectability.30 Other, less famous women also chose to advocate for self­determined New Negro womanhood within domestic life. Educator Elise Johnson McDougald was another New Negro woman who sought a role beyond, but not in place of, domesticity for black women. She wrote an article for Alain Locke’s 1925 issue of Survey Graphic, the “Harlem Number,” which later that year became the basis for The New Negro. Called “The Double Task” in Survey Graphic and “The Task of Negro Womanhood” in The New Negro, McDougald’s essay was the only one in either publication that dealt specifically with black women. McDougald’s was one of only two portraits of named women that appeared in the volume. McDougald argued that 

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women’s identities were defined at least as much by activities outside marriage as they were by wifehood.31 What is notable about McDougald’s discussion of marriage is its paucity. Wifehood takes a distant third place to the roles of professional and mother. She applauded women’s professional achievements and the e∏orts of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority’s Lambda Chapter (New York) to introduce school-­age girls to a range of professional possibilities for women, such as dentist, doctor, interior designer, and journalist. McDougald was concerned with the economic standing of black women, and she called for a tribute to black mothers who were able to combine work and family. Clearly, in the words Arlie Hochschild would use more than sixty years later, McDougald was outlining a “second shift” for professional black women.32 While her terms of praise for black women implied that they were doing a great service to the race, her argument also carried an undertone of resistance to husbands’ authority. She outlined four classes of African American women: upper-­class, professional, trade/industrial, and domestic service. In discussing the women of the upper class, she noted that they were not expected to work and were chosen as wives based on their personal beauty. However, in her discussion of middle-­class women, she noted that many were forced to play two roles, climbing as professionals and still caring for children, since many fathers were absent. She specifically stated that black women’s feminism (and she used that word) was directed toward racial equality, that is, to helping the entire race. “The sex struggle,” as she termed it, should be subordinated to racial advancement. The examples she gave, of the National Association of Colored Women (nacw) and the National Council of Negro Women, aimed to show how those organizations could help the race. McDougald also delivered a verdict on the intraracial treatment of women, observing that frustrated black husbands take out some of their anger on those at home but that change was coming slowly. Black women and men are about equal, she stated, because on the whole black women have more education and thus have as much economic independence as men. Her implication, however, was that without this educational advantage, black women would be subordinate. Writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston also advocated 

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for women’s autonomy and self-­definition. Not only do the married female characters in her work have their own identities, hopes, and goals; they also look outside idealized middle-­class domesticity for this autonomy — ​and find it. Several of her published works allude to the multiple jeopardies of racism, sexism, and classism that black women experience.33 Her fiction’s characters experience unwelcome strictures placed on their behavior by black men. Unlike most of her New Negro feminist published peers, Hurston included a class critique of bourgeois gender roles. One year after McDougald’s essay appeared, Hurston published “Sweat,” a short story about Delia, a washerwoman in an abusive marriage.34 Delia’s husband had treated her well for about the first year of marriage, but then he began to cheat on her and squander his pay before household expenses were met. As a result, she had begun to take in washing to cover their living expenses, including paying o∏ their house. The charmless husband, in addition to neglecting to support his household, continually abuses Delia both verbally and physically. Neighbors disapprove of him but do nothing to help. This marriage fails to be to a contract between equals and is more like a prison. Delia herself finds a way out, through aΩrming her own desires and identity. When it becomes clear that her marriage will not be a source of fulfillment, she looks elsewhere, decorating her house and tending a beautiful garden. She also holds her own against her husband’s outrageous demands and voices her wishes that he change his behavior. Eventually, he brings a rattlesnake into the house as a pet, knowing that Delia is deathly afraid of snakes and hoping that he will scare her o∏ so he can move his mistress into the house. But the cruel joke is on him. He is bitten by his own snake, and before he dies, he sees that Delia makes no move to help him. Although medical help is too far away to reach in any case, Delia’s inaction shows that she rejects her assigned role as his helpmate, and she transmits to him the feelings she had previously ignored. He cannot help but notice that, as he has failed Delia, she deliberately fails him in the end. Hurston did not explicitly declare herself a feminist, but her writings expressed astute observations about gender and power, especially in the context of marriage. As Ti∏any Patterson has noted, “Gender issues that have become the subject of feminist scholars in 

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the past thirty or forty years are depicted as natural, age-­old facts of everyday life in Hurston’s work.” As Patterson points out, Hurston refuses to portray women as victims and instead shows them as autonomous actors.35 Hurston’s writings also show her perspective that neither gender is superior. They also imply that she saw gender as socially constructed, since both men and women in her writings perform a wide range of activities. Her women characters perform “masculine” activities; she herself travels and pursues her own ambitions.36 Some of Hurston’s most explicit musings on the connections between marriage and women’s autonomy occur in her chapter titled “Love” in her memoir Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Earlier in the book, she explains how her parents’ own marriage had been full of conflict and verbal, though not physical, abuse. Infidelity and its attendant anger plagued the Hurstons. One of her biographers has suggested that Hurston’s own reluctance to marry (which I discuss in Chapter 5) was based on observing her mother’s narrow options as a wife.37 Although Hurston did marry three times, she publicly shared her views on how marriage was problematic for women in her chapter on love. She wrote that, after a short-­lived starter marriage, she fell deeply in love with a man she called A. W. (in real life, Percival Punter). Although they were madly in love, their relationship was rocky because Punter could not reconcile his marital ideals with the considerable demands of her career. He begged her to leave New York City to become a housewife, but she wrote that “this was one thing I could not do.” Not only did she have commitments to her publisher and patron; she also “had things clawing inside of [her] that must be said” and felt that being a housewife would rob her of her own self-­expression. Hurston makes much of her ba∆ement that A. W. thought her work would make a di∏erence to their marriage, although she seems to have been well aware of exactly this power dynamic between men and women. Still, every time she traveled or could not spend time with him because of career commitments, their relationship was strained.38 She ends her chapter with the musing that she did not know what would become of their relationship. The message to her readers is clear: women should not have to give up their own interests and ambitions for marriage. All of these women, and most likely others who are not repre

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sented in the surviving archives, sought to blend their family obligations with commitments outside the home, whether paid or unpaid. They began from the premise that work, community service, and wifehood were by no means mutually exclusive and that women ought to seek personal autonomy. Depression Dilemmas: Wives and Work The Great Depression brought more wives of all races to waged work out of necessity. Not all welcomed this situation. True, family subsistence needs had to be met, and standards of living had increased, so one income was often not enough. Too, the gendered segregation of jobs that had evolved in the 1920s created opportunities for women in the next decade. Certain jobs seemed to require women, especially in the clerical sector, social services, and light industry, though racism and sexism closed whole sections of the economy to black women.39 Still, women experienced pressure to avoid waged work. Women’s gains in the labor market, which had seemed benign in the flusher times of the 1920s, now looked threatening, especially to middle-­class men. On the other hand, financial necessity allowed some women an opportunity to expand their activities outside the home. Thus a spirited (often mean-­spirited) debate began in the 1930s about the place of women in waged work. Many thought that wives should work to satisfy a clear economic need. Others feared the negative e∏ects of gender-­role inversion: breadwinner wives. Work might, according to naysayers, cause women to lose command of their womanly arts like cooking and sewing and, hence, their very womanhood. Children might be severely neglected. Married women workers might take jobs away from able-­bodied men. Employers responded to this debate by firing or not hiring married women, a practice that forced some women to lie when seeking a job. This was the case especially for high-­visibility jobs in schools, oΩces, and stores, where the public might experience the discomfort of seeing a married woman engaged in professional duties.40 African American men participated in castigating educated black women. Robert S. Abbott, the recently divorced editor of the Chicago Defender, wrote a ten-­article series lamenting women’s refusal to re

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main in their roles as ornaments in men’s homes. He held that more African American women should attend finishing schools than universities. Women with graduate degrees were “wholly unprepared to assume their duties as mistress of a household,” Abbott warned. These women “frown[ed] upon the biological functions of their sex and ignore[d] such basic aspects of society as marriage and the family.” Using the time-­honored method of criticizing the independent woman, he accused her of being a∆icted with the traits of “obnoxious masculinity”: she would dress poorly, withdraw from society, behave immodestly, and lack gentleness. Worst of all, she could only marry two types of men: an idiot (“a first-­class imbecile with the docility of an Egyptian ass”) or an e∏eminate man who would agree to perform such tasks as cooking and cleaning. Abbott’s tirade reflects both his pain at having recently endured a divorce and the generalized anxiety of men about women’s autonomous behavior.41 Unfortunately for Abbott, black women continued to expand their independence and options, whether economically or otherwise. Zora Neale Hurston wrote her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937, with a plot that showed possibilities beyond being subordinate to a husband. The novel follows the main character, Janie, through her girlhood and three marriages in Florida, showing how only her third marriage, to a man who loves her as herself, is fulfilling. The first marriage is arranged by her grandmother, a well­meaning but anxious guardian who wants her teenaged granddaughter to have “protection.” The chosen husband is an older man who owns sixty acres of land and has an organ in his parlor. However, Janie is discontented and lonely living with a man she does not love who demands that she do farm chores as well as domestic ones.42 A chance meeting with another man, who promises her a life of refined domesticity, provides her with a way out, and she takes it. This husband fulfills his promise and becomes mayor and developer of a small black town, helped in no small way by his light-­skinned trophy wife. But this marriage, too, fails to meet Janie’s needs. Her second husband believes that “her place is in duh home” and that, like children, chickens, and cows, women cannot think for themselves.43 He also prefers to keep her isolated and separated from the poor and working-­class residents of the town through nearly three decades of a stifling mar

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riage. Rebelling, Janie finally tells him that she is tired of suppressing her own desires and intellect for his sake. Her words are so devastating that he drops dead of cardiac arrest.44 Finally, Janie finds fulfilling love with her third husband, the laborer Tea Cake Woods. Consciously breaking with her grand­ mother’s ideal of a life of domestic confinement, she marries the younger Tea Cake for love. Although her new husband is initially embarrassed about his working-­class background and friends, Janie makes it clear that she would rather participate fully in his life. She even prefers to work alongside him in the Everglades picking beans instead of waiting at home for him. She discovers that, in a mutually respectful and a∏ectionate relationship, she is able to live for herself. ­Hurston implies that even when Tea Cake hits Janie, he is not abusing her; instead, he is responding to a “color struck” woman who wants to marry her own brother o∏ to Janie. He is showing that he, in fact, possesses Janie.45 To Hurston, an emotionally sustaining marriage is far more essential than material wealth or upward mobility. Her character Janie expands the realm of possibility of women’s proper places. Other New Negro women writing in the 1930s questioned the need to marry at all. Women who spoke from the perspective of being unmarried had valuable insights on woman’s place. One such feminist was Lucy Diggs Slowe, longtime dean of women at Howard University. Unlike her clubwomen predecessors, Slowe believed that women should advance through “modern life” because of their own self-­determined agency. In a 1937 Opportunity article, Slowe expressed dismay that the families of women college students still wanted them to be “adjuncts of man,” despite evidence that women needed economic independence from men. Consequently, most female students arrived on Howard’s campus imagining that they need only prepare for the world of wifehood. Slowe envisioned the role of colleges as developing female students’ “initiative and self direction” beyond a future as a housewife. This would require guidance services (including instruction on dealing with racist job discrimination) and making women aware that they had opportunities besides teaching and social work. In other words, even given the possibility of marriage, Slowe wanted young women to expand their intellectual capacities.46 

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Slowe herself never married, choosing instead a life partnership with a woman, Mary Burrill.47 Other women found that they could not reconcile marriage with personal autonomy, and they appreciated the independence they kept by remaining single.48 Pauli Murray, noted legal scholar, civil rights activist, writer, and priest, also questioned the domestic ideal for New Negro women. Murray contested woman’s place as much as she could as she came of age in the 1930s. As Doreen Drury has pointed out, “creating an independent life for herself ” in Murray’s case meant that Murray rejected the accepted behaviors and dress of upstanding Negro womanhood, including marriage, altogether. For Murray, four freedoms were essential: first, to live and to travel free from racial or gendered harassment; second, to freely choose a paid or unpaid career; third, to attain creative and financial independence; and fourth, to attain gender and sexual autonomy. In the 1930s, just after finishing her second year at Hunter College, Murray asserted those freedoms for some time as an unemployed, unprotected (by a man) transient woman on the roads and railroads of the Depression-­era United States. Murray chose to access these freedoms in a way that clearly transgressed feminine decorum: she adopted a masculine persona for many of her travels in the 1930s. Impersonating a young boy, with “knee-­length pants tucked into knee-­high socks,” “comfortable shoes,” short hair, and sometimes a sailor’s cap, Murray and her various traveling companions were able to avoid sexual harassment, leap more easily onto or between railcars, and sometimes even use men’s restrooms when necessity arose. Her masculine behavior and appearance opened up possibilities for travel and even gave Murray creative fodder for her writing; she produced a short story about a cross-­country freight-­hopping adventure that appeared in Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology.49 Merely being poor and needing to travel for free on freight trains did not propel Murray into assuming this persona out of necessity — ​ she clearly wanted to. Murray claimed in her autobiography that she passed as a boy only to protect her personal safety, but Drury shows convincingly that in her fiction, private papers, and photographs, Murray took evident pleasure in passing as male. At times, however, her actions caught her squarely between her intense desire to assert 

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her individual need for freedom and her equally intense devotion to her family, namely the aunt who raised her. Furthermore, Murray understood that at times she needed to look the part of a respectable Negro woman in order to gain access to institutions that would allow her to realize professional goals, and so she did. She continued to pass as a man, however, because she developed two other traditionally unfeminine longings: sexual and emotional attraction to other women and a desire to be a writer. These desires echoed those of other feminists with a modernist bent, such as Radcly∏e Hall.50 Although Murray’s strategy might seem extreme, it illustrates the pressures on black women. For a time, Murray unambiguously lived the life that she would have wanted to live had she not been constrained by the assumption of women’s domesticity. Her actions and strategies bring into sharp focus the kinds of desires that other women might have hidden from public view for fear of losing the support of husbands and families and jeopardizing what professional footholds they might have gained. Therefore, although the Great Depression inspired a backlash against working women and wives, it also was a time when some women were able to experiment with roles and gender expectations. Janie Woods married for love, while other women pursued fulfillment outside marriage and encouraged others to consider that option. In the next section, Sadie Alexander serves as an example of a wife who actively sought a balance between fulfilling both gender expectations and her own interests and desires. Sadie Alexander: Blending Work and Wifehood in the Great Depression Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (1898–1989) stands as an exemplar of combining wifehood with a vibrant public life in the 1930s. She turned her analytic skills, gained through study in economics, to feminist arguments about women’s work and its place in the economy. Like Slowe, she insisted that black women themselves should pursue opportunities for greater economic and political power. Alexander, a Philadelphia lawyer, used her education to direct other women to expand their options. She attended the University of Pennsylvania 

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for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees, earned in 1918 and 1921, respectively. She was the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in the United States, in economics. She bypassed the traditional black women’s curriculum in teaching or social work that so many of her peers followed. On top of this, she returned to the University of Pennsylvania for her law degree in 1927. Like Amy Jacques Garvey, she both embraced and transcended a patriarchal marriage; her husband, Raymond, was her employer. Every workday they traveled to their law oΩce together, discussing their cases and their days. His law practice did well, and he made enough money to always have a housekeeper for the family. However, Sadie was expected to — ​and actively agreed to — ​be in charge of the household.51 Sadie Alexander’s young life had been structured around a dual vision of the future that contained both intellectual and familial pursuits. She recalled that, when other family members asked what Sadie would do with all that education once she inevitably married, her mother said that a helpmate could never have too much education. This echoes the queries made of other accomplished women. When the aforementioned writer Margaret Walker Alexander (no relation) encountered a similar question, her emphatic reaction was that whether or not a woman married, she would still need a good education. In her words, “An intelligent woman has just as much right to her education as a man.” Although Walker Alexander’s parents encouraged all their daughters to obtain rigorous classical educations, she was the only one of her siblings to get married. As an adult, Sadie Alexander was prepared to balance her family and career. She was oriented toward the professional achievement of women. In the prime of her career she gave a speech to a chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority that consisted solely of praise for the educational achievements of black women. She listed women who had done well in art, education, business, and politics.52 Like the National Council of Negro Women, she saw education and professionalism as an index to the achievements and status of black women. But to Alexander, this did not mean deserting domestic responsibilities. In her later years, she criticized 1970s feminists, saying that they had lost the baby with the bathwater by wanting equal responsibility with men in all arenas, including finances. She preferred to have her 

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husband worry about the financial welfare of the household, and she felt that it was actually a privilege for him to do so. She was less concerned about breadwinning arrangements at home and more concerned with simply being able to do what she loved; luckily she was supported by her husband.53 Still, she thought that black women should pursue a fulfilling or well-­paid career for its own sake. In a 1930 article in the Urban League’s journal, Opportunity, Alexander urged black women to take advantage of industrial opportunities, with their better pay and shorter hours, and leave domestic work behind (unfortunately, in 1930, just as the article was published, industrial jobs were disappearing in the economic crisis of the Great Depression). She argued that women’s work inside homes, whether for their own families or for those of others, had little status in the new economic order. Instead, industrial jobs would place black women “among the producers of the world” and move them from “valueless home duties” to “the dignity of being a factory worker.” This required black women to think of their industrial jobs as part of their life’s work; they should not abandon their work when they married or had children. Doing so would reduce black women’s status and power in the workplace, Alexander argued, because they had less structure and incentive to unionize for collective bargaining.54 While increased status for black women was perhaps Alexander’s most ardent hope, she also saw it as helping the race. She argued that not only did black women’s industrial labor help their own families; it also helped all American families and the American economy. Alexander’s argument is worth repeating here: The opportunity for participation in industrial pursuits by Negro women means a raising of the standard of living not only of Negro families but of all American families. The addition of this labor supply aids cheaper production, which in turn means more goods can be enjoyed by a large number of people. In a more direct sense it a∏ects the Negro family, since another wage earner is adding to the family. The derogatory e∏ects of the mother being out of the home are over balanced by the increased family income, which makes possible the 

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securing of at least the necessities of life and perhaps a few luxuries. If her services in the home are to be rated by the man as valueless consumption, the satisfaction which comes to the woman in realizing that she is a producer makes for peace and happiness, the chief requisites in any home.55 Economic and psychological dividends would help the family and, by extension, the race. Alexander’s argument makes a strong case for an interplay, not a division, between work and home. Alexander also advanced her arguments when she spoke to various groups about woman’s “place.” In “The Emancipated Woman,” a speech most likely given in 1930, Alexander began by emphasizing the Industrial Revolution as a key rupture in history that demanded a new role for women. Hers was not a Marxist analysis, for she saw this revolution as the genesis for the “Emancipation of Women,” not as a force that would subordinate the work of women in the proletariat model. According to Alexander, when steam and water power began to replace women as the force behind spinning threads and making clothing, “the confinement of women to their homes” as sources of labor “became a thing of the past.” She ignored the fact that the Industrial Revolution increased the gendered divisions of labor.56 Nevertheless, she saw potential for women’s paid work to be a source of autonomy and emancipation. She saw evidence for this idea in the backlash: the social arguments that women’s waged work provoked over the conditions under which women should work (protective legislation), over the supposed loss of “morals” that would come about from women’s paid work (perhaps irregular sexual relations), and the dangers to family life (through the postponement of marriage and birth control). On this last point, Alexander conceded that changes were occurring in family life, such as the necessity of children to “rear themselves” and the fact that the divorce rate was rising, not because of marital infidelity but because women now had the financial ability to leave a degrading relationship. Alexander then made a direct connection between economic equality and political power, naming economic freedom and World War I as the sources of the Nineteenth Amendment. But that amend

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ment was not suΩcient on its own as a guarantee of equality and power. Emancipation, she argued, does not come automatically by decree; individuals must also claim freedom for themselves. Even the acts of taking a job and voting would not in themselves cause the internal changes in women’s outlook that would create true emancipation. Only the “Emancipated Woman,” whose perspective was enlightened, would be able to truly claim this power. These women would consciously vote African American women and men (in that order) into public oΩces for the overall good of the race. “If the Italians can put a Judge on the Common Pleas Bench — ​why can’t the Negroes?” she challenged. Similarly, emancipated women recognized the need to develop not just economic self-­suΩciency but economic power. Again she compared black people to another group. She argued that Jews were represented in the judicial and legislative branches of government because of their comparative wealth and that black people must develop similar economic power. Emancipated women would forgo the cinema and frivolity for the purpose of building wealth. Finally, Alexander echoed the third tenet of modern feminism that Nancy Cott outlines: women should use their economic independence to allow time for networking and connecting with other women, both black and of other races.57 “Wide contacts are [one of the] earmarks of an emancipated woman,” she insisted, and the “emancipated woman is a person of wide vision, tolerant disposition and cosmopolitan nature.” Wide contacts would allow the more complete development of ideas that would advance the causes of black women and all black people on their own terms. Thus black women would not have to accept the ideas and agendas of white women who had the advantage of an arena of debate. In other speeches, Alexander connected black women’s gender to their race. In a 1934 speech to the Baltimore Urban League, Alexander insisted that an assessment of the economic status of black women echoed the economic status of all African Americans.58 She firmly believed the nacw’s philosophy that “a race can rise no higher than its women.” And the fact that women held low-­status, low-­paid jobs in only a few industries and were so overrepresented in domestic service suggested to her that all African Americans possess low eco

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nomic status. After all, many of these women were in low-­status jobs because black men themselves had little economic status. Alexander blamed women’s low wages for a multitude of problems, including economic destitution, juvenile delinquency, and malnourished children. The jobs that were available to them, such as cleaning up in tobacco factories or working on farms using outdated and backbreaking methods, were full of occupational health hazards. And the Depression-­era cutbacks in the industries that employed large numbers of black women left many of them unemployed and on relief. Lack of employment prospects for black women had taken a toll on black families. Since the families had little wealth at their disposal and lived o∏ their incomes, being unemployed was particularly hard and led to the breakup of families. Men, already likely to be unemployed, often left and moved into public assistance shelters. Children were often taken by social services, and women found themselves working for only room and board in private homes. Alexander had a vision of economic justice. She proposed that New Deal legislation take black women into account by instituting a code to protect domestic workers. She reasoned that if other industries had a fixed wage that covered the cost of living plus some funds for leisure activities, why should domestic servants be any di∏erent? But in this speech she also betrayed her assumption that men would be the chief breadwinners, an idea she made explicit in her oral history interview some years later. This assumption suggests that though she was still a feminist, she blended social and political feminism. She saw a gendered division of labor for men and women but also, in the essay described above, argued that women should be very involved with leadership in politics. Although her ideas did not become New Deal policy, she had managed to bring her ideas about black women’s economic parity into public life. Alexander’s was not a fairy-­tale life of e∏ortless symbiosis between work and family. Later in her life, she found out that her daughters sometimes resented her busyness. She sent them both to the private Putney School so that they would be admitted to good colleges, but they apparently perceived this as an abandonment. She says little more about it.59 

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African American women historically have understood their lives to contain three responsibilities: to themselves, to their families, and to the race. They sought not to antagonize men and demand rights from them but, rather, to explain how their increased power and autonomy would help the community. Despite much evidence that African American women have a long history of politicking and other activities outside the home, such activism often occurred in spite of gender-­based discrimination within institutions, movements, and households. New Negro women developed feminist critiques of this discrimination in multiple venues: through their decorous behavior and public activities, through speeches and writings, and through achievement itself. Whether within more traditional gender roles or outside them, New Negro feminists worked to increase women’s share of power for their own good and the good of the race. They did not always do so in public speeches or writings, but by their words and deeds they demanded recognition of their personhood. They advocated a blending of family, career, and self-­determination. While Sadie Alexander was lucky enough to have a husband who supported her ambitions, Sarah Curwood was not. Curwood, too, felt a strong sense of duty to both black men and black women and was not interested in claiming male household roles for herself. All she wanted was to realize her dreams and ambitions and to help the race. But her husband had other ideas. He preferred that she not work outside the home or, if it were financially necessary, that she do domestic work. But Sarah Curwood, educated in economics at Cornell, quietly insisted. She took her job at the Boston Urban League, a branch of the same organization that published Opportunity, and told her husband that she did so to help the race. He was not pleased, but he allowed her to continue her work there.60 It is to the intimate negotiations over marital divisions of labor that the next chapter turns.



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4

rd Mobility a w p The Ev fU eryday Challenges o rried Cou a nd M a y t i nt Class Ide

ple s

The challenges of upward mobility for a person of any race are substantial. Acquiring an income, building wealth, and exhibiting the appropriate trappings of the comfortably well-­to-­do can take a lifetime of striving, or longer. For black Americans hoping to be a credit to their race in the first half of the twentieth century, these challenges were magnified. Economic discrimination in work, education, and financial institutions defined Jim Crow America and reduced black couples’ chances to build wealth. Reduced buying power and exclusion from the gathering places of the white middle class closed the recreational and social avenues open to other upwardly mobile citizens. African American couples were required to define their own markers of class status and mobility.1 As previous chapters have shown, husbands’ and wives’ roles were key markers of class standing for African Americans (and indeed all Americans). In addition, institutions such as black-­owned or -­created popular culture and labor unions enabled the process of self-­definition. And individual black Americans undertook to delineate men’s and women’s marital roles. All of these, however, were versions of ideals. Everyday couples tried

to enact the ideals while living discrete, idiosyncratic lives. Attempting to live up to ideals sometimes led to fulfilling expectations — ​and sometimes did not. In this chapter, I explain the workings of two crucial markers of class status within private life: skin color and male breadwinning. I then describe how both played central roles in the marriage of the Curwoods. Skin Color in Marriage Relationships For African American couples in the 1920s and 1930s, skin color was still, as it had been since slavery, a vivid visual marker of status. Although some black people deplored intraracial stratification based on color, it nonetheless could be a route to upward mobility. In the self-­conscious days of defining themselves as New Negroes, members of the professional and middle classes pretended to ignore the importance of skin color within their own marriages and families while they did their best to engineer the lightening of succeeding generations. These same elites looked down on poorer, darker African Americans while simultaneously acting as if they represented the interests of all black people.2 The reality of life as an African American, no matter how learned or sophisticated, was that race and skin color permeated the most intimate of relationships. In a book by the same title, Kathy Russell and her coauthors describe the “color complex” as a form of intraracial discrimination. They note that in the past, light skin signified more prestige, so lighter African Americans, who had more wealth and power, rejected darker ones.3 Images in popular culture presented lighter skin and more European features as beauty ideals. Advertisements for African American beauty products made clear connections between light skin, economic success, and women’s sexual desirability.4 As a result, skin color connected intimate relationships to the e∏ects of racism. The privilege attached to lighter skin color that upwardly mobile African Americans sought often became a burden for black women to bear. The desire of men to marry lighter women represents a convergence of sexism and racism: the lighter a woman’s skin tone, the more she was seen as feminine and sexy.5 Some midcentury scholars remarked on this: in the 1950s, Melville 

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Herskovits documented the persistent pattern of African American men marrying women lighter than they were.6 Like Herskovits, E. Franklin Frazier noticed darker men marrying lighter women. He theorized the connection of skin color to class status in The Negro Family in the United States. He speculated that, as a wider range of occupations became available to African Americans, a new middle class based on certain occupations emerged: businesspeople and white­collar workers, professionals, and public servants. Importantly, many members were of mixed black-­white ancestry.7 As I described in Chapter 2, Frazier thought that the new brown middle class relied on personal achievement in the form of consumption and income as a class marker. However, members of that class also recognized skin color as a status marker. Frazier noticed that dark men often left less well-­to-­do families in order to attend college, where they met the light-­skinned daughters of the “old families,” the old black elite.8 Thus these dark men ascended the ranks of class. In fact, Frazier himself married a very light woman from a prominent, light-­colored North Carolina family. A few New Negroes, daring to broach the subject, lashed out at intraracial colorism. When Washington Was in Vogue is one of the few examples of popular culture that explicitly addresses skin color. The hero of the story, Davy Carr, criticizes the “pigmentocracy” of the black elite circles in Washington, D.C., that he moves within. Early in the novel he remarks on the prevalence of light women (who could all pass for white) married to darker men. He notes that men discriminate against women who are the same color as themselves in favor of lighter mates. And those same light women discriminate against darker women. They eschew direct insults, however, in favor of indirect humiliation. Davy watches a group of light women conspicuously discuss how they patronize white establishments, and one of the lighter women asks a darker one if she has been to the same place. Of course the darker woman must admit that she has not. The exercise is designed to point out the privileges of lighter skin and arouse envy.9 Carr’s best female friends are both brown women, whose beauty he claims he is not too shallow to see. But many other New Negroes participated in colorism. For example, when her daughter became engaged, Gladys Walton wrote to her 

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E. Franklin Frazier and Marie Brown Frazier, later in life. E. Franklin Frazier Papers, box 131-­141, folder 6, Manuscript Division, Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

husband, Lester A. Walton, U.S. minister to Liberia, that the darker skin of their daughter’s fiancé was not a concern. “While he is brown­skinned,” she wrote, “he is very nice looking and has both colors on his side, so the children will be O.K.”10 Even couples who were focused on racial justice still felt and acted on the hierarchies of skin color within their own families and marriages. Perhaps there is no more ironic example of this than the marriage of Marcus Garvey to Amy Jacques Garvey. That Amy Jacques Garvey, who was light-­skinned, did not marry up in color led to a curious dilemma. She was forced to negotiate between her dark, if famous, husband and her upper-­class Jamaican family and social circle that prided itself on looking nearly white. In Jamaica as in other Caribbean countries, intraracial stratification by skin color was more institutionalized than in the United States. Jacques Garvey’s dilemma was embodied in a comment from a childhood friend upon their meeting on the street for the first time in several years. Remarking on Jacques Garvey’s infant son, the friend said, “What are you doing with this little black baby?” Implicit in this remark was the assumption that women of Jacques Garvey’s color and class were expected to marry men who were similarly light and therefore have light-­colored children. Instead, Jacques Garvey had married a famous, but dark, man, directly contradicting her class’s protocols. Later, her sister would aΩrm that Jacques Garvey’s choice of a husband would have been forbidden by their father had he been alive at the time of the marriage.11 In contrast to the color and class system in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia) sought to aΩrm the beauty of African physical features and dark skin. Whiteness was seen as suspicious and even evil. According to Marcus Garvey himself, pigmentocracy and the upper-­ and middle-­class black people who perpetuated it were guilty of “falsity and treachery” against their darker peers. Nevertheless, Marcus had a fascination with Amy’s long, “good” hair.12 He certainly was not unaware of the fact that the woman in a couple carried the burden for beauty and physical attractiveness more than the man did, and that beauty was connected to skin color. And Amy observed that, in her social circle, the “concept of skin-­color distinction, and raising one’s color by marriage dies hard with our people.”13 The Garveys’ experience 

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suggests that by no means was colorism absent from even a professed admirer of blackness. Direct discussion of skin color between lovers and spouses in this period seems quite rare. In the late 1930s, newlyweds Margaret Morgan and Charles Lawrence, from Vicksburg, Mississippi, experienced the discomfort of an unacknowledged but all too real pigmentocracy. Both partners were from respected families in Vicksburg’s black community: Margaret was a minister’s daughter, and Charles was the son of teachers at the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute, twenty-­five miles southeast of Vicksburg. Margaret would attend Cornell University with Sarah Curwood in the mid-­1930s, and the two were the only black women in the college. Charles and Margaret did not speak of color within their marriage, even while Margaret’s family of origin obsessed about the subject. Her mother and aunts all had light skin and red or brown long hair and could pass for white. Margaret’s maternal grandmother, “Mom” Margaret, was tremendously proud of her daughters’ fair skin and feared that they would darken the family line by marrying darker men. In the words of Margaret’s biographer, Mom Margaret taught her daughters, “Black was bad. Black was devious. You couldn’t trust black.”14 Alas, Mom Margaret’s fears were confirmed when her daughter Mary, Margaret’s mother, married the dark brown Reverend Sandy Morgan. Mom Margaret responded by throwing a teacup at her newly married daughter. In fact, all of the daughters eventually married darker men. As a result, the death of Margaret’s younger brother, “Candy Man,” while still an infant had a particular tragic poignancy. Candy Man had looked white, with fair skin and golden curls, and was Margaret’s parents’ hope of having o∏spring that transcended Sandy Morgan’s darker skin. His death carried not only the grief of losing a child but also the grief of losing a fair-­skinned child.15 In the case of Charles and Margaret, the usual configuration was reversed: the husband was lighter than his wife. By marrying a husband who was lighter than she was, Margaret was aware that she had married well. Margaret’s choice of a husband relieved and gratified her maternal relatives immensely. “They were glad he wasn’t black,” she remembered, “I had redeemed myself finally, I think.”16 Yet all of these approvals and anxieties went unspoken. Margaret and Charles 

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never discussed skin color, even though their relationship was typically honest and open. Perhaps this was because Margaret had unhappy memories of the rage and anger that skin color could bring to a marriage. While Margaret was a young child, the frequent conflict between her parents could, at its worst, boil over into color antagonism. Whatever the subject of the argument, Sandy’s underlying rage stemmed from his wife’s intense and often exclusive relationship with her mother and sisters. Sensing the connection between his color and their exclusion, he would mutter through clenched teeth, “Confound it, you white bitch!” when his anger flared the highest.17 Perhaps, too, the Lawrences did not discuss skin color because it was the elephant in the living room of the middle-­class world they moved through. Years after her marriage, Margaret recalled that “there were jokes about hair in [Charles’s] family, but it was a serious issue.” In a town like Vicksburg, Mississippi, skin color was important as a marker of status. For example, although Margaret’s skin was brown, her straight hair, scholastic achievement, and respected family won her a reputation as “light-­skinned” in the town. She also felt comforted because, although Charles was very light himself, he was the darkest of his siblings. This somehow took pressure o∏ Margaret and allowed more marital closeness. But she never did ask her husband directly how he felt or how his family felt about his marrying someone darker than his own family.18 As the Lawrence family’s experience shows and as Zora Neale Hurston points out, it was not always preferable for men to marry lighter. Hurston’s own father was light (and was referred to as “dat yaller bastard” by his mother-­in-­law), and her mother was dark.19 She explained in a 1934 essay that this was a common pattern in some southern communities. Still, she acknowledged that in some places in the South, and usually in the North, dark women did not marry elite African American men. Such colorism also filtered down to poor and working-­class black people, she noticed.20 Hurston would explore the psychological damage that colorism could do in her 1925 play Color Struck. In that play, Hurston’s dark-­skinned main character has so internalized color prejudice that she sabotages a promising romantic relationship.21 These examples suggest that most couples and individuals pre

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ferred to leave hierarchies of skin color out of the conversation. Perhaps one reason for this was the history of shame within families about sexual powerlessness: many of the genes for lighter skin had come from sexual assaults by white men. But another reason is the irony of discrimination on the basis of skin color among a group of people who considered themselves racially enlightened. Indeed, both kinds of enlightenment were interlinked and important to New Negroes: that of skin and that of politics and the mind. Acknowledging the importance of skin color in mate selection and within families might somehow have uncoupled this association. However, class divisions created another category of intraracial stratification and tensions within marriages. The ideal that men would make enough money to be family breadwinners met with a reality of uncertain employment, low wages, and women’s participation in paid labor. Husbands, Breadwinning, and Everyday Couples The gender role ideals described in the previous two chapters conflicted with each other and were diΩcult to implement — ​and that left individual couples to work out the marital divisions of labor for themselves. Most tried to maintain the model of the male bread­ winner described in Chapter 2, but they also had to consider economic reality and the individual situations of each partner. Some husbands could not find or hold jobs that paid a family wage; some wives strongly desired a career or had skills that could bring in significant income. Thus, conforming to the male breadwinner ideal was often harder than expected. Even for members of the middle class, financial concerns arose from the expectation that husbands had to be the sole breadwinners. Marital problems often arose when men did not fulfill their economic role or when wives were too economically independent for their husbands’ liking. Then and now, finances and financial trouble were extremely frequent sources of conflict within marriage. Amy Jacques Garvey, who had carefully outlined men’s and women’s responsibilities in her Negro World writings, was deeply disappointed when her husband, Marcus Garvey, failed to provide adequately for her and her children. Moreover, when the couple’s children encountered medical problems, his financial instability had 

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devastating e∏ects on the family’s health and well-­being. Marcus had, in part, married Amy not only to manage the household’s income but to help him oversee the unia as well. In practice, this working partnership caused considerable stress for Amy as she struggled to make financial ends meet while taking orders from a husband who tolerated no dispute of his authority. Amy’s disillusionment is evident in her description of her life during Marcus’s jail term from 1925 to 1927 and his subsequent release. After clandestinely meeting with her husband during his prison transfer from New York to Atlanta and taking his orders for running the organization, she returned to New York anxious to sort out the couple’s financial a∏airs, including paying rent and legal fees. But when she went to the bank, she discovered they had only eight dollars in their household account. To cover their expenses, she would have to take on the breadwinner role by performing heroic feats of organizational fundraising. Marcus Garvey, for his part, seemed oblivious to the overwhelming burdens he was placing on his wife, and he sent demands for expensive items from Macy’s and Gimbel’s. He also required her to edit a second volume of his speeches and writings (she had completed the first one in 1923).22 She exhausted herself to finish the volume and presented it to him triumphantly, but instead of thanking her, he told her to undertake a massive publicity campaign and send hundreds of copies to politicians.23 Relations between the two deteriorated further after Marcus was released from prison and continued to require that she fulfill both the breadwinner and helpmate roles. He was immediately deported and sent back to Jamaica. She stayed in New York to finish business and pack up the household. He wired her for money to buy a house, which he did, and then anxiously told her to hurry up with the packing and shipping process. Amy was overwhelmed with the task. Marcus was an avid antique and book collector, and the many delicate items were prohibitively expensive to ship. When she explained this to him, he instructed her not to complain and to make haste.24 When Amy arrived in Jamaica, exhausted and disappointed that the private vacation that Marcus had promised did not materialize, Marcus “arranged [the furniture] just where he wanted it. I was allowed to sort 

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and classify the books, for which shelves were built.”25 Amy’s pique, evident in these unusually unflattering sentences, was to appear more and more often from this point on. Her anger grew not only at the ceaseless demands but at his inability to maintain a steady income. The Garveys were not the only couple who had to work at maintaining a gendered division of labor. The New York journalist and diplomat Lester Walton was determined that both his wife and daughter would always be able to rely on a husband as a provider. He himself knew that this could be very diΩcult. In 1930, he was between jobs and struggling to support his family. Encouragement came from his own mother. “Remember this,” she wrote, “you are the bread winner and would be most miserable should you have to depend on Gladys and the girls for help.”26 Several years later, Lester sought to make sure that his daughter’s husband would be able to provide financially for her. When his daughter Gladys (“Sister”) unexpectedly fell in love and got engaged in 1937, his first concern was that her fiancé, Charles, was able to support a wife. After receiving two airmail letters from the starry-­eyed couple at his diplomatic post in Liberia, Lester telegraphed, “I feel it is my duty to learn more about a prospective son-­in-­law before conscientiously giving approval. Is he in a position to support a wife? Is he steadily employed with an assured income or is he building air castles? If he can provide you with a comfortable home of his own I do not oppose marriage.” However, Lester was not at first convinced that this was the case. When he was told that Sister’s fiancé sold class pins, he wondered how he was supporting himself during summer vacations.27 In response, his wife, Gladys, and Charles sent a telegram that was essentially a résumé and description of business prospects. Gladys wrote, “You should know that I would not give my consent to Sister’s marry­ ing unless I had proof that Charles could support her[.] He is connected with Loverture jewelry manufacturing company of New York of which Kenneth Bright that owns Lafayette Property is President[.] He is not selling pins during time schools are closed but already has contracts for graduation pins from schools in his territory[.] You need have no fear for your daughter’s future at any time[.]” Charles wrote in the same telegram, “Aware of the implications of marriage[.] Love Gladys too much to take unnecessary risks[.]” He went on to 

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give the occupations of his parents: his mother was head of the English department at a high school in Houston, while his father was a school principal in the same city. He also described his own educational background (Fisk College) and his previous employment history with the wpa.28 In response to this satisfactory information, Lester Walton gave his consent. He cabled back his instructions for how to word the wedding invitations, along with a list of guests to be invited; it included the Beardens, the Du Boises, the Powells, Mary McLeod Bethune, and other prominent African Americans.29 To him, the top priority was to marry his daughter o∏ to an appropriately middle-­class man and to provide the appropriate accoutrements for the wedding. In some cases where husbands were able to fulfill the bread­ winning role, problems arose when husbands and wives di∏ered over how much paid work wives should do. The actress Fredi Washington and her husband Laurence Brown hit a snag early in their marriage when Washington was filming on location in Jamaica. The producers of Run Little Chillun, a play in which she had already starred in New York, sent her a telegram saying that the show would open in Boston immediately upon her return. Anticipating Brown’s dismay, she wrote to him, “Steady your nerves now, I’ve got to tell you something which I’m afraid you’re not going to like so well but I’m in it and there’s nothing I can do about it since it involves my word and my honor.” As she explained, she felt an obligation to the rest of the play’s cast and crew to appear in the show because their sacrifices had advanced her career: “I owe something to those people who worked so faithfully in the show last season. Sometimes they only received two or three dollars a week when I received my full salary.”30 Although Brown’s response does not survive, Washington’s next letter to him indicates that he was indeed very angry. Apparently, he asked her why the show needed her and could not use another actress, and he said that distance could ruin marriages. He also chided her for making a decision without him, saying that he would not do the same to her. Washington remained steadfast. She reminded him that she had signed a contract for the show before they were married, and as for his fear that their relationship would su∏er from the distance, she replied, “I expect your love and mine to be strong enough, endur

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ing enough to bring us out on top. Its [sic] only lukewarm love that spoils with the slightest opportunity.” Finally, she reminded him that she would have plenty of time on her hands to spend with him after this final obligation. Cleverly, she cast her actions in terms of her own personal integrity and desire to do what was best for their marriage as well as herself.31 At least two of Zora Neale Hurston’s three marriages and several romances ended because her career ambitions were her first priority. Hurston deeply loved Herbert Sheen, a medical student in Chicago, but once they exchanged vows in 1927, she second-­guessed her decision. She spent a scant three-­day honeymoon before starting back to work and sending Sheen back to Chicago. Hurston was far more interested in her writing and research activities than in fulfilling the role of a doctor’s wife. They divorced in 1931. Many years later, Hurston wrote to her ex-­husband that she believed marriage to be a protective institution for mothers and children, and that she had had no desire for this protection when they were married.32 Hurston also appears to have been more interested in her research and writing activities than in financial stability; while her education and occupation placed her in the middle class, she was poor at the end of her life. Hurston fell in love again, with Percival Punter, whom she met in 1932 and began to see romantically in 1935. He was a twenty-­three­year-­old graduate student, and Hurston was forty-­four (although she claimed to be ten years younger). Her relationship with Punter was more passionate than the one she had with Sheen, but she experienced an even greater tension between her career ambitions and Punter’s demands on her. Punter was heavily invested in the masculine ideal of the provider and, as Hurston put it, “stood on his own two feet so firmly that he reared back.” On one memorable occasion, he became irately o∏ended because Hurston o∏ered to lend him a quarter and inadvertently insulted his manhood, implying that he could not “do for a woman.” On another, he walked out in anger when Hurston had to cut short a date because of a literary obligation. He pleaded with Hurston to stop working and become his housewife and was mystified that she would not. In turn, she could not fathom why Punter could not see that she could love him and continue her career at the same time. “My career balked at the completeness of his 

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ideal,” she recalled. “I really wanted to conform, but it was impossible. To me there was no conflict. My work was one thing, and he was all the rest. But, I could not make him see that. Nothing must be in my life but himself.”33 Hurston took several leaves of absence from the relationship, only to return each time to find that the conundrum still remained. Eventually the two lovers split permanently in 1944.34 In contrast, some women willingly discontinued their own careers. Isabel Washington Powell, Fredi Washington’s sister, was pursuing a career in show business when she met her husband, Adam Clayton Powell. She had been a chorus girl at the popular Harlem nightclub Connie’s Inn, had a lead in a Broadway show, and in 1929 had costarred with Bessie Smith in St. Louis Blues (she played Smith’s husband’s mistress). She then had moved up to lead chorus girl at the famous Cotton Club, where she met Powell in 1930. At that point, she was o∏ered a leading part in the traveling company for Showboat, but she turned it down because of her marriage. Although Adam left her in 1944 for another woman, Isabel claimed that she had no regrets about giving up her career for marriage and had had an exciting life.35 Similarly, E. Franklin Frazier’s wife, Marie, as we saw in Chapter 2, gave up a literary career when she married. And the film Stormy Weather featured a female character’s decision to give up show business so she could marry and have children. However, some couples discovered that blending responsibilities was a practical way to make ends meet and allow each spouse to fulfill his or her desires. Marriages could be a cooperative economic e∏ort. One striking example of such an arrangement is the marriage of Robert and Katherine Stewart Flippin. The Flippins adjusted gender roles to make their marriage work economically — ​not only for survival, but also to create a respectable middle-­class lifestyle in their own generation. The Flippins married during the Great Depression and were forced to grapple with economic necessity. While Robert, a college graduate, was underemployed in a series of service jobs, Katherine found steady work in a department store. As newlyweds, the couple lived in an apartment owned by Katherine’s mother and shared it with Robert’s mother. Robert Flippin did not seem to fear for his manhood when the young couple moved into his mother-­in­law’s house. The couple apparently viewed this arrangement simply 

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as an indication of the diΩculties that black people had finding housing in San Francisco. Also, Robert owed his career advancement to Katherine’s connections: his job as director of the Booker T. Washington Community Service center was facilitated by his relationship with Katherine’s mother, a founder of the center. Katherine’s role as breadwinner and her family’s help in finding a prestigious job for Robert indicate both the importance of extended family relations and the problems that educated black people faced in finding full employment. Too, their material needs caused the Flippins to emphasize egalitarianism and mutual, complementary contributions. Among their social elite peer group in San Francisco, Katherine’s education and civic activities were as salient as Robert’s. Also, the Flippins did not have children, so they did not confront the additional financial burden that childrearing would have imposed. It is unclear whether they chose not to have children or were unable to have them. The fact of childlessness could well have a∏ected Katherine’s choice to work outside the home.36 Rather than attempt to fit their lives into a rigid economic template, the Flippins seemed to turn financial necessity into an opportunity for growth, for themselves, their relationship, and their community. Their joint community service raised their status in the community. Katherine’s paid labor during the 1930s gave Robert the resources to advance his own career, thus increasing the couple’s stature in the 1940s. Throughout the rest of their marriage, they continued the pattern of dual careers that they developed over the first two decades. In some respects, their married lives reflect the turn-­of-­thecentury pattern of spousal cooperation in community work. James and Sarah Thomas Curwood Sarah and James Curwood’s struggles with upward mobility were fraught with conflicting ideals of the roles of husbands and wives. While James wanted to be the sole breadwinner and decision-­maker, Sarah’s ambition and their precarious financial position stymied his e∏orts. James was likely attracted to Sarah because of her light skin, but she did not fit the ideal of a helpmate wife. In 1936 the Curwoods likely entered their marriage with what they 

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thought were common goals for their socioeconomic advancement. They sought to serve as exemplars for their race through designing a comfortable middle-­class lifestyle at home and through launching their well-­educated children into the world. Unfortunately, structural factors — ​such as James’s lack of earning power — ​exposed the fact that the Curwoods di∏ered bitterly over how to prioritize these goals. To James, these goals were to be accomplished through his financial support of the family and his masculine authority over his wife and children. Sarah thought she could accomplish their dreams through her three kinds of service: to her family, to her race, and to her own self-­suΩciency.37 Sarah intended to advance her own career at the same time that she gave adequate, but only part-­time, care to her husband and children. When the Curwoods married, these di∏erences in the means to an end seemed small or even nonexistent. As the marriage went on, however, the fault lines of gender and work divided them. James and Sarah were two very di∏erent individuals from two very di∏erent worlds. Sarah was the more middle-­class partner and the one who actually inhabited the world of black intellectuals — ​a world of education and learned life. While James was an autodidact who read voraciously and developed a library of the black intellectuals of his time, it was Sarah who met them as an intellectual equal. While James shared E. Franklin Frazier’s contempt for striving wives, Sarah saw through this prescription. She knew from personal experience that those striving wives were crucial to race advancement. James’s resentment of Sarah’s education and ambition and her resentment of his stifling desires for her to be an obedient housewife did tremendous damage to their relationship. Some of the damage came from the couple’s inability to reconcile their di∏erent class backgrounds. The Curwoods embodied the fact that intraracial di∏erences profoundly a∏ected the public and private lives of African Americans. First, the couple di∏ered in age. Sarah was born in 1916 and was nineteen when she met James. James was born in or around 1908 and was twenty-­seven. Second, they grew up in di∏erent areas of the country: Sarah in a German immigrant neighborhood in Binghamton, New York, and James in Houston, Texas. Third, in their di∏erent worlds, Sarah was familiar with and friendly 

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with white people as neighbors and classmates, while most of James’s contact with white people came from serving them. Fourth, Sarah had considerably lighter skin than James, much as other middle-­class black wives had lighter skin than their husbands. Finally, and very importantly, they were from di∏erent socioeconomic classes. Sarah’s family of origin was middle class, and James’s was poor, or lower working class. This class di∏erence is evident in the availability of archival material for each partner. Sarah’s life, especially before she met James, is copiously documented in comparison with that of her husband, who left behind very little about his origins. Sarah Ethel Thomas was born January 23, 1916, in the middle-­class home of her maternal grandparents. Sarah described her family of origin by remembering, “We were the 10%,” alluding to Du Bois’s Talented Tenth.38 Her grandparents, George and Ella Nora Coakley Dorsey, had met in Washington, D.C., and moved to Utica, New York, before settling in Binghamton. Once there, they had moved from a mostly Irish and black section of the town into the German immigrant neighborhood, and they had bought a house with weekly payments. There, her grandfather and his brother worked as chefs in hotels and managed their own catering business. Sarah’s mother, Sarah (“Sadie”) Elizabeth Dorsey, was the second of George Dorsey’s five children. Maurice Thomas, Sarah’s father, descended from a family in southern Ohio. His father had been a racehorse timer and a cobbler, but Maurice had grown up in the homes of stepfathers because his father died when Maurice was two years old and his mother remarried several times. After high school, Maurice realized that his only employment in Ohio would be menial. He moved east and tried to earn money for medical school. He met and married Sadie Dorsey instead and put his accumulated savings into establishing a middle­class household. Eventually he became a building contractor. The Thomases enjoyed a stable economic situation, thanks to Maurice’s business and real estate investments, his ownership of a fleet of taxicabs, and his new position working in a unionized job for American Railway Express. He was able to spend significant amounts of time with his family because he worked from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. Sadie, 

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Sarah Thomas Curwood, ca. 1940. Bradford Bachrach photo. Collection of author.

who had had three years of high school, stayed home all the time — ​ Maurice even did much of the shopping for food and clothes. She also acquired three diamond rings and a fur coat.39 When Sarah was born, Maurice and Sadie already had two daughters: six-­year-­old Elizabeth (“Betty”) and four-­year-­old Elnora (“Nony”). Sadie bore Sarah in her parents’ house because the house that Maurice had built for his young family had been burned just before the young family was to move in. As Sarah recalled, “Mother refused to live in the ‘damaged’ house because she did not like things that had been repaired and also because she feared that the fire, which had been set, might be evidence of anti-­Negro feelings.” Maurice sold it at a profit, and the family bought another. Trouble did not end there, however. They acquired the new home through white friends Maurice knew through his real estate dealings, and when the Thomases moved in, the white neighbors on either side moved out. The white neighbors who remained eventually became friends.40 Though they had to endure harassment from whites and isolation from other black people, the Thomas family did enjoy a supportive extended family and friends. Guests often visited. Thanksgiving included copious amounts of food, and Christmas meant many gifts and guests. Sarah and her sisters were the only black children in the same school that their mother had attended. Outside school, Sarah participated in many extracurricular activities, including a Catholic Girl Scout troop. She and her sisters had plenty of friends, many of whom were Jewish, inside and outside school.41 Sarah’s parents demanded proper decorum but o∏ered conflicting advice on the role of proper middle-­class femininity. On one hand, her father had demanded “ladylike behavior” from her. As she wrote in a 1968 journal entry, “I am sure [my roots] are sunk deep in a very satisfying relationship with a father, who, though dominant and rather dictatorial in most relationships, allowed me infinite expression and thought, but within the confines of what he called ‘ladylike behavior.’ Father was one of five boys. He definitely abhorred girls who were tomboys. Therefore, I never learned to climb a tree, bat a ball. Today, put me in a yard with a three foot fence, and I am pretty well hemmed in.”42 Sarah’s mother, Sadie, however, demonstrated autonomy and 

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strong views to her daughter. While Sadie appeared to surrender power to her husband, whom Sarah acknowledged as strong and controlling, she actually combined deference and self-­assertion. Her husband was an atheist and frowned on her attending church, so she brought a member of the church into her home for regular study sessions. Her husband discouraged her from voting, but she joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and Margaret Sanger’s birth control movement. She owned boxes full of the Little Blue Books from the Haldeman-­Julius publishing house in Girard, Kansas.43 Sadie’s Little Blue Books testify to her active and independent interest in radical politics. Maurice Thomas died in 1930, when Sarah was fourteen. He had lost much of his wealth in the financial crash of 1929, so that even had he lived, the family’s financial status still would have deteriorated. When Maurice died, Sadie and Sarah’s older sisters showed Sarah that “ladies” could also be self-­suΩcient, provided they were educated. Sadie decided that Sarah must finish school. Nony and Betty, “who had finished high school the previous year, gave up plans for college, took domestic jobs, partly live-­in, and supported mother and me.” At first, Sadie worked with her daughters. The sisters became concerned, however, when Sarah, who could not cook herself a proper meal, arrived home from school to an empty house. Therefore, Sarah wrote later, “my sisters decided it was wiser for mother to remain home.” In the meantime, Sarah performed some household duties, such as shopping for food. During this period, she and her mother became very close. The sisters were compensated financially “by mother’s act which legally gave my sisters our home.”44 Sarah remembered their heroism, not their resentment and their interrupted schooling. Nony recalled this time di∏erently; she did not think it fair for Sarah to monopolize all of the available support, as all three girls had shown academic promise.45 Sadie might well have meant to protect her youngest and most vulnerable child, as she o∏ered Sarah the greatest access possible to the world of higher education. She gave Nony and Betty the house, but she gave Sarah an education.46 Thus Sadie Thomas started Sarah on the path of education and taught her the value of female self-­suΩciency. Sadie doubtless wanted 

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to ensure that her youngest daughter would not have to work in domestic service. When Sarah received a scholarship to attend Cornell University, Sadie must have been delighted and relieved. Stephanie Shaw has documented the childrearing practices that parents of early-­twentieth-­century black professional women employed. These parents wanted their daughters to acquire education that would provide alternatives to service work. Chief among their practices was instilling a culture of achievement, self-­confidence, and community responsibility.47 Bart Landry agrees that it was a feature of middle-­class black women’s culture — ​a culture that black women themselves designed and transmitted to one another — ​that pushed Sarah into professional work and shaped her desire to work for her family, career, and civil rights. As Landry suggests, the higher the class status within the black middle class, the more likely it was that wives worked.48 Sadie’s sacrifice of Nony’s and Betty’s education paid o∏ in Sarah’s academic success. Graduating as valedictorian of her high school class, Sarah earned the scholarship to Cornell from the Harvard Club of Binghamton. Sarah was well aware that this achievement came on the backs of her sisters. She also knew that for a respectable black woman, femininity encompassed self-­suΩciency. Her enrollment at Cornell was welcomed as the symbol of how well she had utilized her costly academic opportunity and as the means to future autonomy based on education. At Cornell, Sarah had her first significant contact with other African Americans besides members of her family. Many of the other black students at Cornell were graduate students from the South, and Sarah was startled by the hatred that one of her colleagues felt toward white people. For the first time, she was aware of her membership in an African American group. Becoming aware of racial issues, she began to take an interest in economics and sociology. She also began to think of her conduct and achievements as reflections not only of herself or her family but also of her responsibility toward other members of her race. Prejudiced teachers, the denial of a scholarship she merited, and the request that she enter a sorority through a back door all made her conscious of racial prejudice directed toward her. Her private life also changed. At home in Binghamton, the four women in Sarah’s family had typically done their hair together. 

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But at Cornell, Sarah feared that using a hot comb would create an odor and o∏end the white families she boarded with. She was forced to simply brush and oil her hair until she went home on vacations.49 Sarah lived in the homes of white families because she was barred from the women’s dormitories. Black men at Cornell were numerous enough that the college set aside rooms in a dormitory for them. But she was one of only two black women. Her first room, arranged by the dean’s oΩce, was in a damp basement that she entered through the garage door. The bathroom in the basement contained a toilet only, and she was limited to a bath once a week in the main house. During her sophomore year, she moved in with a new family who also proved unsatisfactory. She was starting to study for exams when the family told her to leave because there was a single male in the household over twelve years of age, and they had discovered a regulation that prohibited them from taking in college-­age women. Her next lodging was with a family of alcoholics, one of whom sexually harassed her. She next tried a series of black families who lived farther from campus. Studying in these households was very diΩcult, because the radio played constantly and she often had to share a room. Margaret Morgan, the other black woman undergraduate at Cornell at the time, endured similar conditions.50 James Curwood’s early childhood was very di∏erent, with less money, education, and status. From an early age, he came into contact with white people as their subordinate. Little is known of his origins. He was born in Houston, Texas, around 1908 to a woman named Ellen (maiden name unknown) and an absentee father. He was christened either Edward Bonny or Edward Sullivan, and it is not known whether either of these last names belonged to either his biological father or his mother. After Edward was born, Ellen married a man whose last name was Rasmus. She bore seven more children. When he was about fourteen, James rode the train north to Chicago and somehow found his way to North Adams, Massachusetts. There he became friendly with the family of Charles Arnum, a Civil War veteran from the 54th Massachusetts Regiment.51 Somewhere between Houston and North Adams, James forged a new, more northern and urban identity, that of James Lawrence Curwood. He recast his name to be nearly identical to that of a popular 

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James Lawrence Curwood, ca. 1940. Fabian Bachrach photo. Collection of Stephen T. Curwood.

author at the time, James Oliver Curwood, because James aspired to be a writer. He invested time and e∏ort in remaking himself into a handsome, cosmopolitan, middle-­class gentleman. The “man” in gentleman was operative: to complete the picture he sought a proper lady to be his wife. A refined woman in his life would, perhaps, prove to other men that he had arrived.52 From North Adams, James found his way to Ithaca, where he worked within student housing in a service capacity. Before he met Sarah, James had not yet completed the eighth grade. After meeting her, he moved to Rome, New York, for a year and earned his junior high school diploma while working two jobs.53 He was determined to acquire an educated, middle-­class identity — ​emulating the leisure class that he worked for. His behavior echoes the theories of Thorstein Veblen: realizing that the appearance of wealth in itself has the power to confer honor and respectability, those in the class of domestic servants (whom we call service workers) tend to emulate the actions of their masters. Actual wealth is not available to servants, but the cultural markers — ​material goods and the conspicuous leisure of women — ​are.54 James knew how to present a respectable image, even if he did not have the actual wealth it represented. The tone of the letters that James wrote to Sarah during their courtship and the early years of their marriage is remarkably similar to that of the letters that make up the novel When Washington Was in Vogue, described in Chapter 2. Indeed, James had a remarkable ability to adapt his language to what he read. He also had an extensive library. He owned first editions of such classics as Alain Locke’s New Negro, Charles S. Johnson’s Patterns of Negro Segregation, Horace Cayton and George Mitchell’s Black Workers and the New Unions, Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma, and Otto Klineberg’s Characteristics of the American Negro. He also owned later editions of Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Dusk of Dawn, and Black Reconstruction in America; James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan; and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.55 He also subscribed to New Masses. He was very protective of his books: when he went into the army in 1944, Sarah had to write to him to ask how to unlock his bookcase so she could look at the volumes in it.56 Sarah and James met in January 1935, probably at a meeting of the 

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black student group, the Booker T. Washington Club, on the Cornell campus.57 Sarah was a student; James was a servant. When Sarah met James, who was eight years older than she, she found him “interesting.” The two met again at a club meeting the following month, a delightful evening for Sarah. They danced, an experience that Sarah described as “heaven,” and James bought her candy. After that, to Sarah’s happiness, he began to court her strongly and called her often, sometimes twice or three times a day. They attended the theater together, and he often walked her home in the evening. The two even became ill at the same time and were in the Cornell infirmary together, on di∏erent floors. Visitors relayed their messages back and forth. By the end of March, they were in love, and James, at least, was thinking that they would marry.58 The fact that older, well-­traveled James was on a journey to remake himself and to leave behind his poor Texas roots interacted dramatically with Sarah’s youth, her established middle-­class identity and light skin, and her lack of broad experience. James and Sarah went their separate ways during the summer. He traveled to his adopted family and hometown of North Adams, Massachusetts. Sarah went home to Binghamton. After the summer of 1935, Sarah returned to Cornell for her junior year. James moved to Rome, New York, where he completed junior high school and also worked at a car dealership. He lived in a boardinghouse. Sarah would sometimes write to him on lined notepaper while in class, pretending to take notes. After Sarah’s junior year ended in June 1936, the two made hasty plans to marry. Sarah joined James in Rome, where she expected to set up house with him and then commute to a substitute teaching job for the rest of the summer. She had begun to envision staying in Rome with her new husband and not returning to Cornell. The couple married on June 20, 1936. None of Sarah’s family were present at the chapel when they married; Sarah notified her mother via a telegram that evening. Although the couple tried to live together in Rome right away, James’s financial diΩculties and Sarah’s illness (which will be discussed in Chapter 5) quickly made it evident that the couple was not ready to set up a household. Sarah went home to Binghamton. Although Sarah had been prepared to leave Cornell, she decided instead to fin

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ish her senior year. The couple would be reunited in Boston in the summer of 1937, after her graduation. Sarah’s middle-­class family had lived in a mostly white neighborhood, separate from African American social networks. James had grown up poor, and perhaps in some awe of black people who had personal and physical capital. The appearance of respectability was less consuming for Sarah than for James. Indeed, in some ways, Sarah’s middle-­class family intrigued him. She observed that “many of the things I took for granted, things that my father had done, [material] things that my mother had, my husband viewed as constant prods for him also to not only achieve, but to surpass.” Where her father had given her mother modest, living plants on her birthday and their anniversary, James would give huge bunches of cut flowers to Sarah on every conceivable holiday. Later, she would have to find money in the household budget to cover his delinquent accounts at the florist.59 On the part of Sarah’s family, no evidence of conflict over her choice of mate survives, but it is clear that James’s financial problems embarrassed Sarah herself. In the summer of 1936, Sarah’s mother, sisters, and extended family subsidized the new couple after they married hastily, Sarah became ill, and the couple found themselves without enough money to set up their household. James found a job as a butler for a Jewish family in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston, but he continued to struggle to make ends meet. Sarah, facing the inquiries of family, continued to push James to repay his debts so that they could set up a household together. “Aunt Blanche is wondering what kind of husband I have that sends me home to be supported by mother when I am ill,” she wrote, and then, “I may also add that Mother expects you will help me with my expenses at school this year and I can’t tell her you have nothing to help with.” When her mother discovered a large unpaid bill in the mail, Sarah went so far as to refuse to write letters until James proved to her that he was making payments on the debt. She hoped that by repaying his debts and helping with expenses he would regain “some standing” in her family’s eyes.60 James and Sarah Curwood also encountered the e∏ects of color

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ism within their intimate lives. Like the Garveys, but in a less institutional way, the Curwoods were concerned with racial advancement. Unlike the Garveys, their goal was assimilation, not black nationalism or separatism. But they still evidenced a recognition that authentic blackness was somehow more politically correct. For example, when Sarah wrote to her husband about a summer job at the Boston Urban League in 1937, she mentioned excitedly that the director was “a real brown skin.”61 It is clear that Sarah saw this as a good thing, that the director’s racial allegiances were on the correct side of the struggle. However, within their own marriage, the Curwoods did not discuss skin color. Within the couple, skin color followed socioeconomic lines: Sarah was a light tan color and James a medium brown. When Sarah’s darker maternal grandfather had married her light maternal grandmother from a prominent Washington, D.C., family, the couple had left Washington because her grandfather would not fit in with her grandmother’s social set there. Still, James might well have thought that Sarah’s light skin solidified his ascendance to the ranks of the middle class. In letters, James often extolled Sarah’s beauty, describing how he found her features and her picture so enticing. As with the Garveys, it was important to James to marry a beautiful woman, and that beauty was connected to the color of her skin. In his letters, especially the early ones, James often alluded to his admiration of Sarah’s beauty and his lack of social position. Several months after they met, he showed her picture to other residents of his boardinghouse, one of whom reportedly said, “You can see that she is a fine girl.” In the same letter, he anxiously predicted that “there is more that a little liklihood [sic] that you will meet among your associates, some one nearer your equal socially than I am, one you can respect as well as love, for it takes a combination of things to evoke true happiness.”62 Two days later, he was explaining his lack of material achievement, saying, “You have not known the man I used to be, but all my earlier life was spent in the clouds, that accounts for my being so far behind now.” Not long after this anxious letter, he was again praising her beauty, delighting in the fact that “those lovely lips are mine to kiss, and that beautiful hair is mine to play with.” In fact, like Marcus Garvey, he especially appreciated his beloved’s hair. 

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Sarah, by her own description, had “good hair.” He wrote, “I think I have told you — ​I love your hair. It’s so, oh, I don’t know, It’s just sweet, and pretty, and soft, and, long.”63 Although little direct evidence exists of how Sadie felt about James, she did seem to worry about his lack of financial independence. Sarah herself recalled that James was constantly competing with Sarah’s family of origin in terms of class status — ​he bought them grandiose and expensive gifts.64 Importantly, no correspondence survives that directly addresses their class di∏erences in terms of color. This suggests that the fact was so unremarkable, or so unmentionable, that it went unspoken. The middle-­class respectability that Sarah took for granted was crucial to James, who took advantage of every indicator of middle­class status available to him, such as marriage to Sarah. His ambition helps to explain his intense dislike of her getting a job and his lack of imagination regarding her potential career choices. He tried to get her to cook and clean and do little else, provoking a conflict that emerged in the early years of their marriage. Sarah came from a family that James thought would have taught her the proper roles of femininity. But in his eyes she seemed not to understand the importance of a dependent role. In fact, though she protested otherwise, she valued her career development at least as much as her role as wife and helpmate. On the surface, Sarah and James shared similar values, especially their enjoyment of and belief in the importance of learning and literature, their self-­definition as middle-­class, and their hopes for racial advancement. In a journal entry of 1968, Sarah remembered the pretense and the reality of their relationship: My upbringing made me an ideal wife for my husband. What he viewed mainly as my acceptance of his greater years and wider experience was in reality my acceptance of masculine superiority, especially in the field of family support and decision-­making a∏ecting the welfare for the family. I was well versed in many of the womanly arts. . . . I could sew very well, bake, cook, play the piano, entertain properly. My liberal arts education had equipped me well to become a volunteer worker in various fields and I did 

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so. But slowly it dawned on me that though I was the type of wife my husband said he wanted, in reality I was a disaster.65 By “disaster,” Sarah meant that James got more than he bargained for. She was ambitious, as was he, but their ambitions did not match. Sarah sought to contribute to her race through her work in economics and sociology outside the home. James sought to contribute to his race through his identity as a respectable New Negro in a solid, middle-­class household and his full participation in the American dream. Like other New Negroes, James thought that this dream had to rest on patriarchal authority. In the spring of 1937, Sarah graduated from Cornell and James lost the butler’s job that he had held for the past year. He found new employment at the Roseledge estate, in Cohasset, Massachusetts, an hour from Boston by train. Although Sarah had moved to Boston, the two now lived at least an hour from each other. They once again stayed in contact via mail and met once a week on James’s day o∏. Now that Sarah had graduated, the couple had to decide how to make the gendered balance of power work within their marriage. James’s absences for most of each week helped make the summer a rocky one. Until now, the Curwoods had lived together only in their imaginations and had seen each other little during the year. Sarah had still been at school, a state of a∏airs that had been nonnegotiable and that James accepted as a matter of course. Now Sarah took a volunteer job at the South End settlement house run by the Boston Urban League. It is interesting to note that when Sarah wanted to justify to her husband her work at South End House (her response was described at the beginning of Chapter 3), she did so in terms of service and not in terms of money. She very likely used this same justification when she took a position at a progressive, interracial nursery school. In James’s view, her working for the betterment of the community was more palatable than working to advance her career. She also refrained from pointing out that James’s income could not support both of them. While engaging in the sorts of activities that her husband came to accept as more permissible (getting more education and teaching), she was indeed increasing her economic power. But her e∏orts did not 

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protect James from his insecurity. Her career moves became less attractive to James as his illness and alcoholism eroded his own earning power. On the other hand, James’s letters indicate his growing anxiety. The more professional autonomy she claimed, the more he worried about her contact with other people, especially men, and he constantly reassured her of his own fidelity, of his eyes for no one but her, and of his awe of her beauty. He wanted to control Sarah’s life totally, and he seemed to live in fear that he would lose her if she engaged in activities unrelated to him or outside their home. James was unhappy about her independence. At least once over the summer he believed that the marriage was over and made preparations to break up with her. At the same time that the Curwoods’ experiences challenged New Negro ideals of male breadwinning and female support, they also dispelled any notions that black men unfailingly understood and supported their wives’ professional aspirations. Wives’ work did create real conflict between men and women over their gender roles. Women’s self-­interested actions and a heavy-­hearted realization that their husbands might not be able to live up to their promises of perpetual financial security led to conflict. As a case in point, James paid a price for his expectations regarding Sarah’s behavior. Aspiring to become a bona fide member of the middle class, James was more aware of a white model of middle-­class women’s leisure, for he had little firsthand contact with professional black women. He was ba∆ed and dismayed by his ambitious, career­oriented wife. He did not understand that her ambitions were part of a model of New Negro womanhood. He dreamed of white upper­class culture in which women were allowed — ​even required — ​to stay at home. In his imagination, a wife was to maintain a serene, sparkling home with hot dinner waiting on the table for her husband when he returned from his well-­paying job. But, as Sarah herself wrote in her memoir, she was a disaster at subservient domesticity. Ideals di∏ered, and reality did not match either set of ideals in the Curwood marriage. The best way to avoid conflict, Sarah found, was to get him to comply with her wishes by framing them in terms of a project for bettering the race. 

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In the realm of race work, too, James faced a double bind. On one hand, he needed Sarah’s credentials to help boost his own status and give him access to the world of middle-­class New Negroes he idolized, as evidenced by his book collection. But on the other hand, that world of New Negro men was one in which the husbands were the thinkers, writers, and earners. Men were the authorities in their fields and in their homes. Marie Brown Frazier herself had given up her career as a writer in order to be a proper faculty wife. Charles S. Johnson’s wife spent much of her time worrying about and buttressing her husband’s reputation.66 But James did not have the luxury of such an arrangement. He was in the ironic position of gaining middle-­class status through his wife without being able to live his middle-­class dream of patriarchy. The Curwoods thus confronted their divergent versions of reality and experienced anger, disappointment, and tragedy. In the Curwoods’ case, the sharp disjuncture between Sarah’s and James’s visions of the responsibility of their family to their race, and the pressure caused by their inability as a couple to live up to gendered ideals, exacted a personal cost.



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5

Love and Trouble in

ar M w r e t In

arriage s

As the Curwoods experienced conflict over economic roles within their marriage, they also confronted the intimate and emotional tasks of maintaining a marital relationship. Their beliefs about romantic love and men’s and women’s roles — ​in terms of economics, power, and sex — ​grew intertwined with their tumultuous personal relationship. Still, while their historical context played a part in their marriage, so too did their individual temperaments and psychologies. This chapter seeks to demonstrate how history and individuality became entangled in their story, supported by the “love and trouble” framework that black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins has proposed and by observations of how other couples handled both love and trouble in their marriages. Their private history vividly illustrates how important and useful it is to study black people on their own terms.1 Very little historical scholarship exists on any aspect of the personal relationships or intimate lives of African Americans. It often seems as if African Americans drop o∏ the scholarly radar screen if they are not positioned either as exploited, victimized people or as triumphant warriors in the struggle against racism. Literary scholar Claudia Tate noticed this phenomenon in 1998, naming it the “racial protocol.”2 Within U.S. history, scholars have been unwilling to deal with subjects that

include race as one factor among many, preferring either to write as if race were invisible and irrelevant or to make race the single most important feature. Histories of African Americans’ private lives do not fit into the racial protocol, because in family life one’s primary identity is not race but kindredness. By the same token, histories of white marriages have been simply histories of marriage; the fact that these people are living an identity of whiteness along with their identities as husband or wife is ignored. I do not mean to suggest that no histories have overcome this divide, as several have done so quite admirably, but overall the trend is still very clear.3 As historians, we have not paid enough attention to intimate lives. The study of intimate relationships, with attention to gender, takes us another step away from thinking of black people merely as units of race. My analysis reveals a pattern that reflects Collins’s “love and trouble” tradition. Across time, couples have experienced tremendous love as well as sadness and anger. Quoting Gayl Jones, Collins suggests that this “simultaneity of good and bad” characterizes a blues aesthetic of concurrent emotions: love is bittersweet. Much of this bittersweet quality comes from grappling with gender expectations: African American women have wished to be supportive of their husbands, but when husbands have used gender politics to oppress wives, women have faced the choice of either submerging their own needs or having to defend themselves in conflict with their husbands.4 Therefore, this chapter will focus on these gendered pressures within intimate relationships. Also, rather than taking either love or trouble as the definitive aspect of African Americans’ married relationships, I show that both are relevant. Then, in the second half of the chapter, I show how James and Sarah Curwood experienced love and trouble in their marriage. Love Between the wars, African Americans held hopeful dreams of love and romance that echoed those of many Americans in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries. These included the idea that love was the overriding reason to marry and that it trumped other concerns. For 

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example, when Gladys “Sister” Walton met her future husband in 1937, she saw it as self-­evident that she must drop her longtime suitor for the new man she had fallen in love with. Furthermore, she could not wait to marry until her father, Lester Walton, returned from abroad: the couple was too much in love to endure the long geographical separation that this would necessitate. Her fiancé had to return to his hometown of Houston, but it was inconceivable for her to go with him if she were not yet his wife. Protocols of proper sexuality made it imperative that she be released into his company only if they were married, but their intense love would make the separation unbearable. Therefore, the couple successfully begged Sister’s father for his blessing to marry before he returned, as I described in Chapter 4. The story suggests that romantic love was seen as a pivotal event in adult life. Another couple, Alta Sawyer and the artist Aaron Douglas, found that their strong romantic love for each other eclipsed other concerns and potential conflicts. During their secret courtship, while Alta was divorcing her husband, they exchanged intense love letters. They told each other how fortunate they were to have found such love and how they should try to keep their relationship happy. However, in one letter to his future wife, Aaron Douglas referred to what might have been a brief moment of conflict between the lovers. He reminded her that she was “engaged in an intense love a∏air” and “that the two people involved are two ordinary human beings. And that susceptibility to err is the most constant peculiarity of man. And as intelligent, educated people we must see beyond the pitfalls that engulf most unfortunate [sic] lovers. . . . But remember above all, dream girl, that doubt is the best fertilizer for discontent. And that the man you love thinks that you are the last word in womanhood.”5 Douglas wanted his beloved to understand that momentary disagreement would not harm their deep romantic involvement. Perhaps the most eloquent expression of an ideal of romantic love occurs within a fictionalized account, that of Janie and Tea Cake in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. After two marriages that had not sustained her emotionally or let her seek fulfillment in life, Janie finally finds Tea Cake. Her marriage with Tea Cake does both. The relationship is also sexually fulfilling and full of sen

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suality, and Hurston’s description of it is a rare glimpse of sexuality in African American life.6 However, the relationship has a bittersweet quality, because the novel begins and ends with Janie returning to her hometown after Tea Cake’s death and because Hurston poured her own conflicted feelings for her lover Percival Punter into the novel. As Hurston describes in her memoir, she and Punter were very much in love, but they separated because of his wish for her to discontinue her career.7 Their Eyes is a utopian vision of how life might have been if Punter had allowed Hurston her career, but like the real­life version, it ends with the relationship’s end. Although romance was a sometimes unattainable ideal, instances of marital a∏ection and tenderness abound. Harmony was most prevalent when husband and wife held similar values about gendered relationships and racial politics. One example was the marriage of Charles S. Johnson, a sociologist and Fisk University president, to Marie Antoinette Burgette Johnson. The two courted and married during 1918–20 and remained married until his death of a heart attack in 1956. As a young newlywed, Marie Johnson recorded in fairy­tale language the story of their meeting and courtship in Chicago. “He was the new director of Research, Chicago Urban League,” she wrote in her wedding journal. “She was the Dramatic Director [of the] Chicago Community Service League. He was home from war, skeptical and stern. She was brimming over with laughter and faith a head full of dreams. They met — ​the Gods smiled they loved — ​and now they wed.”8 Her diary reveals the romantic details of their first meetings. As a young scholar, Charles had published an unflattering report about Marie’s hometown of Milwaukee, and Marie had angrily resolved to tell him o∏ if they ever met.9 The two would not meet face-­to-­face until 1919, after Charles finished his service in World War I. Marie was then director of dramatics at the War Camp for Community Service, where she received an introductory letter from Charles. Pleased that she had a chance to get back at him for the Milwaukee report, she decided to ask him if he knew of a “homely man with horn-­rimmed glasses” who could play James Reese Europe in an upcoming play, insinuating that Charles was homely. But Charles fought back with 

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witty repartee, and when Marie met him in person, she noticed he was handsome. She continued to test him, however, asking him to perform jobs like assembling a stage, which he did willingly and with style, in his “immaculate linen and perfect toilet.” The two fell in love, and some of the page headings in their wedding album reflect this: “two souls with but a single thought” and “two hearts that beat as one.”10 Another couple, Robert and Julia Reagin of Selma, Alabama, relatives of the aforementioned Lester Walton, had such a close relationship that when Julia died in childbirth in 1932, Robert declared, “I am hurt all over and such a blow I don’t think I can get over.” In a letter to his brother-­in-­law Lester, he wrote, “I think of her all day long and at night I can’t sleep. Everything makes me think of her.” The reason for his deep grief, he said, was that his marriage had been such a happy one. He and Julia understood each other, and he especially admired her loyalty and honesty. Furthermore, she was “so wonderful. I am so glad that she was my wife for I have gained for having her for my mate. She has left us a heritage of loveliness and beauty and all that is high and noble.” Robert had lost his best friend and heroine.11 Robert and Katherine Stewart Flippin, who were introduced in Chapter 4, also enjoyed the sunny side of love. But they did not accomplish this feat alone. This couple was well supported by multigenerational family ties, especially Katherine’s mother and grandmother and Robert’s mother, and their community. In the early years of the marriage, this support was crucial. The Flippins could not exist as a couple without a web of supporting relationships, illustrating how diΩcult it was for even well-­educated couples to sustain isolated nuclear families.12 Even in this western, urban, middle-­class African American family, kinship ties and extended social networks were crucial. Marrying in the depths of the Great Depression, the Flippins experienced their share of trouble in the form of financial stress. Their youth, love for each other, and supportive network helped them through, however. In those early years, they sometimes coped with financial hardship by looking for adventure. They took several car camping trips, which cost far less than train tickets and hotel stays. This choice perhaps underscored their sense of experimentation, 

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Katherine and Robert Flippin, Treasure Island, San Francisco, 1939. Stewart-­Flippin Family Papers, box 97-­29, folder 541, Manuscript Division, Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

which made worries at home more tolerable. For African Americans, setting o∏ without a destination or prearranged place to sleep was a risk, but they preferred that to remaining in the city. On one trip, they were gone for nearly a month, spending very little money and visiting Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, and Zion National Park. Adventure did not meet expenses, but it preserved morale: they valued this informal time together.13 At home, Robert accepted Katherine’s career choices and encouraged her as she earned her degrees. She discussed all aspects of her career with him and often consulted him when making decisions.14 Trouble Couples encountered problems, too. Frequent sources of stress were lack of time for each other and geographical distance. Fredi Washington and Laurence Brown, whose negotiations over travel for work were described in Chapter 4, experienced sadness over long separations.15 Charles S. Johnson was a workaholic, and Marie Johnson missed him terribly when he traveled on business. In one letter during a six-­month separation, she wrote, “I just want to see you as soon as possible. I just want to hear your voice and to feel that you are my same dear one back close to me again. When and where and how is much less important but God speed the day.” She also hinted that he worked too hard and had “so little time to enjoy the homes you have built for us. Maybe out of this trip will come a greater appreciation of a comfortable chair and a cigarette beside your own radio.” At other times Marie Johnson was more resigned. She was “weary of the long days and nights of separation” and worried about his pace of traveling, but she noted that she could no longer “fret you and myself by champing at these long absences. . . . I don’t see anything you could do but what you are doing.”16 Lester and Gladys Walton also had to deal with the consequences of long periods of separation. They married in 1912 and had two daughters, Gladys (“Sister”) and Marjorie. Gladys was left alone with the two girls for long periods of time while Lester was away on business, and she reminded him how it felt. “The children can tell you 

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that none of us eat so much since you are away,” she wrote in 1929, and during an absence in 1931 she wrote letters detailing important dates and milestones that he missed: their nineteenth wedding anniversary, family members’ birthdays, and Father’s Day. In the summer of 1937, when Sister married her beloved, Lester could not attend the wedding due to his obligations as U.S. ambassador to Liberia in Monrovia.17 Distance caused even more trouble for the Flippins, especially when Robert spent the summer of 1935 away in training to be a medical assistant. The two su∏ered from missing each other; Robert wrote in his diary how much he missed his young wife. “Katherine is the finest person in the world — ​I pray that she may be happy and the year pass rapidly. I love her. She has the stu∏ that made the pioneer women of years ago. . . . God — ​I ask you that I never again need be separated from [Katherine] — ​it’s too awful. She followed the bus laughing thru her tears. She sure gets good and red and I can’t help but cry.” In another entry, he wrote, using her nickname, “I guess I’ll never be sane when I’m without Bunch.” Katherine missed him terribly as well, finding it unbearable to hang up the telephone after speaking to him.18 However, the couple’s troubles extended beyond simply missing each other. Robert engaged in an extramarital liaison while he was away. Was it the result of old habits or desolation and loneliness or spending time with old friends (in Chicago, he stayed with Madge Cayton, the sister of his buddy Horace Cayton) or some other emotional factor? We will never know. As a young man, Robert dated many women, a habit he did not entirely abandon after marriage. He had caused at least one friend to wonder if he would ever settle down and marry. In fact, some of his earlier girlfriends wrote to him when they discovered his impending marriage. One woman from Denver, already married, still made it clear that his coming marriage upset her. Though she ostensibly wrote to wish him well, her letter had a pleading tone: “Bob, I hope your Katherine likes me. . . . Really and honestly Bob you are the truest friend and the best friend I have ever had. I love [my husband] dearly but he knows you are the best friend I have.” Another imploring letter came from closer to home: a woman 

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in San Francisco begged him to let her see him again and implied that she wished him to leave Katherine.19 Robert’s entanglements continued into the summer of 1935. It is unclear whether Katherine knew about them at the time, but she certainly did in later years, as she would have found evidence in Robert’s correspondence. It is clear that Robert allowed this former lover to believe that he might leave Katherine, and he kept her letter expressing her hopes. She wrote, “You have been in my thoughts constantly like a melody one never forgets. There has been quite a great deal of anxiety, too, although I should be shot for it! . . . I can hardly wait for your next letter. There is so much that must have been happening to you, and I’ve wished so that everything . . . were settled. A whole lifetime is not long enough to be with you. I’ve been so tired lately, and every night I’ve wished I could curl up in your arms. My life has never had any peace in it, except for that you gave me the times we were together this summer.”20 Robert somehow extricated himself, and the letter writer’s hopes were in vain; the Flippins remained together for another twenty-­seven years. Infidelity was undoubtedly a widespread marital problem. Even W.  E.  B. Du Bois was not immune, and his biographer has documented multiple liaisons.21 During his a∏air with the Harlem Renaissance writer Georgia Douglas Johnson, he wrote to her that he wanted to see her immediately upon his return from a trip. “I want to see you at midnight,” he stated, “please come down half-­dressed with pretty stockings. I shall kiss you.”22 However, family members were understandably reluctant to discuss extramarital a∏airs. Zora Neale Hurston’s biographer has suggested that Hurston’s father was unfaithful in his marriage to Hurston’s mother,23 but Hurston’s own autobiography makes no mention of this problem. Hurston does, however, acknowledge the existence of extramarital a∏airs in black communities and implies that women could and should fight back. She describes how one of her aunts dealt with her husband’s extramarital liaisons: she broke down the door of one lover’s house with an axe, and she knocked another o∏ the steps to the church, spit on her, and ground in the spit with her foot. Chapter 3 discussed “Sweat,” a 1925 short story, in which a straying husband re

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ceives his punishment when he is bitten by a snake he had been using to terrorize his wife. Hurston’s true and fictional stories of unfaithful husbands take place in the rural South and not in the New Negro enclaves of the North. She advocates a practical female sensibility about dealing with these husbands: women do not wallow in heartache and hurt feelings but instead simply dispatch the problem.24 Financial problems were another common area of marital conflict. Marie Johnson chided Charles for keeping his finances secret until an income tax problem exposed their precarious financial situation. She wanted them to be a “partnership” in their finances, as they had been in the old days.25 Despite Amy Jacques Garvey’s very pointed criticisms of men who were lazy or otherwise failed to protect and provide for their families, from 1925 on, Marcus Garvey was in fact failing to meet his wife’s standards. When he first went to prison in 1923, the couple’s bank account was nearly empty, as described in Chapter 4. Amy struggled constantly to cover his expenditures, and sometimes her fundraising provided funds the couple needed desperately. Moreover, Marcus was sometimes callous to Amy’s needs: he kept promising vacations alone together, which never materialized, and ignored the diΩculties she faced in packing up their household to move to Jamaica in 1927. He depended on her financially and as a personal assistant but appeared to still hold his masculine authority above her.26 In this way, he sounds not unlike Jean Toomer, described in Chapter 2, who insisted on leadership of the household even though he did not bring in any income. But other troubles were less well defined. For example, Katherine Flippin was deeply hurt when Robert concealed his liver cancer diagnosis from her until just before he died in September 1963 at age fifty­nine. His death came as a complete shock; he had sworn his doctor, a family friend, to secrecy. Robert likely intended to protect Katherine from worry, but she felt angry and betrayed by his secrecy. “I should have been told,” she said, “because I thought, well, he’s getting thin, he looks so terrible, but he’ll bounce back. But you see, had I known, I would have been ready for this permanent situation.” She recalls being “in a state of shock for months,” quitting her job, and not seeing anyone but her best friend.27 

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Love and Trouble for James and Sarah Curwood The Curwoods faced four challenges to marital happiness: sexual incompatibility, troubled finances, James’s substance abuse and mental health problems, and domestic violence. While their experience was especially dramatic and traumatic, their troubles developed within a social and historical context. Structural circumstances, in addition to personality and individual factors, made their marital lives miserable at times. On an individual level, James’s insecurity was extreme. He behaved neurotically as a result of his own personality and his life experiences before he met Sarah. On a structural level, James was a relatively uneducated black man trying to provide for a very well-­educated middle­class black wife during the Great Depression. He was charming and cultured, but he lacked his wife’s access to circles of relative power. Although he had tremendous intelligence and ambition in his own right, he felt inferior to Sarah. His insecurity, combined with mental illness and alcoholism, translated into jealousy, infidelity, violence, and eventual suicide. Sarah herself was very determined, serious, and ambitious. She was a product of her environment, in that her middle­class upbringing had helped her gain an excellent education. She was also a product of her time, in that she was beginning to question her prescribed role of mother and helpmate. What she brought to the marriage, then, was a deeply held conviction that she must use her education, which meant having a life outside her home and family. But she found herself trapped in a marriage with a controlling and often enraged man whom she eventually feared and resented. The inside of the Curwoods’ marriage is illuminated by the letters they left behind. The letters themselves exist partly because Sarah largely stayed put between 1935 and 1938 (she was at Cornell and, later, in Boston), while James was far more mobile. He was accustomed to moving around and seeking his fortune, as he had done before he met her. Traveling about in search of work was typical in the lives of working-­class men in that era, particularly during the Great Depression. After he married Sarah, he worked hard to support his middle-­class wife on his barely working-­class income. Later, he was 

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too proud to let her earn the relatively substantial income her education would have commanded. It is possible his persistent diΩculty in finding a well-­paid job made for this very uncomfortable state of a∏airs and prompted his moving around. Yet the possibility remains that he traveled for other personal reasons: to maintain relationships with other women, to satisfy a yearning for adventure, to avoid nervousness or feelings of inadequacy among the black men at Cornell and with Sarah’s family, or to find the means to move up in the world. His desperate hopes for upward mobility led to conflict. He disapproved of Sarah doing things by herself, yet he himself was often away. When he was away, his letters admonished her to pay attention to him nonetheless. When he felt neglected, which happened regularly, he demanded she “look closer into my a∏airs, and not give your opinions about them in so aloof a manner, and so hurriedly. It sometimes seems to me that to you, my endeavors are boring, and that the only reason you comment on them is because of your allegiance to conventional decency!!! [followed by thirty-­five more exclamation points].”28 The letters also worked to maintain contact between spouses and to perform rituals of courtship and romance. The performance not only pleased the other; it permitted the members of the couple to enact their own conceptions of themselves.29 These enactments were acts of gender reproduction. As a very young woman, Sarah was still forming her identity; she played the coy maiden and obedient wife, though she possessed traits that might have been called masculine: ambition, intellect, and seriousness. Sarah’s aloofness might have been both an act of playing hard to get and an indication of her consuming interest in her studies. Meanwhile, James was in the process of remaking his identity, a central tenet of which was masculinity. To be masculine in James’s world was to be a financially stable breadwinner and authoritative toward his wife.30 James’s ardent and sometimes possessive exhortations enacted the role of provider and overseer for his betrothed. He swore that he had not so much as looked at another woman since he met Sarah.31 These protestations continued throughout the correspondence. In this regard, too, the letters were a performance, 

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for James had at least two extramarital sexual liaisons during the marriage. Each lover projected the image that he or she thought would be most attractive to the other, and each constructed an idealization of his or her mate. The letters were the instruments of this endeavor. These are not the only examples of such instrumentality: Eleanor Alexander’s study of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore shows how letters were central to courtship in the early twentieth century. In Alexander’s words, the Dunbars were “in love with romantic love”; the same could be said of the Curwoods. Their views of each other were distorted by their individual convictions that their lover had to be the most important person or thing in their lives. Like the Victorians, they expected emotional fulfillment from their marriage. Unlike couples at the turn of the century, the wife had a higher expectation for fulfillment in her public life. Still, even in the face of evidence that suggested Sarah was not planning to be an ornamental wife and that James was not emotionally or financially responsible, they kept up the charade.32 As in the Dunbars’ correspondence, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Curwood letters is the degree to which James and Sarah played out their roles with each other. They developed their courtship and marital identities through their writing; the letters were private, but they were intended for the eyes of another — ​the future or new spouse. The motives for writing were complex: to reveal themselves to each other in their personalities and self-­conceptions, to tell the other what he or she expected, to give each other news, or to continue their romantic connection. Sometimes the letters were an emotional outlet: for Sarah during the times she was ill or lonely, and for James when he was angry or anxious, bursting with declarations of conjugal love or asserting his authority as a fiancé or husband. As performance, the letters show whom the Curwoods wanted to be, both as a couple and as individuals. James wrote letters that he probably hoped expressed his respectability, his eloquence, his devotion, and his ability to play a paternal role. Particularly during the first exhilarating year, he wrote romantically, with flowery turns of phrase, seeking to sweep Sarah o∏ her 

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feet. He played the role of a man in control of himself and his life who was ready to share and guide the life of a suitable woman, and he had chosen Sarah for the supporting role. He wrote many pages about his plans for their new home and how they would live once they were married: with a handsomely furnished home and a car. His letters often refer to Sarah as “my precious baby” or “my precious child,” and sometimes he gave advice on her emotional development: “Those unhappy days of yours [during the summer of 1935], although few, were needlessly so, for it is a great folly to depend upon others to insure your happiness, as true and lasting happiness comes from within, as you obviously have learned judging from your last letter or so.” His language was infantilizing: “Throughout the summer you have taken in new knowledge with the beautiful simplicity of a child, you have shown eagerness to learn, and an aptitude to understand.”33 Sarah looked like a successful man’s wife. In Sarah, James saw an attractive, caramel-­colored woman, academically brilliant but very young, who e∏ortlessly projected an air of refinement. Sarah’s appearance and demeanor explain James’s attraction. Sarah chose James over the other eligible men at Cornell at the time, perhaps because James was handsome and charming and treated Sarah with reverence and gentlemanly manners. Having educated himself, he appeared cultured, and he cut a fine figure on the dance floor. To young Sarah, who was accustomed to the graduate and undergraduate men at Cornell, he must have seemed mature and worldly. When she met James, she had spent only one and a half years as a member of a community of black people. The fact that James was a handsome black man who was interested in her company perhaps led her to ignore his lower social status and the slight air of womanizing that may have attended him. Her family did not meet him for some time, so they lacked an opportunity to express any doubt that they might have harbored about his class status. Perhaps, too, her serious academic ambition was o∏-­putting to other suitors. Competition increased Sarah’s eagerness to date James. Sarah was friends with Margaret Morgan, her fellow black female student at Cornell, who would eventually marry Charles Lawrence, become a doctor, and mother the sociologist Sara Lawrence Lightfoot. Margaret was from a prominent southern black family and the daughter of 

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a minister.34 Sarah’s sister Nony recalled, “I think there was some sort of competition going on with her and Margaret Morgan. . . . I don’t know whether he was looking at Margaret or not, you know sometimes when things like that happen, you tend to push yourself into a situation that ordinarily you wouldn’t. You’re thinking, ‘well, I’m gonna see if I can get him’ sort of thing.”35 James was secretive about his past, not only to conceal previous mistresses and trouble with the law, but also to present a middle-­class facade. Perhaps Margaret or her parents knew, despite James’s best e∏orts to reinvent himself, that such a match would be socially unacceptable. Perhaps James chose Sarah because Margaret was not available. After courting in the spring of 1935, James and Sarah began corresponding in earnest. The lovers, James especially, crafted their communications carefully. He sent his first letter during their stay in the Cornell infirmary. He explained in grand, formal language that he was specifically writing his letter in a style that he thought she would like. “Realising that you are soon to be my wife,” he wrote, “I thought it high time to learn your desire in correspondence, as I shall be away from you, from time to time after we are married on various excursions, and I should hate to be guilty of sending my wife un-­interesting letters.”36 James’s letters project a self-­consciously glamorous image and, at times, sound disingenuous. After several weeks’ silence, James explained that he had not written on account of an accident. The letter is sweet, almost too smooth, and full of patronizing reassurances. Was he injured while engaging in a criminal act? The injury does sound like something that might resemble a gunshot wound. Had he encountered trouble with the law? Many of his letters raise similar doubts.37 Sarah apparently found nothing amiss, however, and the a∏air continued to blossom. The couple continued their performance of romantic love. Some of the 1935 letters contain a hint of conflict and further indication of James’s controlling personality. He solicited professions of love from Sarah: “You are so shy when I insist on being told whether I am loved or not.” But his incessant requests made it impossible for her to say spontaneously that she loved him.38 Once the couple married in 1936, it was socially permissible for them to have sexual intercourse for the first time, an experience that Sarah 

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did not enjoy but hoped she would someday. With a job lined up at a local school, her plans seemed to be moving ahead.39 As time went on, however, the veneer of optimism and romantic love of the first letters fell away. The next letters provide an intimate glimpse of how race and gender identities interacted amidst the structural and emotional demands of marriage during the 1930s. Anger and possessiveness began to show up in some of James’s letters. At one point, he grew frustrated at Sarah’s attempts to get him to visit her at Cornell and angrily wrote, “I ask you to come over here insinuating that it was impossible for me to come over there and what answer do I get back. . . . James, you must come over here. If that isn’t a baby, I guess it must be a woman, I don’t know which is the more inconsistent.” He also complained that her letters were not intimate enough: “Sorry you were deprived of your letter to-­day but it could not be helped, I assure you. However I am not sure but what you were not deserving of a letter [sic]. Not because of anything you have said, but because of your totally empty letters.” He also expressed his jealousy of other men Sarah encountered at social events: “I am very glad you found an opportunity to go out and enjoy yourself, even though it does make me terribly jealous. If only you knew how jealous I am you would be sorely frightened.”40 James’s condescending tone and his belief that he knew what was best for Sarah were controlling behaviors that psychologists correlate with physical violence within marriages. James shared this controlling behavior with Jean Toomer, and both men physically abused their wives.41 Toomer’s beliefs about wives’ subservient roles, as described in Chapter 3, might have been echoed in James’s perspective. Such an assumption would have justified their bullying tactics to both men (and any others who assumed husbandly superiority). Sarah’s letters were consistently more reserved, o∏ering news from her senior year of school or from her family. She projected an identity of a cheerful, feminine, and devoted woman, perhaps wanting James to believe that she did put him first and that her schoolwork was only a temporary diversion. In short, terse paragraphs she wrote pages and pages of the details of daily life, describing picnics, movies, or friends. Sometimes her letters read like a list, as in this missive written shortly after they were married: 

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Have you chosen your job yet? How is your Aunt? I am going to a wedding on the 19th — ​one of my  high school friends. I believe I shall like Boston, as least I hope you I do. So you are glad to be married!!!!! Don’t flirt with  so many women. She very seldom displayed her strong feelings for her courtship and marriage the way that James did. She did profess her love, but in a lighthearted and exuberant way, unlike her husband’s heavy, romantic expositions on the character of his devotion. About their unexpected separation after marrying, during which she stayed with extended family, she wrote, “Remember how we used to kid around about the way we’d have to learn the right hand of letters after we were married + separated. Well here ’tis. I am listening to the radio. How I wish you were here so we could dance but Auntie [would] mind, I know.” Even her allusions to sexual intercourse had little emotion, and in a reference to a frightening first sexual experience, she cheerfully told her new husband, using pet names for sex organs, that she would surely learn to enjoy it as much as he did: “How is my friend Edgar? So sorry Nellie treated him so. She’s perfectly willing to rectify her mistake now!!!”42 James, meanwhile, asked her to declare her love more often and emphatically.43 Sarah’s aloof and indirect style countered her husband’s wrath or demands. She often managed to write pages and pages without revealing her feelings. Perhaps she perceived what would happen if she revealed her true self — ​the self that worried that she was too ambitious and educated to be happy with a husband like James, and the self that was independent and opinionated. Perhaps doing so would lead to havoc, of which there was already plenty in the marriage, even early on. To James’s chagrin, Sarah’s chatty yet somewhat superficial letters remained her default style, even when (or particularly when) James had written to her while upset and angry. Only occasionally, and when she was in despair, did Sarah breach her reserve. During the first year of their marriage, James was already despon

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dent and depressed, as he would be for the rest of their time together. The marriage began to unravel as Sarah discovered that he had pretended to be far more financially stable than he actually was, and James declined into alcoholism and depression. This decline began almost as soon as the Curwoods became a couple — ​so soon, in fact, that James probably had been mentally unstable and alcoholic before the marriage but had been able to hide his condition from Sarah. The letters evidence a steady disillusionment. Some of the most miserable years occurred when the Curwoods were together after 1937 and not writing to each other. Then Sarah’s diary includes short entries, such as “Jim in one of his moods.”44 Disaster first struck in July 1936. James infected Sarah with gonorrhea. Rather than apologize, he was relieved to know that he was the one who had given it to her, the implication being that she had not been intimate with someone else. Sarah was furious, because he had assured her that he was “clean” and free of sexually transmitted diseases.45 Also, after they purchased furniture for a new home, Sarah discovered that James lacked the money to rent an apartment. Worse, he was in serious debt. Sarah was appalled, and in her anger at having been lied to, she told James that he was not the sort of man with whom she and her family were accustomed to dealing.46 James convinced Sarah to ask her mother for rent. She did, and Sadie refused. Instead, Sadie implored the couple to reconsider their desire to rent an apartment. Sadie now told Sarah to return home to Binghamton, where she would have access to family doctors and be taken care of under her family’s roof. Her mother agreed to pay for storing the new furniture. Sarah collected her personal items from the school that had just hired her and went home to her family. She had not decided to leave James permanently, however. She intended to rejoin him after he found a job that would pay o∏ his debt. Sadie covered some of James’s expenses over the rest of the summer, and her sisters even loaned him money. Sarah decided that she would return to Cornell in the fall.47 Sarah decided to clarify her expectations for future behavior. She wrote to James outlining the bad “old deal” that had existed at the beginning of the summer and hoped that they could begin anew. Her eleven-­item list of don’ts is worth reproducing here: 

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It might be well to comment on a few of the “old deal plays” which shouldn’t be used again.







1 Lying  Lying (oh well why avoid the word) Lying directly or by implications such as the $1,000.00 that you we had that dwindled to $500 and then to $0 then ~$1000.00. 2 Refusal to have a medical check-­up which would have avoid[ed] all the trouble and expense of this summer which neither of us could pay for. Nellie positively refuses to meet Edgar unless he has a doctor’s certificate of ok and each time she leaves him, she will demand one before she returns to him. Not that she doesn’t trust Edgar but experience shows something when went haywire when all was supposed to be O.K. so you really can’t blame her. 3 Concealing of indebtedness. 4 Making big promises with nothing tangible to back them: ring, watch, auto, fur coat, furniture, etc. 5 Borrowing money to pay a debt 6 Buying cars 7 Borrowing cars. Use a train or bus. 8 Being unable to take “his girl” out yet not allowing her to go with someone else, even though he knows he’s the only man she loves. 9 Letting his hair be unkept. Finger nails also. 10 Forgetting to brush his teeth regularly and using dental floss. 11 Being a big shot bad man {wine women cards etc.48

This rare glimpse of pique reveals just how much the summer’s events had distressed Sarah. Her other letters reminded James about his debts but brimmed with encouragement. Now that James had a job, she revealed the conviction beneath her veneer of naïveté. Her letter hurt and humiliated James, and he wrote, “I full well know that I am a person who can be told things, and one who tries to profit by the things told me, but I will not be dictated to by you or anyone else. The manner in which you conditioned me caused me to grow angrier than I ever thought I could get with you, and every time I think of it I get damnably all over again — ​even though I have burned the letter.”49 Still, he tried to comply with her wishes. 

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Two other factors strained their marriage over the next year. Sarah became pregnant and, after attempting to abort her pregnancy with home remedies, had a miscarriage. James’s mental health grew fragile; he got angry at Sarah’s distress. At one point he told her his nerves could not take her constant barrage of worry about the pregnancy and money. A second strain was Sarah’s need to conceal her marital status. Only her mother, her sisters, and a few select extended family members knew she was married. Married women were not eligible for the funding that kept her at Cornell. Once she graduated from Cornell in June 1937, Sarah moved to Boston to be near James.50 The Curwoods finally were able to reside in the same household. Sarah was pregnant again, and their first child, Sarah Emily (“Sally”) Curwood, was born in April 1938. The couple purchased a house on Rockland Avenue in Roxbury, an African American neighborhood. Because they were living together, the couple stopped expressing their hopes and dreams for marriage in writing. what their story of courtship and early marriage shows is that the Curwoods, like all married couples, experienced an uneven mix of trouble and love. On the surface, the Curwoods were an ideal New Negro couple: attractive, erudite, intellectual, and respectable. Beneath the surface, the couple experienced the very human problems of sexual conflict, precarious finances, and mental illness. Unfortunately, they encountered more trouble than love. Living up to self-­ or externally imposed marriage ideals was an unrealistic, and eventually impossible, goal for this couple.



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Epilogue Unfortunately, the Curwood couple did not find happier times. By the 1940s, their marriage was deteriorating. James still traveled and had a∏airs. Sarah was patiently developing her own career, slowly overcoming James’s resistance. As the 1940s wore on, the fault lines deepened. He spent an unsuccessful month and a half in the navy, began to drink heavily, and experienced hospitalizations and rehabilitation for mental illness. Baby Sally became very ill with measles and then encephalitis that left her in a coma for one terrifying day, and James responded by going on a drinking binge. Sarah discovered concrete evidence of James’s infidelities and began to spend more and more time out of the house working and studying. Sarah managed her husband skillfully. Having discovered that teaching was one occupation he approved of, she began a job at the Ruggles Street Nursery School, a socially progressive, integrated program in Roxbury. And when she was at work and he could not reach her, she realized a measure of peace and respite from the household’s chaos. Sarah excelled in her chosen line of work. In 1944 she attended the Nursery Training School of Boston (later the Eliot-­Pearson Department of Child Study at Tufts University). She remained at Ruggles Street for five years, working her way up to head teacher, and after James’s death, she acted as director for a year. She also continued to study, earning a master’s degree in education from Boston University in 1947.1 Sarah’s professional development correlated with James’s declining mental health. In 1943 James was traveling again, and a few letters

date from that period. His aims were unclear, and his schedule was so drawn out and confusing that even Sarah did not know exactly where to send her letters. In 1944 James was drafted and entered the Great Lakes Naval Training Camp. After a month and a half, to his relief, he returned home on a medical discharge. He was older than most draftees, because Massachusetts was forced to send more older fathers (over age thirty-­eight) than most states. He was thoroughly miserable, and he was discharged more likely on mental than physical grounds. But while he was writing home nearly every day, declaring his misery and homesickness, he was also writing to a woman with whom he had had an a∏air.2 A few days after James returned home, an event occurred that revealed his tenuous mental health. Sally was admitted to the hospital at 4:00 a.m. in convulsions from encephalitis, a complication from the measles she had contracted a month before, and soon she went into a coma. She woke up, to Sarah’s relief, later that afternoon. James could not handle his wife’s focus on their daughter. In what was becoming an increasingly characteristic response to stress, he went on a drinking binge. After two nights, during which Sarah slept on the porch, James was admitted to the Washingtonian hospital, a rehabilitation facility.3 The crisis only deepened when Sarah discovered his a∏air. Because he had left the training camp so abruptly, his mail had to be forwarded to Boston. Most of the letters were from Sarah herself, but one was from his lover.4 James’s health did not improve. He spent time in the Boston Psychopathic hospital, in addition to the Washingtonian, and had at least one more a∏air. Meanwhile, he tried to stop drinking and provide a good living for his family. In 1946 he founded a cleaning service, A-­C House Cleaners, which specialized in contracting cleanups after fires and floods, storm window cleaning and storage, and regular maintenance cleaning. The firm advertised in Boston and wealthy suburbs, such as Wellesley.5 Sarah set up the oΩce and did the bookkeeping. She gave birth to a son, Stephen, in 1947. Unfortunately, the business was short lived. Sarah became adept at deflecting James’s prescriptions for her, but she did not escape verbal and mental bullying. “Curwood all o∏,” she wrote in her diary in 1948; “He makes me so nervous. I want to 

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go away, far away.”6 Her sister Nony recalled the signs of domestic abuse that she and her husband would notice on their periodic visits. James seemed intent on displaying how perfect his family was. Meanwhile, Sarah would neglect her guests, to their disappointment and ba∆ement. Later, Nony understood what was happening. “If she acted nice [to us], her husband would go into reverse, and act up,” she explained. “We didn’t know she was having all this trouble with him, see. As long as he felt like he was showing o∏ and what not, it was okay. Isn’t that strange? It just changed her personality so.”7 As Nony related, it was not until the marriage had reached a crisis point that the family realized how intimidated Sarah had been. Nony then understood how much Sarah had had to walk on eggshells to avoid upsetting her insecure, abusive, and easily enraged husband. In 1949 James behaved especially erratically, buying extravagant items such as a new car, and would disappear for days without warning. With a “trigger temper,” as Sarah put it, he argued with her frequently. She had long ago decided that arguing back took too much energy. Even their ten-­year-­old daughter, Sally, implored her father not to drink. Late that year James fell out with his best friend and business partner. Sarah, doing the books, knew that much of the income from the business was disappearing. The company went bankrupt.8 By this point, Sarah was desperate. Packing two children and her most precious possessions in the family car, she set o∏ on December 6, 1949, to visit her sister Nony in Kansas and James’s family in Texas. On Christmas Eve, in Texas, the news reached her that James had committed suicide by hanging himself the night before.9 Sarah’s strategy for dealing with James’s death was to swing into action. Like most middle-­class black widows, she did not have the option of eschewing the paid workforce.10 She sold the house and rented an apartment; then she purchased an eighteenth-­century farmhouse in southern New Hampshire and moved her family into it. At the same time, she pursued her graduate education. She had begun to study for her Ph.D. at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations. In the midst of the family crisis, she failed her qualifying exams in May 1949. Now a single mother, but unencumbered by her husband’s illness and chaos, she returned to study in earnest. She earned her Ph.D. in 1956, by which time she was an 

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assistant professor in psychology and sociology at Antioch College in Ohio. James’s suicide, then, was a mixed experience for Sarah. She was traumatized by his violent death and mourned him. Yet his death came as a relief to her; it removed his overbearing presence and allowed her to achieve her own goals.11 the story of James and Sarah Curwood o∏ers a rare archival glimpse into the intimate lives of an interwar couple. They are not representative archetypes of a black married couple, but their experience is a vivid example of how struggles for marital happiness and upward mobility played out in the space between their individuality and the times in which they found themselves. The Curwoods negotiated the flow of emotional and economic power within their marriage against the backdrop of twentieth-­century Jim Crow America, the growth of cities, the racial and class identity formation among New Negroes, and the gender and sexuality expectations of the interwar period. Living in an extremely racist society meant confronting racial realities. Black men and women alike found it diΩcult to live up to ideals of husbandhood and wifehood o∏ered by both other African Americans, who wanted to portray black people in the best light, and white Americans. The Curwoods found that racism erected multiple obstacles in their path to an ideal marriage, including James’s diΩculty in getting an education and finding a job that would pay a good enough wage to support Sarah. The Curwoods also found themselves in the urban North at a time when hundreds of thousands of southern African Americans had recently arrived. James himself was one such migrant. Unfortunately for the Curwoods and thousands of other families, when the couple married during the Great Depression, there were more African American workers than there were jobs that were open to them. Still, they married during a remarkable period of African American cultural and political self-­assertion. As New Negroes, they embodied upwardly mobile, racially proud hopes for self-­determination in the urban North. While some of this upward mobility would come from well-­compensated employment, they hoped, other noneconomic elements figured prominently in their self-­image. Education, 

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personal appearance and demeanor, and appropriate material possessions were valuable indicators of middle-­class status. The Curwoods also encountered evolving attempts by white and black Americans to reshape gender roles within marriage in the early twentieth century. The Curwoods participated in changing ideals but di∏ered with each other about what modern African American marriages should look like. Sarah and James brought very divergent socioeconomic statuses and cultural expectations to their marriage, which makes their story particularly revealing. Sarah’s middle-­class background, her coming of age at a time when women were an increasing presence in the professions, and her interest in social sciences and social work meant that she would not be fulfilled solely by a domestic role within her marriage. James’s experiences within upper-­class white households led him to expect a more domestic — ​ and ornamental — ​role for his wife. Furthermore, the Curwoods also dealt with human idiosyncrasies and mental illness. James’s substance abuse, gambling addiction, and infidelity meant that the couple often experienced chaos and conflict as the marriage continued into the 1940s. They were almost certainly not alone in dealing with these problems. I have sought to illuminate this interplay between external and internal factors throughout this book and especially in the telling of the Curwoods’ story. Other couples and families have allowed me to show the heterogeneity of married lives. Their stories show that marriages work at the intersection of racial self-­definition and human relationships. While some of them, as the Curwoods did, encountered more trouble than love, their stories and strivings are a tale of human endeavor that extends beyond the racial protocols of African American history.



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Notes Introduction 1 James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, July 19, 1937. This letter and other papers of Sarah T. Curwood now reside at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcli∏e Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 2 Coontz, Marriage, 8. See also May, Great Expectations. 3 New Negroes have received comprehensive treatment in Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, and later in Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois: Fight for Equality. See also Gates and Jarrett’s introduction to New Negro. Davarian Baldwin, in Chicago’s New Negroes, expands study of the New Negro into the urban Midwest. 4 Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 6–7. 5 Nell Irvin Painter uses this phrase to describe the study of southern history  in Southern History across the Color Line, 2. 6 Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 3–4. 7 Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.” 8 Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 93. 9 Stephanie Shaw has acknowledged the social-­psychological concepts of “external” and “internal” factors in the lives of professional black women. She maintains that women simultaneously participated in both internal (family and community) groups and external groups over which they had no control. See Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 5. By the same token, then, married couples also both belonged to their own families and commu­ nities and experienced life as black Americans in the Jim Crow United States.

Chapter 1 1 Throughout this period, African Americans and whites married at comparable rates. Herbert Gutman, in Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 455, notes that five in six black children in New York City in 1925 lived with both parents.

2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 1 4 15 16 17



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According to Andrew Cherlin, statistics show that marriage was a common experience for African Americans. From the late nineteenth century through much of the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans married earlier, and more frequently, than whites. Other measures show black-­white di∏erences before World War II to be very small. For example, in the early twentieth century, the vast majority of urban black children lived with both parents. In addition to marrying earlier in life, before 1950, more African American couples married than white couples, measured by the percentage of women ages 20–24 who had never married (i.e., were neither married, divorced, widowed, nor separated). By 1950, young white women married in greater numbers than did young black women. See Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, 94–95, 102–3. Stephanie Coontz argues that the subsequent statistical divergence between blacks and whites — ​most notably in out-­of­wedlock births, lower rates of marriage, and higher rates of divorce — ​is likely connected with the postindustrial city and other post–World War II factors. See Coontz, Way We Never Were, 241–44. Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 11. Ibid., 12. On women’s stereotypes and nineteenth-­century public actions, see Cott,  Public Vows; Welter, Dimity Convictions; Painter, Standing at Armageddon,  231–35, 242–43; and Coontz, Way We Never Were, 107–8. Coontz, Marriage, 145–49, 164 (quote on 177). Ibid., 179, 181. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 2, 4; Kessler-­Harris, Out to Work, 109–15. Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 146–47. Stansell, American Moderns, 31–32. Multiple studies have examined African American family life within slavery, and I will leave that discussion to them. See Gutman, Black Family in Slavery and Freedom; King, Stolen Childhood; Stevenson, Life in Black and White; Frankel, Freedom’s Women; and Painter, Southern History across the Color Line. Frances Smith Foster has compiled writings by African Americans that show how African Americans themselves saw their own families. She argues for the existence of a rich tradition of writing about love and marriage before the twentieth century. See Foster, Love and Marriage in Early African America, xiii–xvi. Cott, Public Vows, 81, 86–96. For an accounting of such laws, see Grossberg, “Guarding the Altar,” 222. For a discussion of the “Jezebel” and “Mammy” stereotypes of black women, see White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Cott, Public Vows, 106–7, 116, 141–42. See White, Too Heavy a Load, 44–54, 69–72. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 78. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 58–59; Washington, “New Negro Woman” (cited in ibid., 50).

notes to pages 15–19

18 “The surest way to prove that the facts [of black women’s licentiousness]  were overdrawn was to organize ourselves,” Washington wrote in her memoir of the NACW’s founding, “thus bringing before the country from time to time the best women of the race” (Washington, “National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 5”). For the history of the NACW, see Neverdon­Morton, Afro-­American Women of the South, 191–92, and White, Too Heavy a Load, 23, 52–54, 60–61. The individual NACW clubs initiated various self-­help programs in order to preserve and improve home life, and the national organization, by 1913, possessed several departments, including Social Service, Mother’s Meetings, Rural Conditions, Education, Temperance, Children, Health and Hygiene, and a Big Sister Movement. 19 Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 193, 202, 204. 20 Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 147–48. See also Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled, 113. Gordon, in her work on black women welfare leaders, has borrowed a term from Alice Walker and called this perspective “womanist.” By this she means that the women attached importance not only to marriage and sexual propriety but also to women’s active, public work toward professional goals or racial advancement. 21 Black Best Men presented their bourgeois impressions of both “New Negro Men” and “New Negro Women” in a series of sketches published in Voice of the Negro, vol. 1 (1904). 22 Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 62. 23 Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 107, 169; Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 57–58. 24 Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xiv, 5, 45, 102; Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 65–66. 25 A strategy that they used to combat racist and sexist stereotypes was what historian Darlene Clark Hine has called “the culture of dissemblance.” Black women sought to create dignity and personal autonomy for themselves by developing a public demeanor that seemed open and disclosing but that was in fact inscrutable. Part of this task was to deny their sexual feelings or identities. Hine explains that the NACW in particular furthered this performative process. See Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.” 26 Pearson, “The Home.” 27 Gibson and Gibson, Golden Thoughts, 3–4, 196–97. Claudia Tate brought my attention to this source in her Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 3–4, 196–97. 28 Gibson and Gibson, Golden Thoughts. 29 These statistics come from a sample of sixty-­four black female welfare activists chosen by Linda Gordon in Pitied but Not Entitled, 120–22, 309–11, 352 n. 33. 30 Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 169–72. 31 Harper, “Two O∏ers.” 32 This pattern is consistent with the experiences of two other black female public figures: Mary McLeod Bethune and Charlotte Hawkins Brown. See Foster, Brighter Coming Day, 3–23. 

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3 3 Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, 271. 34 Harlan, “Secret Life of Booker T. Washington,” 393–416. 35 Harlan, Booker T. Washington, 184–85, 213, 285; Neverdon-­Morton, Afro­American Women of the South, 134. 36 White, Too Heavy a Load, 82–83. For information about the career of Margaret Washington, see Rouse, “Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee.” 37 Scott, “Article in the Ladies’ Home Journal,” 291. 38 For a comprehensive biography of John Hope, see Davis, Clashing of the Soul. 39 Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, 14–19; Davis, Clashing of the Soul, 79. 40 Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 136–39. 41 Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, 23–24, 32–40 (quote on 36). While Rouse points out that John Hope preferred that Lugenia limit her political activities, Leroy Davis asserts that each spouse supported the other. See Davis, Clashing of the Soul, 123. 42 Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 161–62. 43 Ibid., 149–51. Despite changing laws and trends, African American journalists and authors of etiquette books exhorted women to avoid divorce at all costs. 44 Alexander, “Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow,” 8–9, 147; Gibson and Gibson, Golden Thoughts, frontispiece. 45 It seems likely that Jim Crow discrimination and humiliation played some role in Stewart’s decision to desert his wife, children, and country, although the ultimate reason may never be known. He certainly was enraged with racial politics at the time. In 1885 T. McCants Stewart had written from Columbia, South Carolina, to the Freeman, a New York newspaper, “I feel about as safe here as in Providence, R.I. I can ride in first-­class cars on the railroads and in the streets. . . . I can stop in and drink a glass of soda and be more politely waited upon [than] in some parts of New England.” However, after another trip south in 1890, which must have been the trip on which he left his family in Charleston, he realized that Jim Crow was becoming increasingly entrenched. See Wynes, “T. McCants Stewart,” 315–17. 46 Charlotte Stewart Stephens to McCants Stewart, May 26, 1906, box 97-­3, folder 35, Stewart-­Flippin Family Papers, Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 47 Ibid. 48 Cayton, Long Old Road, 1–7, 23–26. 49 Reid, “Critical Summary.” 50 Painter, Creating Black Americans, 199–201. 51 English, Unnatural Selections, 1 52 Ibid., 21–22, 33. 53 Stansell, American Moderns, 273. 54 Norton, People and a Nation, 642–43; Ullman, Sex Seen, 73–74; Chesler, Woman of Valor, 206–9. 

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notes to pages 25–34

5 5 Du Cille, “Blues Notes on Black Sexuality,” 418–44. 56 Ann du Cille, in Coupling Convention, has extensively analyzed marriage in the works of Wright and Hurston. 57 Interview with Margaret Walker Alexander, 1977, in Hill, Black Women Oral History Project, 2:27. Margaret was a writer who wrote as Margaret Walker; her most famous work is Jubilee. 58 Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 163–64. 59 Aaron Douglas to Alta Sawyer Douglas, date unknown, 1925, folder 1, letter 5, Papers of Aaron Douglas, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. 60 Interview with Elizabeth Cardozo Barker, 1976, in Hill, Black Women Oral History Project, 2:96. 61 Grossberg, “Guarding the Altar,” 205; Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 19–20, 147–49. 62 Williams, “Talks,” Chicago Defender, March 28, 1914. 63 Ibid., March 24, 1923. 64 Ibid., April 14, 1923. 65 Sanger, What Every Girl Should Know, 63–67. 66 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 241. 67 Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, 301–3. 68 Sanger, letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, November 11, 1930, and to James E. Hubert, December 3, 1930, in Papers of Margaret Sanger, “Advisory Council: Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau [1932],” reel 32; Chesler, Woman of Valor, 295–96. 69 Du Bois, “Black Folk and Birth Control.” 70 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Marriage and Divorce, 1926, table 9. Statistics by race are not available for those years, but in 1939 there were 8.4 divorces per 1,000 married males in the general population, and 6.6 divorces per 1,000 nonwhite married males. See Jacobson, American Marriage and Divorce, table 23. 71 May, Great Expectations, 156–63. 72 Coontz, Marriage, 197–98, 200–201, 307. 73 Groves, Marriage Crisis, 12, 30, 64, 189. 74 Lindsey and Evans, Companionate Marriage, 14, 79, 138. 75 Drowne and Huber, The 1920s, xv, 23. 76 Ibid., 47. 77 Patricia Hill Collins has called this “heteronormativity.” In her analysis, heteronormativity is a system of power designed to control sexual and gender identities. For her, heterosexism, as she calls it, moves beyond simply prescribing heterosexuality and condemning homosexuality. It is a system of power that posits certain forms of sexuality as superior or inferior and gives legitimacy to those in the supposed superior group to control those in the so-­called inferior group. The superior group tends to claim that its own form of sexuality is normal while that of the other group is deviant, and it sets up a strict demarcation between normal and deviant sexualities. In the case of African Americans, long-­standing images of the black male rapist and the black 

notes to pages 34–40

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8 4 85 86

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8 8 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

female Jezebel work to code so-­called deviant sexuality as black and so-­called normal sexuality as white. See Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 128–29. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Fight for Equality, 221. Ibid., 224–25, 266. Cram and Bowser, Midnight Ramble. For a discussion of skin color, gender, and marriage, see Chapter 4. Hudson, “Reading Achievements, Interests, and Habits of Negro Women.” Hudson found preference for love stories and “negro literature.” For Fauset, see Plum Bun, The Chinaberry Tree, and There Is Confusion. For Larsen, see Quicksand and Passing. All use the plot device of marriage — ​albeit in a myriad of ways — ​to discuss gender, race, class, and color. Analysis of Fauset’s and Larsen’s work can be found in Ann du Cille, Coupling Convention; Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance; McLendon, Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen; and Davis, Nella Larsen. Williams, When Washington Was in Vogue. Young and Young, The 1930s, 176. Except for live performances, race records were often the only way black listeners could access black music. They could not tune in via radio, because only in the late 1930s did Jack Cooper, in Chicago, became the first black DJ; until then, black music had only limited exposure on the radio. See Starr and Water­ man, American Popular Music, 87–91, and Drowne and Huber, The 1920s, 205. Chapter 4 discusses the feminist implications of this choice; see also Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 11–14, 17–18, 154–59. Quoted lyrics are Davis’s transcription, p. 287. Ibid., 48. Murphy, St. Louis Blues. McCanns, “Day at Hampstead.” Robeson, Paul Robeson. Starr and Waterman, American Popular Music, 110, 118. Ibid., 153–54. Waters, “My Handy Man” (author’s transcriptions of lyrics). Cherry, “Long, Lean Lanky Mama,” 275. Author’s transcription. Cherry, “Long Lean Lanky Mama,” 272. Garber, “Spectacle in Color,” 318–31.

Chapter 2 1 Cott, Public Vows, 92–96. At the time, however, congressmen did not think that African American men should have political rights like voting. 2 Ross, Manning the Race, 17. 3 Indeed, as Deborah Gray White has remarked, the New Negro era possessed an “underlying machismo.” See White, Too Heavy a Load, 110–12 (quote on 116). 

170

notes to pages 41–54

4 Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 152–53; Ross, Manning the Race, 17. 5 Locke, New Negro, 4. 6 Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 201, 205–6. See also Wall, Women of the Harlem Renaissance. 7 Locke, New Negro. For further analysis of the images themselves, see Ross, Manning the Race, 84–89. 8 Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 206. 9 Ross, Manning the Race, 94–95; see also Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. 10 Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 22–23, 152–53; White, Too Heavy a Load, 120–23. 11 Taylor, Veiled Garvey, 82–85. 12 Du Bois editorial. 13 Horace Cayton to Robert Flippin, June 21, 1932, box 92-­12, folder 220, Stewart­Flippin Family Papers, Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 14 Ibid. 15 Cayton, Long Old Road. 16 Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 156–57, 188. 17 The novel was published in 2003 as When Washington Was in Vogue: A Love Story (A Lost Novel of the Harlem Renaissance). 18 Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, 82. 19 Chateauvert, Marching Together, 4, 54, 85. 20 See Ferguson, Blood at the Root, 109, and Miller, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender, 111. 21 Chateauvert, Marching Together, 139. 22 Kimmel, Manhood in America, 132. 23 The Birth Control Review was published by the American Birth Control League, originally headed by Margaret Sanger. See Du Bois, “Black Folk and Birth Control.” See also, in the same volume, Schuyler, “Quantity or Quality,” and Johnson, “Question of Negro Health.” 24 Frazier, “Bourgeoisie Noire,” 388. 25 These were The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), The Free Negro Family (1932),  and The Negro Family in the United States (1939). 26 Ross, Manning the Race, 147–48, 175. 27 Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, 25, 28–29. 28 Ibid., 45–51; Clark University transcript, box 131-­1, folder 6, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Frazier Papers). 29 Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, 53, 56, 59–61. 30 Despite his productivity and growing professional acclaim, Frazier was plagued by the racism of his Atlanta colleague, the white social worker Helen Pendleton. After Frazier secured funding for the purpose of accrediting the school, including a $15,000 grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation, he became Pendleton’s superior. Frazier’s militant antiracism 

notes to pages 55–63

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31

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and his role as her superior so incensed Pendleton that by the fall of 1926 she had convinced the board to remove Frazier as director. See Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, 62–65, 72–73, 76. Thomas Jones to W. E. B. Du Bois, April 11, 1927; E. Franklin Frazier to W. E. B. Du Bois, January 18, 1927; W. E. B. Du Bois to Frazier, January 21, 22, 1927, all in box 131-­9, folder 6, Frazier Papers. Platt also tells a version of this story in E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, 77–78. Charles S. Johnson to E. Franklin Frazier, October 20, 1924, and E. Franklin Frazier to Charles S. Johnson, January 3, July 23, 1925, box 131-­11, folder 10, Frazier Papers. Frazier, “Bourgeoisie Noire,” 387. Ibid., 382, 385. Ibid., 97–99. Ibid., 112, 125–27, 143, 224–25. In the meantime, he had published his second book, a short analysis of free black families that eventually became chapter 10, “The Sons of the Free,” in The Negro Family in the United States, 182–214. Platt, E. Franklin Frazier Reconsidered, 142–44. Box 131-­39, folder 12, Frazier Papers. Frazier, Negro Family in the United States, 41, 106–7, 117, 126–27, 144, 150–51. His editor at the University of Chicago Press, G. J. Laing, was surprised when Frazier referred to the manuscript by that title in a letter of July 1937. Laing had previously thought, he wrote back, that the title was “The Negro Family in the United States” and that it was best to use a straightforward title rather than a literary one. Frazier explained that he had only used “The Negro Family in the United States” as a working title, not the title itself. But, prodded by Laing and Ernest Burgess, an editor for Chicago’s Sociological Series, Frazier assented to the more pedestrian and scientific-­sounding title. He did lecture Burgess, “Incidentally, The House of the Mother is an African expression for the maternal family organization, and I have shown throughout the manuscript how that has a∏ected Negro family life in the United States” (box 131-­39, folder 12, Frazier Papers). Frazier, Negro Family in the United States, 164–65, 170–73. Ibid., 235, 246–47. Ibid., 246–67. Frazier uses this term to refer to the working class in general. Not coincidentally, W. E. B. Du Bois had used the concept of the black proletariat in Black Reconstruction (1935). In chapters 10 and 11, Du Bois studied black laborers during Reconstruction in a Marxian framework. Black proletarians played a heroic role, creating a labor movement in 1869, conducting themselves without violence and in dignity, and becoming the wisest voice in Reconstruction politics. See Black Reconstruction, 416–20.

notes to pages 63–68

46 7 4 48 49 50

51

52 53 5 4 55 5 6 57 58

5 9 60 61 62 63

64



Frazier, “Status of the Negro in the American Social Order,” 293–307. Frazier, Negro Family in the United States, 447–75. Ibid., 285, 413, 429–30, 439, 460, 474–75. Moynihan, Negro Family, 6–12. These writings are preserved in the Jean Toomer Papers in the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., and are hereafter referred to as Toomer Papers. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist, 14–15, 225. Pinchback is a famous figure in African American history, having been the Reconstruction-­era governor of Louisiana for two months, a Louisiana state senator, and a U.S. senator (he was elected but not admitted). Pinchback was so light that he could pass for white, but he chose not to and instead participated in elite African American social and political circles. The Pinchback family lived in a predominantly white neighborhood in Washington, D.C. See Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer, 16, and Larson, Invisible Darkness, 170. Jean Toomer, “Notation of Events,” March 28, 1950, box 63, folder 1450, Toomer Papers. Nina E. Pinchback Toomer to Nathan Toomer, July 8, 1897, box 8, folder 262, Toomer Papers; Larson, Invisible Darkness, 172. Larson, Invisible Darkness, 178–81. Jean Toomer to Mae Wright, August 4, 1922, and to Mrs. Wright, August 16, 1922, box 9, folder 283, Toomer Papers. Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 214. See Hutchinson, “Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse.” Many of his ideas about human nature came from Georges Gurdjie∏, the Armenian spiritual leader who ran a school and commune in Fontainebleau, France, in the 1920s. Although Toomer broke with Gurdjie∏ in 1930, he remained fascinated by psychology and human nature. For more details about the intersection of Toomer’s literary work and Gurdjie∏ ’s thought, see the excellent biography of Toomer by Nellie McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist, 214–24. Jon Woodson takes this connection a step further by connecting Gurdjie∏ to more Harlem Renaissance writers in To Make a New Race. Larson, Invisible Darkness, 126, 130–33. Ibid., 39; McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist, 212–13. “Gurdjie∏, George Ivanovitch”; Larson, Invisible Darkness, 34–38. Larson, Invisible Darkness, 42–45; Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer, 170–72, 186. Jean Toomer, January 4, 1930, Journals 1929–1930, box 61, folder 1419, Toomer Papers. Interestingly, this was in spite of (or perhaps because of ) his resentment at the restrictive role his grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, played in his life. See Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer, 16. Jean Toomer, undated entries, box 61, folder 1419, Toomer Papers.

notes to pages 68–74

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65 See, for example, “Fern” and “Karintha,” chapters that accentuate women’s mysterious, sensuous qualities and de-­emphasize their agency. 66 Margery Latimer to Laura Greshemer Chase, June 1931, box 9, folder 296, Toomer Papers. See also Margery Latimer to Jane Comfort, May 1931, box 9, folder 297, and Margery Latimer to Shirley Grove, May 1931, box 9, folder 305, Toomer Papers. Also see Larson, Invisible Darkness, 122–24. 67 Larson, Invisible Darkness, 122–26; Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer, 194–96. Toomer’s own account, quoted in both sources, was called Portage Potential and can be found in box 35, folders 747–50, Toomer Papers. See also Margery Latimer’s journal, n.d., box 66, folder 1512, Toomer Papers. 68 Margery Latimer to William and Karlton Kelm, June 18, 1932, box 9, folder 309, Toomer Papers. 69 Kerman and Eldridge, Lives of Jean Toomer, 205–6; Jean Toomer form letter to friends, August 23, 1932, box 8, folder 250, Toomer Papers. 70 Stansell, American Moderns, 229, 231, 234, 245–46, 258. 71 Jean Toomer to Marjorie Content, June 20, 1934, box 8, folder 254, Toomer Papers. 72 Taylor, Shadows of Heaven, 18, 23, 35, 219. 73 This session is described in a letter from Jean Toomer to Marjorie Content, June 17, 1934, box 8, folder 253, Toomer Papers. 74 Taylor, Shadows of Heaven, 44–46; Larson, Invisible Darkness, 156. 75 Jean Toomer, from “As the World Revolves” (1935–37), box 24, folder 586, Toomer Papers. 76 Jean Toomer, “Men, Where Bound?,” from “As the World Revolves” (1935–37), box 24, folder 584, Toomer Papers. 77 Jean Toomer, n.d. (ca. 1935–37), “The Hunter and the Farmer,” box 49, folder 1036, Toomer Papers. 78 Jean Toomer, n.d. (ca. 1935–37), “Lord and Master,” ibid. 79 Jean Toomer, n.d. (ca. 1935–37), untitled draft fragment (“To train a woman to be the wife of a genius . . .”), from “As the World Revolves,” box 24, folder 586, Toomer Papers. 80 Jean Toomer, “Men, Where Bound?,” from “As the World Revolves” (1935–37), box 24, folder 584, Toomer Papers. 81 Jean Toomer, “Women” and “The Bases of Modern Man’s Distrust of Modern Woman,” from “As the World Revolves,” box 24, folder 582, Toomer Papers. 82 Jean Toomer, “One of the Functions of Marriage,” from “As the World Revolves,” ibid.; “The Functions of Man to Woman, and Woman to Man, in their life together” and untitled (“Each person has good, bad, and indi∏erent aspects”), box 49, folder 1036, Toomer Papers. 83 Jean Toomer, n.d. (ca. 1935–37), untitled draft fragment (“Man wants an establishment”), box 49, folder 1036, Toomer Papers. 84 Jean Toomer, n.d. (ca. 1935–37), “Lord and Master,” ibid. 85 Sarah Curwood owned a copy of Frazier’s Negro Family in the United States. 

174

notes to pages 74–82

Chapter 3 1 James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, June 29, 1937, Sarah T. Curwood Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as Curwood Papers). James’s desire was unusual among black husbands, who usually wished for their wives to escape domestic service. Perhaps he wished for her downward mobility in order to even out their class status. 2 Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, July 1, 1937, Curwood Papers. 3 See Landry, Black Working Wives. 4 Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 111–13. 5 Cott, Public Vows, 157, 164. 6 As a result of these economic and cultural factors, married women’s employment rates across all races increased from 1910 to 1920, from 1920 to 1930, and from 1930 to 1940. In the 1920s, married women workers began to seem less oxymoronic, and more wives admitted wanting an independent income and the right to work. See Bolin, “Economics of Middle-­Income Family Life,” and Kessler-­Harris, Out to Work, 224–25, 228–29. 7 White, Too Heavy a Load, 120. 8 Locke, New Negro. 9 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 228–29, 237–39. 10 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 157. 11 Stephanie Shaw describes situations where husbands exhibited these responses. Fostine Riddick concealed her shifts as a nurse anesthetist from her husband in the 1930s, and Portia Washington Pittman’s husband grew violent when he could not find work but she was enjoying acclaim as a musician in the 1920s. See What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 118, 125. 12 “The New Negro Woman,” Messenger, July 1923, 757 (emphasis in original). 13 Owen, “Love — ​Once More!” 14 Chateauvert, Marching Together, 139. Married women who were Pullman maids were members of the Brotherhood itself, however. 15 Owen, “Marriage and Divorce” (pt. 2). 16 Ibid. (pt. 1). 17 Frazier, Negro Family in the United States, 429. 18 Ibid., 420–46. 19 Ibid., 438. 20 Ibid., 437. 21 Ibid., 439–40. 22 Williams, When Washington Was in Vogue, 8, 12, 25, 45. 23 Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 114–19, 124–25. 24 White, Too Heavy a Load, 163–68; Chateauvert, Marching Together, 2–3, 11. 25 Hill, Black Women Oral History Project, 2:20. 26 Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 2. 27 Indeed, these women were way ahead of their time. Like Bart Landry and 

notes to pages 83–92

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others, I suspect that the current ideal of a balance of home and career life owes something to these 1920s and 1930s women. Garvey, “Women as Leaders,” reprinted in Guy-­Sheftall, Words of Fire, 93–94. Taylor, “ ‘Negro Women are Great Thinkers as well as Doers’ ” and “Introduction to Amy Jacques Garvey.” Taylor, Veiled Garvey, 72–73. McDougald, “Double Task” and “Task of Negro Womanhood.” Hochschild, Second Shift. King, “Multiple Jeopardies, Multiple Consciousness,” 294–317. “Sweat” originally appeared in volume 1, number 1, of Fire!!, a single-­issue literary magazine that Hurston coedited with Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Aaron Douglas, John Davis, and Richard (Bruce) Nugent in 1926. Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 108. It is true that Hurston placed less of an emphasis on the fact that women were a social group, bound together by sisterhood. Furthermore, she did not successfully practice “community feminism,” because Hurston’s characters (Janie, in particular) did not manage to balance their individual needs as women or persons with the collective needs of their race. See, for example, Jordan, “Feminist Fantasies,” 106. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 149. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 186–88. Interestingly, Hurston fails to mention a second, short-­lived marriage, which she entered while she was separated from Punter. See Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 325–26. Works Progress Administration jobs were given to white men first and black women last. But at least one grassroots campaign worked. The “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycott of department stores in several major cities that refused to hire African Americans yielded an estimated 75,000 new jobs during the 1930s. See Bolin, “Economics of Middle-­Income Family Life”; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 215–21; and Kessler-­Harris, Out to Work, 259–61. May, Homeward Bound, 48–49, Kessler-­Harris, Out to Work, 254–58; Scharf, To Work and to Wed, 102–9. See Chicago Defender, February 17, 24, 1934. The series began on February 17 and continued for ten weeks. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 30, 44–46. Ibid., 69, 110. Ibid., 85, 133–35. Ibid., 171–72, 198–99, 218–20, 285. Slowe, “Colored Girl Enters College.” Mary Burrill was a playwright and author. See Beemyn, “Queer Capital,” 94–103. Shaw lists several examples of women who chose to remain unmarried in What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 124–25.

notes to pages 92–100

9 4 50 51 52

5 3 54 55 56 57 58

59

60

Drury, “ ‘Experimentation on the Male Side,’ ” 1, 2, 4, 8. Ibid., 3, 6–18, 26–33. Hill, Black Women Oral History Project, 2:69–86. Untitled speech on achievements of African American women, box 71 folder 33, Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Papers, University of Pennsylvania Archives, Philadelphia (hereafter cited as Alexander Papers). Hill, Black Women Oral History Project, 2:80–82. Alexander, “Negro Women in Our Economic Life.” Ibid. “The Emancipated Woman,” ca. 1930, box 71, folder 30, Alexander Papers. Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism, 4–5. “The Economic Status of Negro Women, an Index to the Negro’s Economic Status,” February 1934 (speech at the Baltimore Urban League), box 71, folder 32, Alexander Papers. Margaret Walker Alexander, too, had some ambivalence about her absence from her children’s young lives. In her case, she recalled being too busy to help them with their schoolwork as she herself had been helped when she was a child. She recalled that she was working very hard and was so tired that simply cooking dinner was a tremendous e∏ort. But she also stated that she was not interested in teaching very young children. In any case, her siblings stepped in to help Margaret’s children with their homework each day. See Hill, Black Women Oral History Project, 2:16–17. Sarah Thomas Curwood to James Curwood, June 28, 1937, and James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, June 29, 1937, Curwood Papers.

Chapter 4 1 Occupation, education, and income are some such markers. See Willie, Black and White Families, 18–19. In addition to Willie’s indicators, wealth, property ownership, and more intangible markers such as personal conduct and skin color were indicative of the black middle classes. 2 Ibid., 112. 3 Russell, Wilson, and Hall, Color Complex, 1. 4 Walker, Style and Status, 82–83. 5 Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 113–14. 6 Herskovits, American Negro, 64, quoted in Russell, Wilson, and Hall, Color Complex, 108, 178 n. 2. 7 Frazier, Negro Family in the United States, 429. 8 Ibid., 428–29. 9 Williams, When Washington Was in Vogue, 10, 48, 136–44. 10 Gladys Walton to Lester A. Walton, July 8, 1937, box 1, folder 13, Lester A. Walton Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. (hereafter cited as Walton Papers). 

notes to pages 100–113

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11 Taylor, Veiled Garvey, 121. On color in the Caribbean, see Simpson, “Skin Color in the Caribbean,” 29–46. 12 Quoted in Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism, 12, 197. 13 Amy Jacques Garvey to Michael Manley, April 6, 1973, quoted in Taylor, Veiled Garvey, 122. 14 Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead, 20–23 (quote on 22), 114–15, 124–26, 141. 15 Ibid., 114–15. 16 Ibid., 21, 22, 215 (quote on 215). 17 Ibid., 42–43, 215, 114–15. 18 Ibid., 114–15. 19 Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 9. 20 Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 39–46, quoted in Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 103–4. 21 Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 92. 22 Garvey, Philosophies and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, 1023. 23 Garvey, Garvey and Garveyism, 162, 164–68. 24 Taylor, Veiled Garvey, 90. 25 Ibid., 189–90. 26 Mrs. [first name unknown] Walton to Lester A. Walton, July 4, 1931, box 1, folder 9, Walton Papers. 27 Lester A. Walton telegram to Gladys (“Sister”) Walton, ca. July 22, 1937, box 1, folder 13, Walton Papers. 28 Gladys Walton and Charles W. L. Johnson telegram to Lester A. Walton, July 30, 1937, box 1, folder 13, Walton Papers. 29 Lester A. Walton telegram to Gladys Walton, ca. August 2, 1937, ibid. 30 Fredi Washington to Laurence Brown, October 10, 1933, box 1, folder 1, Fredi Washington Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. 31 Fredi Washington to Laurence Brown, October 26, 1933, ibid. 32 Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 149–50, 224–25. 33 Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 183–88 (quote on 184); Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 272–74. 34 Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 373. 35 Murphy, “Adam Powell’s Ex-­Bunny Girl Isn’t Forgetting or Regretting,” [Martha’s] Vineyard Gazette, October 31, 1975, clipping in Isabel Washington Powell Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. 36 Statistics show that 40 percent of black upper-­middle-­class wives with children were employed in 1940, while nearly 60 percent of childless upper­middle-­class black women were. See Landry, Black Working Wives, 200, figs. B3 and B4. 37 Ibid., 92.



178

notes to pages 113–23

38 Sarah Thomas Curwood memoir, Sarah T. Curwood Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as Curwood Papers). 39 Sarah T. Curwood Manuscript, 1967–1968 (dated November 1967 and Fall 1968) (hereafter cited as Curwood Manuscript), Curwood Papers. Manuscript entries were written between 1967 and 1968; where she dated an entry, I have included her date(s). 40 Curwood Manuscript (including dated entry of January 28, 1968), Curwood Papers. 41 Curwood Manuscript, Curwood Papers. 42 Ibid. 43 These books cost five or ten cents each and contained what the publishers hoped was an education in socialist ideas for working-­class men and women. See website for the Debs Collection, Indiana State University, 〈 http://library .indstate.edu/about/units/rbsc/debs/bluebook.html 〉, accessed April 23, 2009. 44 Curwood Manuscript (including entries from “Easter 1968” and November 1967), Curwood Papers. 45 Skelton interview by author. 46 Sadie also tried to protect Sarah from racism. She often told her daughter that the Thomases were “just an ordinary family, living an ordinary life.” Reality exerted its own pressure, however, in the racist arson of their house and white residents moving away when the Thomases moved in. See Curwood Manuscript (including January 28, 1968), Curwood Papers. 47 Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 13–16, 35–38. 48 The opposite was true for white middle-­class marriages, in which economic necessity trumped a desire for professional service to communities. See Landry, Black Working Wives, 30–31. 49 Curwood Manuscript, Curwood Papers. 50 Ibid.; Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead, 94–99. Margaret Morgan is Sara Lawrence Lightfoot’s mother and is the subject of this book. 51 Curwood interview by author. James likely had a sexual relationship with Charles’s daughter, Charlietta, or “Chas” (he told Sarah that Chas was his aunt). He also adopted another woman as his mother, identified only as Mrs. Horace V. Hill and “Mother” in his correspondence. 52 For a discussion of the self-­made man in America and men’s desires to appear powerful in the eyes of other men, see Kimmel, Manhood in America, 6–10. 53 “Jr. High Promotes its Largest Class,” June 20, 1936, newspaper clipping enclosed with Sarah E. Thomas Diary, 1932–36, Curwood Papers. 54 See Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 29–32, 57–58, 242–43. Richard Bushman has documented the growing use in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of less expensive alternatives to architectural and wearable finery among what he calls the “vernacular gentility,” nonmembers of the middle class who



notes to pages 124–31

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55

5 6 57 58 5 9 60 61

2 6 63

4 6 65 66

wanted to appear respectable. People without good taste, he suggests, were thought of as lower in the progression of civilization. See Bushman, Refinement of America, xiii, 207–9. Volumes cited are in possession of author. I have identified them as belonging to James Curwood by the presence of bookplates bearing his name. It is interesting to note, however, that the 1940 edition of The Negro Family in the United States was Sarah’s own. It has her personalized label on its endpaper. I do not know whether James ever read The Negro Family in the United States, but a copy was in his house. Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, April 19, 27, 1944, Curwood Papers. Minute book, 1934–35, Booker T. Washington Club Archives 37-­6-­3516, Kroch Library Rare Books and Manuscripts, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Sarah E. Thomas Diary, January 12, February 9, 19, April 3, May 20, 1935, and James Curwood to Sarah Thomas, March 27, 1935, Curwood Papers. Curwood Manuscript, Curwood Papers. Sadie Thomas to Sarah T. Curwood, July 9, 1936, and Sarah T. Curwood to James L. Curwood, July 30, August 16, 31, 1936, Curwood Papers. Indeed, if the same person had remained at the helm of the Boston Urban League since 1931, a photograph of him exists in Opportunity magazine and shows him to have medium brown skin tone. See photograph of George S. Goodman, Executive Secretary, Boston Urban League, in Opportunity 9, no. 7 (July 1931): 213. James Curwood to Sarah Thomas, September 3, 1935, Curwood Papers. James Curwood to Sarah Thomas, September 5, 9, 1935, and March 7, 1936. ­Sarah’s description of her hair is in Sarah Thomas Curwood memoir, Curwood Papers. Sarah T. Curwood memoir, Curwood Papers. Curwood Manuscript, Curwood Papers. Painter interview with Marie Brown Frazier.

Chapter 5 1 I borrow this phrase from Ti∏any Patterson’s characterization of Zora Neale Hurston’s work in Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 6. 2 Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels. 3 See, for example, Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, and Coontz, Way We Never Were. 4 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 151–53. 5 Aaron Douglas to Alta Sawyer Douglas, date unknown, 1925, folder 2, letter 18, Papers of Aaron Douglas, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. 6 Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 123. 7 Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1996), 187–88. 

180

notes to pages 131–42

8 Wedding Book Supplement, 1920, box 147, folder 6, Charles S. Johnson Papers, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn. (hereafter cited as Charles S. Johnson Papers). 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. A slightly di∏erent account of their first meeting (via Edwin Embree) appears in Gilpin and Gasman, Charles S. Johnson, 7–8. 11 Robert Reagin to Lester A. Walton, August 2, 1932, box 1, folder 9, Lester A. Walton Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. (hereafter cited as Walton Papers). 12 The ideas of John R. Gillis, who has argued against the notion that marriage is a “liberation from bondage to kin, peer group, and community,” are useful here. See Gillis, For Better, For Worse, 3–4. 13 Hill, Black Women Oral History Project, 4:109. 14 Ibid., 4:170. 15 Fredi Washington to Laurence Brown, June 6, 1932, June 24, October 10,  1933, and September 5, 1934, box 1, folder 1, Fredi Washington Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y. 16 Marie Johnson to Charles S. Johnson, March 24, 1930, and January 17, 1947, box 149, folder 8, Charles S. Johnson Papers. 17 Gladys Moore Walton to Lester A. Walton, April 20, 1929, June 2, 17, 23, 20, 1931, July 5, 8, 16, 30 (telegram), September 7, 1937, box 1, folders 8, 9, and 13, Walton Papers. 18 Journal of Robert B. Flippin, entries for June 30, July 18, 1935, and January 2, 1936, box 97-­10, folder 182, and Georgia Flippin, Mary Stewart, and Katherine Flippin to Robert Flippin, January 1, 1936, box 97-­12, folder 223, Stewart­Flippin Family Papers, Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. (hereafter cited as Stewart-­Flippin Family Papers). 19 Violette M. Blattmen to Robert B. Flippin, May 12, 1932, and Arabela Burke to Robert B. Flippin, February 8, 1932, box 97-­12, folder 219; Edna Mae James to Robert B. Flippin, October 27, 1930, box 97-­12, folder 226, all in Stewart­Flippin Family Papers. 20 Betty Humiston to Robert Flippin, October 21, 26, 1936, box 97-­12, folder 225, Stewart-­Flippin Family Papers. Evidence of Robert’s stay with Madge Cayton is from his correspondence: Robert Flippin to Katherine Flippin, May 4, 1936, box 97-­12, folder 234, Stewart-­Flippin Family Papers. 21 See Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race and W. E. B. Du Bois: Fight for Equality. 22 W. E. B. Du Bois to Georgia Douglas Johnson, September 17, 1926, Georgia Douglas Johnson Papers, Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 23 Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 30–31. 24 For John Hurston’s infidelity, see ibid., 30; for analysis of infidelity in Hurston’s  Dust Tracks on a Road, see Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 142–48. 

notes to pages 142–48

181

25 Marie Johnson to Charles S. Johnson, letter of February 4, 1952, box 149, folder 8, Charles S. Johnson Papers. 26 Taylor, Veiled Garvey. 27 Hill, Black Women Oral History Project, 4:146–52, 171; Broussard, African­American Odyssey, 182. 28 James L. Curwood to Sarah T. Curwood, October 25, 1936, Sarah T. Curwood Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. (hereafter cited as Curwood Papers). 29 For an overview of theories regarding the origins of gender identity and the mechanics of gender reproduction, see Elliott, Concepts of the Self, 104–21. 30 Unfortunately, social scientists like Frazier did not conduct studies on the construction of gender roles. However, one present-­day study o∏ers some analysis of African American men’s idealized roles and is useful for suggesting possibilities. See Diemer, “Construction of Role Identity among African­American Men,” 30–40. 31 See, for example, James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, August 10, 1936, Curwood Papers. 32 Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 74–77, 83 (quote on 77). 33 James L. Curwood to Sarah E. Thomas, September 3, 1935, Curwood Papers. 34 Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead, 102–4. 35 Skelton interview by author. 36 James Curwood to Sarah Thomas, March 27, 1935, Curwood Papers. 37 James Curwood to Sarah Thomas, August 15, 1935, Curwood Papers. For another example of James’s elaborate excuses, see also March 7, 1935. 38 James L. Curwood to Sarah T. Curwood, October 28, 1936, Curwood Papers. 39 Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, July 17, 1936, and Sarah (Sadie) Thomas to Sarah Curwood, July 9, 1936, Curwood Papers. 40 James L. Curwood to Sarah E. Thomas, September 11, 1935, January 9, March 11, 1936, Curwood Papers. 41 Leonard and Senchak, “Prospective Prediction of Husband Marital Aggression within Newlywed Couples.” 42 Sarah T. Curwood to James L. Curwood, July 30, 1936, Curwood Papers. 43 Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, July 17, 1936. On James’s anger and requests for attention, see, for example, James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, May 23, October 22, 25, 1936, Curwood Papers. 44 Sarah T. Curwood Diary, January 24, 1949, Curwood Papers. 45 Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, July 30, August 5, 10, September 4, 1936, and James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, August 7, 1936, Curwood Papers. 46 James referred to this conversation in his letter; see James L. Curwood to Sarah T. Curwood, September 4, 1936, Curwood Papers. 47 Sarah (Sadie) Thomas to Sarah Curwood, July 9, 1936; Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, August 16, 25, 1936; James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, September 4, 1936, Curwood Papers. 

182

notes to pages 148–56

8 Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, August 24, 1936, Curwood Papers. 4 49 James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, September 2, 1936, Curwood Papers. 50 Sarah (Sadie) Thomas to Sarah Curwood, July 9, 1936, and Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, August 16, 1936, Curwood Papers.

Epilogue 1 Sarah Curwood Diary, November 15, 1948, Sarah T. Curwood Papers (hereafter cited as Curwood Papers), and Sarah Curwood Curriculum Vita, Radcli∏e College Alumna File, both in Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 2 See James and Sarah Curwood Correspondence, April 17 to May 31, 1944, and Eleanore Brackett to James Curwood, May 29 1944, Curwood Papers. 3 Sarah T. Curwood Appointment Book, 1944, Curwood Papers; Curwood interview by author. 4 Eleanore Brackett to James Curwood, May 29, 1944, Curwood Papers. 5 Stationery, sample advertisements, sample bank check, A-­C House Cleaners File, Curwood Papers. 6 Sarah T. Curwood Diary, January 12, 1948, Curwood Papers. 7 Skelton interview by author. 8 Bob Smith to James Curwood, August 7, 1947, Curwood Papers; Curwood inter­view by author; Sarah Curwood Diary, November 5–10, 14, 1948, Curwood Papers. 9 Sarah Curwood to James Curwood, December 13, 15, 16, 1949, and Sarah Curwood Diary, December 6–31, 1948, Curwood Papers. 10 Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 127. 11 Jerome Bruner to Sarah Curwood, May 24, 1949, Valuable Memorabilia File, Curwood Papers; Sarah Curwood Curriculum Vita, Radcli∏e College Alumna File, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.



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194

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Index Alexander, Sadie Tanner Mossell, 85, 101–7 Birth control, 33, 37–38, 51, 75, 80, 127 Brotherhood of Sleeping-­Car Porters, 59–60, 86; Women’s Auxiliary of, 86–87, 90 Cayton, Horace, 30–31, 57 Childlessness, 23, 122 Children, 18, 29, 47, 98; mothers and, 21, 65, 68, 75, 86, 106, 121, 145, 177 (n. 59); education and welfare of, 28, 127; fathers and, 53, 56, 59, 68, 81; death of, 114; in Curwood marriage, 158, 160, 161 Class, 15, 40–51 passim, 59–60, 64, 68, 99, 105–6, 109, 123–24, 135, 149, 162–63; black middle class, 5, 10, 13, 15, 18, 48, 86–89, 128, 133 Companionate marriage, 4, 15–16,  39 Curwood, James Lawrence and Sarah Thomas, 1–2, 13, 53, 83, 107, 122–24, 131–38, 149–58; James’s mental illness, 2, 137, 149, 156–57, 159–61, 163; James’s biography, 129–31; Sarah’s

biography, 114, 124–29; wedding of, 132; children of, 158, 160–61 Dissemblance, 7, 19, 28, 167 (n. 25) Divorce, 18, 29–30, 38–39, 97 Domestic violence, 2, 29, 94, 154, 160–61 Domesticity, 15, 75, 76, 84, 86, 101, 137 Du Bois, W. E. B., 28, 63, 119, 131, 172 (n. 45); thinking of, on black families, 33, 37, 56–57, 60; family life of, 41, 47, 147 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence and Alice Ruth Moore, 29, 151 Education, 2, 98–99, 101, 102, 127–28, 136, 159, 161 Eugenics, 31, 33, 86, 87 Femininity, 6, 19, 91, 98, 100, 126, 135 Feminism, 33, 91–92, 95, 102, 104, 105, 107 Films, 40, 41–44, 49–51 Finances, marital, 8, 29–30, 77, 90, 122, 133, 148, 160 Flippin, Robert and Katherine, 121–22, 143–45, 146–47, 148

Frazier, E. Franklin, 10, 60–70, 87–89, 111, 121, 123 Garvey, Marcus and Amy Jacques, 56, 113, 116–18, 134, 148; Amy’s feminism, 92–93 Gender roles, 4–5, 8, 9, 15, 16–17, 22–24, 38, 75–82; for husbands, 56–82 passim, 116–19, 120, 150; for wives, 31–32, 83–107 passim, 119–21, 135, 137 Golden Thoughts on Chastity and Procreation, 21–22, 29 Great Depression, 4, 46–50, 60, 85, 97, 121, 143, 149, 162 Great Migration, 5, 32, 162 Harlem, 5, 8, 34 Harlem Renaissance, 33, 34–35, 54, 72, 85 Heterosexism, 40, 46–47, 169  (n. 77) Hope, John and Lugenia, 27–28 Hurston, Zora Neale, 32, 34, 94–96, 98–99, 115, 120–21, 141–42 Infidelity, 146–48, 150–51, 159, 160 Johnson, Charles S., 32, 60, 63, 138, 142–43, 145, 148 Larsen, Nella, 33, 34, 170 (n. 83) Marital conflict, 1–3, 28–31, 96, 137, 139–40, 150, 156–57 Masculinity, 6, 15, 16, 19–20, 53–56, 66–68, 74, 150 Messenger, 10, 44–45, 58–59, 63, 82, 86 Morgan Lawrence, Margaret, 114–15, 129, 152–53 Murray, Pauli, 100–101



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Music, 39, 40, 45–46, 48 National Association of Colored Women (NACW), 19, 20, 94, 167 (n. 18) New Negroes, 9, 111, 136, 162; definitions and origins of, 5, 32–33; marriages of, 6, 57; New Negro women, 18–19, 86; New Negro men, 54–55, 86 New Women, 16, 18, 75 Race work, 13, 22–28, 136, 138 Racial protocol, 7, 139–40, 163 Racial uplift, 14, 15, 18–22, 24, 33 Romance, 14, 16, 140–43; in film, music, and fiction, 24–25, 40–51 passim; couples’ performances of, 29, 150–51, 153; expectations of, 38, 40, 139 Sexuality: changing cultural norms of, 4, 13–14, 33–38, 40, 48–49, 80; countering racist stereotypes regarding, 6, 8, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22; within marriages, 29, 153–54, 155; lesbianism, 49, 91, 99–101 Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), 33, 35–37, 156, 157 Skin color, 8, 110–16; as signifier of status, 24–25, 47, 50, 98, 152; as topic of films, 41; differences of, between spouses, 85, 114–15, 133–35 Stormy Weather (song and film), 8–9 Toomer, Jean, 10, 70–82, 148 Walton, Lester, 113, 118–19, 143, 145–46 Washington, Fredi, 119–20, 121, 145 Washington, Margaret Murray, 18, 20, 25–27, 167 (n. 18) Waters, Ethel, 8, 48–49