Black No More Page 2
He was a man of contradictions. For someone so utterly unsentimental and sternly rational about race and blackness, he indulged his wife’s strange neoessentialist belief in “hybrid vigor”—that is, her belief that their daughter’s racial fusion of black and white represented the birth of a new, superior race. With Schuyler’s help, his wife turned their only daughter into a social experiment, raising Philippa on a scientifically prepared diet of raw meat, unpasteurized milk, and castor oil, and keeping her in near isolation from other children. The child’s strange upbringing was both a raging success and a terrible failure. Philippa learned to read at two, became an accomplished pianist at four, and a composer by five. She was a child celebrity, a kind of black Shirley Temple with a high IQ who became the subject of scores of articles in publications such as Time, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was roundly hailed as a genius. There is a poignant moment in Kathryn Talalay’s biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White, when Philippa is thirteen and her parents finally show her the detailed scrapbook they’ve been keeping about her upbringing and career—notes and articles they’ve been keeping diligently over the years. Philippa, rather than being touched, was horrified to realize, with sudden clarity, all the ways she’d been her parents’ social experiment and “puppet.” In the years that followed, she grew increasingly disillusioned with America, her own blackness, and the musical career of her youth. Like a character out of Black No More, she eventually changed her name and began to pass as white—as an Iberian-American named Filipa Montera. She spent most of her adult life overseas, still playing music, but less seriously, and trying to find herself in various romantic affairs. She eventually tried to reinvent herself as an international journalist and children’s advocate, and in 1967 she died in a helicopter crash while attempting to evacuate war orphans out of Vietnam.
—
In the years that followed the publication of Black No More, Schuyler’s healthy skepticism toward authority and his absurdist, freewheeling humor gave way to rigidity and humorless Far Right extremism. In the end he did join a club, the John Birch Society, and became the kind of tool of the Far Right that he might have brilliantly parodied in his earlier work. The statements he made later in life against the civil rights movement and in particular against Martin Luther King Jr. would taint his public image and allow him to be dismissed as a serious thinker.
The turn against Schuyler can be glimpsed in the 1971 edition of Black No More, in the introduction by Charles Larson, a prominent scholar of African and African American literature. In a scolding, censorious tone, Larson makes it clear how much he dislikes both the novel and its author:
Black No More is disturbing in these days of renewed Black Pride and Black Power. There is no pride in being black and certainly little indication that the black person in America has anything culturally his own worth holding on to. . . . It is a plea for assimilation, for mediocrity, for reduplication, for faith in the (white) American dream. . . . Hardly a page passes by without some aspect of black American life being satirized or attacked. . . . Schuyler’s bitterness is clearly apparent.
Reducing Black No More to the mildly amusing but ultimately unimportant scribblings of a black reactionary, Larson turns a blind eye to all the ways the novel was and remains a liberating and lacerating critique of American racial madness, capitalism, and white superiority.
Rereading Black No More so many years later, in the era of Trump and Rachel Dolezal, Beyoncé’s “Formation” and that radical Pepsi commercial starring Kendall Jenner, of the rise and fall of Tiger Woods’s land of Cablinasia, and of Michael Jackson’s “race lift” and subsequent death, Schuyler’s wild, misanthropic, take-no-prisoners satire of American life seems more relevant than ever.
Schuyler belongs to the pantheon of black writers in America who have seen their work either reviled, forgotten, dismissed, or—most commonly—ignored in their own lifetime. In this respect, he belongs in the company of Chester Himes, Fran Ross, William Melvin Kelley, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen, most of whom died in poverty or saw their work go out of print, and whose work was appreciated only after they were gone—and in some cases, not yet.
There is no stable ground to stand on in Black No More. Its irony and merciless satire steadfastly resist the anthropological gaze of the reader. It is a novel in whiteface. And while black literature is almost always read as either autobiography or sociology, Schuyler’s work can be read as neither. It is one of the earliest examples of black speculative fiction. Black No More resists the push toward preaching and the urge toward looking backward into history. Afrofuturist before such a term existed, it insists, instead, on peering forward into what could come to be.
—
My father taught me how to laugh about race. And now that I am a parent myself, I understand what he was after in his Schuyleresque satires. I find myself trying to transmit—mostly unconsciously—the same lessons to my sons. I am trying to teach them to make a mockery of the world they’ve been handed—to find a way to twist it and spin it and flip it upside down so even the most painful experiences become material for their own private jokes. I am trying to show them they can wear two faces. They must wear two faces.
Black No More is funny, but it is also horrific. Humor gives way to horror and then veers back again.
Now is the time to read Schuyler’s novel. Now more than ever we need literature that is as fearless, observant, and obstinate as Black No More, that speaks the uncomfortable and unpopular truths. Now more than ever we need work that is not afraid of its own contradictions. Through Schuyler, I am reminded—even for just the length of this short, cutting, wild ride of a novel—of what it looks like to be free.
DANZY SENNA
Preface
Over twenty years ago a gentleman in Asbury Park, N. J. began manufacturing and advertising a preparation for the immediate and unfailing straightening of the most stubborn Negro hair. This preparation was called Kink-No-More, a name not wholly accurate since users of it were forced to renew the treatment every fortnight.
During the intervening years many chemists, professional and amateur, have been seeking the means of making the downtrodden Aframerican resemble as closely as possible his white fellow citizen. The temporarily effective preparations placed on the market have so far proved exceedingly profitable to manufacturers, advertising agencies, Negro newspapers and beauty culturists, while millions of users have registered great satisfaction at the opportunity to rid themselves of kinky hair and grow several shades lighter in color, if only for a brief time. With America’s constant reiteration of the superiority of whiteness, the avid search on the part of the black masses for some key to chromatic perfection is easily understood. Now it would seem that science is on the verge of satisfying them.
Dr. Yusaburo Noguchi, head of the Noguchi Hospital in Beppu, Japan, told American newspaper reporters in October 1929, that as a result of fifteen years of painstaking research and experiment he was able to change a Negro into a white man. While he admitted that this racial metamorphosis could not be effected overnight, he maintained that “Given time, I could change the Japanese into a race of tall blue-eyed blonds.” The racial transformation, he asserted, could be brought about by glandular control and electrical nutrition.
Even more positive is the statement of Mr. Bela Cati, an electrical engineer residing in New York City, who, in a letter dated August 18, 1930, and addressed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said, in part:
Once I myself was very strongly tanned by the sun and a European rural population thought that I was a Negro, too. I did not suffer much but the situation was disagreeable. Since that time I have studied the problem and I am convinced that the surplus of the pigment could be removed. In case you are interested and believe that with the aid of your physicians we could carry out the necessary experiments, I am willing to send you the patent specificati
on . . . and my general terms relating to this invention. . . . The expenses are so to say negligible.
I wish to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to Mr. V. F. Calverton for his keen interest and friendly encouragement and to my wife, Josephine Schuyler, whose coöperation and criticism were of great help in completing Black No More.
GEORGE S. SCHUYLER
New York City,
September 1, 1930
ONE
Max Disher stood outside the Honky Tonk Club puffing a panatela and watching the crowds of white and black folk entering the cabaret. Max was tall, dapper and smooth coffee-brown. His negroid features had a slightly satanic cast and there was an insolent nonchalance about his carriage. He wore his hat rakishly and faultless evening clothes underneath his raccoon coat. He was young, he wasn’t broke, but he was damnably blue. It was New Year’s Eve, 1933, but there was no spirit of gaiety and gladness in his heart. How could he share the hilarity of the crowd when he had no girl? He and Minnie, his high “yallah” flapper, had quarreled that day and everything was over between them.
“Women are mighty funny,” he mused to himself, “especially yallah women. You could give them the moon and they wouldn’t appreciate it.” That was probably the trouble; he’d given Minnie too much. It didn’t pay to spend too much on them. As soon as he’d bought her a new outfit and paid the rent on a three-room apartment, she’d grown uppity. Stuck on her color, that’s what was the matter with her! He took the cigar out of his mouth and spat disgustedly.
A short, plump, cherubic black fellow, resplendent in a narrow-brimmed brown fedora, camel’s hair coat and spats, strolled up and clapped him on the shoulder: “Hello, Max!” greeted the newcomer, extending a hand in a fawn-colored glove, “What’s on your mind?”
“Everything, Bunny,” answered the debonair Max. “That damn yallah gal o’ mine’s got all upstage and quit.”
“Say not so!” exclaimed the short black fellow. “Why I thought you and her were all forty.”
“Were, is right, kid. And after spending my dough, too! It sure makes me hot. Here I go and buy two covers at the Honky Tonk for tonight, thinkin’ surely she’d come and she starts a row and quits!”
“Shucks!” exploded Bunny. “I wouldn’t let that worry me none. I’d take another skirt. I wouldn’t let no dame queer my New Year’s.”
“So would I, Wise Guy, but all the dames I know are dated up. So here I am all dressed up and no place to go.”
“You got two reservations, ain’t you? Well, let’s you and me go in,” Bunny suggested. “We may be able to break in on some party.”
Max visibly brightened. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “You never can tell, we might run in on something good.”
Swinging their canes, the two joined the throng at the entrance of the Honky Tonk Club and descended to its smoky depths. They wended their way through the maze of tables in the wake of a dancing waiter and sat down close to the dance floor. After ordering ginger ale and plenty of ice, they reared back and looked over the crowd.
Max Disher and Bunny Brown had been pals ever since the war when they soldiered together in the old 15th regiment in France. Max was one of the Aframerican Fire Insurance Company’s crack agents, Bunny was a teller in the Douglass Bank and both bore the reputation of gay blades in black Harlem. The two had in common a weakness rather prevalent among Aframerican bucks: they preferred yellow women. Both swore there were three things essential to the happiness of a colored gentleman: yellow money, yellow women and yellow taxis. They had little difficulty in getting the first and none at all in getting the third but the yellow women they found flighty and fickle. It was so hard to hold them. They were so sought after that one almost required a million dollars to keep them out of the clutches of one’s rivals.
“No more yallah gals for me!” Max announced with finality, sipping his drink. “I’ll grab a black gal first.”
“Say not so!” exclaimed Bunny, strengthening his drink from his huge silver flask. “You ain’t thinkin’ o’ dealin’ in coal, are you?”
“Well,” argued his partner, “it might change my luck. You can trust a black gal; she’ll stick to you.”
“How do you know? You ain’t never had one. Ever’ gal I ever seen you with looked like an ofay.”
“Humph!” grunted Max. “My next one may be an ofay, too! They’re less trouble and don’t ask you to give ’em the moon.”
“I’m right with you, pardner,” Bunny agreed, “but I gotta have one with class. None o’ these Woolworth dames for me! Get you in a peck o’ trouble . . . Fact is, Big Boy, ain’t none o’ these women no good. They all get old on the job.”
They drank in silence and eyed the motley crowd around them. There were blacks, browns, yellows, and whites chatting, flirting, drinking; rubbing shoulders in the democracy of night life. A fog of tobacco smoke wreathed their heads and the din from the industrious jazz band made all but the loudest shrieks inaudible. In and out among the tables danced the waiters, trays balanced aloft, while the patrons, arrayed in colored paper caps, beat time with the orchestra, threw streamers or grew maudlin on each other’s shoulders.
“Looky here! Lawdy Lawd!” exclaimed Bunny, pointing to the doorway. A party of white people had entered. They were all in evening dress and in their midst was a tall, slim, titian-haired girl who had seemingly stepped from heaven or the front cover of a magazine.
“My, my, my!” said Max, sitting up alertly.
The party consisted of two men and four women. They were escorted to a table next to the one occupied by the two colored dandies. Max and Bunny eyed them covertly. The tall girl was certainly a dream.
“Now that’s my speed,” whispered Bunny.
“Be yourself,” said Max. “You couldn’t touch her with a forty-foot pole.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Big Boy,” Bunny beamed self-confidently, “You never can tell! You never can tell!”
“Well, I can tell,” remarked Disher, “’cause she’s a cracker.”
“How you know that?”
“Man, I can tell a cracker a block away. I wasn’t born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, for nothin’, you know. Just listen to her voice.”
Bunny listened. “I believe she is,” he agreed.
They kept eyeing the party to the exclusion of everything else. Max was especially fascinated. The girl was the prettiest creature he’d ever seen and he felt irresistibly drawn to her. Unconsciously he adjusted his necktie and passed his well-manicured hand over his rigidly straightened hair.
Suddenly one of the white men rose and came over to their table. They watched him suspiciously. Was he going to start something? Had he noticed that they were staring at the girl? They both stiffened at his approach.
“Say,” he greeted them, leaning over the table, “do you boys know where we can get some decent liquor around here? We’ve run out of stuff and the waiter says he can’t get any for us.”
“You can get some pretty good stuff right down the street,” Max informed him, somewhat relieved.
“They won’t sell none to him,” said Bunny. “They might think he was a Prohibition officer.”
“Could one of you fellows get me some?” asked the man.
“Sure,” said Max, heartily. What luck! Here was the very chance he’d been waiting for. These people might invite them over to their table. The man handed him a ten-dollar bill and Max went out bareheaded to get the liquor. In ten minutes he was back. He handed the man the quart and the change. The man gave back the change and thanked him. There was no invitation to join the party. Max returned to his table and eyed the group wistfully.
“Did he invite you in?” asked Bunny.
“I’m back here, ain’t I?” answered Max, somewhat resentfully.
The floor show came on. A black-faced comedian, a corpulent shouter of mammy songs with a gin-roughened voic
e, three chocolate soft-shoe dancers and an octette of wriggling, practically nude, mulatto chorines.
Then midnight and pandemonium as the New Year swept in. When the din had subsided, the lights went low and the orchestra moaned the weary blues. The floor filled with couples. The two men and two of the women at the next table rose to dance. The beautiful girl and another were left behind.
“I’m going over and ask her to dance,” Max suddenly announced to the surprised Bunny.
“Say not so!” exclaimed that worthy. “You’re fixin’ to get in dutch, Big Boy.”
“Well, I’m gonna take a chance, anyhow,” Max persisted, rising.
This fair beauty had hypnotized him. He felt that he would give anything for just one dance with her. Once around the floor with her slim waist in his arm would be like an eternity in heaven. Yes, one could afford to risk repulse for that.
“Don’t do it, Max!” pleaded Bunny. “Them fellows are liable to start somethin’.”
But Max was not to be restrained. There was no holding him back when he wanted to do a thing, especially where a comely damsel was concerned.
He sauntered over to the table in his most shiekish manner and stood looking down at the shimmering strawberry blonde. She was indeed ravishing and her exotic perfume titillated his nostrils despite the clouds of cigarette smoke.
“Would you care to dance?” he asked, after a moment’s hesitation.
She looked up at him haughtily with cool green eyes, somewhat astonished at his insolence and yet perhaps secretly intrigued but her reply lacked nothing in definiteness.
“No,” she said icily, “I never dance with niggers!” Then turning to her friend, she remarked: “Can you beat the nerve of these darkies?” She made a little disdainful grimace with her mouth, shrugged daintily and dismissed the unpleasant incident.