Black bottom saints, p.13
Black Bottom Saints, page 13
Money from the Wheel
1 jigger of brandy
½ cup of ginger ale
Place ice into a tall glass, add brandy, top with ginger ale, stir briefly, and serve.
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Week 17
Seventeenth Sunday after Father’s Day
Joe Louis was photographed by James Van der Zee. Ziggy received an autographed copy of the photo inscribed “To my dear friend Ziggy, a true champ” from Louis. Years later, Elsie Roxborough stole Ziggy’s Joe Louis photograph after having torn up the copy Joe had given her. Following Elsie’s death, the Roxboroughs returned the photograph to Ziggy. It lived on his dressing tables at the Gotham and later in the Lafayette Towers.
In the second month of his Kirwood Hospital stay, Ziggy stopped eating his new favorite snacks, tamales and Chinese food, which Baby Doll had been sneaking in, and stopped wanting to work on his book. Baby Doll bought the Van der Zee photograph to the hospital and used it to decorate Ziggy’s bed tray and remind him to keep fighting. When Ziggy saw it, he lit up as if he had just walked onstage and found the spotlight. He looked like someone who might, one day, come home to the Lafayette Towers. Then he spoke, and Baby Doll wondered if the pressure hadn’t already damaged his brain past a point of no return: “Baby Doll brought me Elsie Roxborough.” She thought she had brought him Joe Louis.
Elsie Roxborough
PATRON SAINT OF: Unconventional and Invisible Blackness
If I could bring one person back from the dead, it would be Elsie Roxborough.
Elsie was the first colored woman to go to the University of Michigan and live in the dorms. After his daughter was admitted to Michigan, Daddy Roxborough made her wait out a year to matriculate. He needed time to take the University of Michigan to court to force them to do right by the apple of his eye.
At Michigan, Elsie Roxborough was in the same class as Arthur Miller, the playwright. They both competed in a play competition. He won first place; she won third, but Elsie was right there in the mix with the future Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner. In those days he was called “Outstanding Arthur,” a fine Jewish boy, born in Harlem, editor of the Michigan Daily college paper, who widely announced that Miss Roxborough was the most exciting woman on the Ann Arbor campus. To fully appreciate the compliment, you have to know Miller is the man who would one day marry Marilyn Monroe.
Elsie wrote four, or perhaps it was five, plays, and while still at college even produced one of Langston Hughes’s plays. I’ve been told Lang had a picture of Elsie on his desk on the day she died. Probably kept it there to the day he died. Elsie was beyond special.
Joe Louis and Elsie had a thing. Her family and his pride broke that up. Elsie was only seventeen when it was reported that she and Joe were engaged. Soon there was another public announcement declaring the engagement off. Louis made a statement about Elsie’s needing to follow her books; she issued a perfectly coordinated statement about wanting a career. Her family, who were carefully grooming Louis for respectability and Elsie for elegance, were satisfied and even pleased when they went their separate ways. And even more pleased when she was writing plays and she founded a company of actors, the Roxanne Players.
She wrote about what she knew. So few people knew her world that her plays were deemed preposterous. One of them was so viciously damned by the sepia press that she stopped putting on plays in Black Detroit. Instead, she moved to New York and began a new life as a white woman.
This took significant preparation, vivid imagination, and a flush travel budget—all of which Elsie, soon to be not-Elsie, possessed in spades. She didn’t go straight to New York. She detoured to Mexico, to try out and polish up her Spanish and also to give herself a bit of time to get the details of her lying story straight.
John Roxborough was drinking fine Scotch when he dropped that dime. We were in the Ebony Room of the Gotham Hotel and it was very, very late. He didn’t begin the tale with that day, that year, or with his daughter Elsie. He told me a story that began generations earlier, when the 19th century was turning into the 20th, about Roxborough men, Black lawyers and doctors, generations of them, who decided they had had enough of not making money. So they ventured out of the world of respectable Negroes, poor as church mice, and into the world of illegal gambling.
Roxborough put it to me this way: “Was I too original? Did I raise her to be too original, too?” I could only answer, “Elsie is an original.” He took her picture out of his wallet. He held it to the bar-candle flame. He let the flame burn his fingers as it consumed her image. He smashed out the last of the fire with the palm of his powerful hand. “They say Elsie’s living in New York. Elsie’s dead!”
I looked into Roxborough’s eyes to see if he was sharing news or taking a stand. I wished I had not looked. I saw something in Roxborough’s eyes that I had never seen there before: hate for his child.
John Roxborough, the numbers king, who had been so proud when Elsie published her first newspaper column just a year out of high school, so proud when she formed the Roxanne Players and produced the Hughes play she called Drums Out of Haiti, hated his daughter for being as wild as he was. I wanted to tell him that wasn’t fair. But you don’t tell John Roxborough anything about his family.
In New York, Elsie started calling herself Pat Rico, then Mona Manet. She started playing a new kind of role in Greenwich Village at 77 Washington Place and ended up at 865 First Avenue, somewhat in the vicinity of Sutton Place. That’s where she was living when she died from an overdose of pills on October 2, 1949.
In New York her “white” working life was spent toiling for one second-rate white magazine after another, covering stories in white Atlanta, interviewing white southern society folk, being embraced and entertained by them, all while launching double entendre jabs at white-middle-class habits and peculiarities from the pages of middlebrow white magazines. That victory makes me think her overdose was an accident.
And this: Perhaps her last way to show contempt for the mundane evils of the white social world was to wrap herself up in it, knowing she was superior in every way.
Elsie is the only woman I knew who had lived in the Black world and lived in the white world and lived in them both in a way that would let her know that her Black world was better.
How did our “It” girl, our more-than-Tallulah Bankhead, our more-than-Marilyn Monroe—how did it come to be that she found no place for herself in either world?
Can a person be destroyed by one bad review? Maybe if you were Elsie and so used to praise you could be. Maybe it was her fear of being unable to find her peers, the others as smart, as rich, as beautiful, and as Black. Maybe being peerless became an unbearable isolation.
With me writing here in Kirwood with no impending date for my release, it is a time to shout this once-whispered truth—that while Elsie passed for white, she did not pass for white and completely vanish. She was only white downtown, only white in her other name. Uptown in Harlem, on the very rare occasions that she ventured north, she remained colored, observant, vivacious, and eager to see her very best old friends. I was pleased to be one of them.
Once Elsie called me from New York and begged me to come see her. I came. In the quietest Harlem bar she could find she told me that she was writing a one-man show for me. It would have a simple set and costumes. It would be cheap to mount. I would be sitting at a table, cig in one hand, glass in the other. From that perch I would tell the audience about my Black Bottom Saints. We would argue who should be included. When she was tired of arguing, she would kiss my cheek with a kiss as soft as Idlewild rain. And she would say, “Altar boy”—she called me “Altar Boy”—“I’m going to write that for you.” But she didn’t write it. Or, maybe she wrote the manuscript and it never made its way to me. What I know: When I left, she went downtown and she was white again, leaving me and everybody who loved her to wonder, What happened to Elsie?
I don’t think it was some big thing we didn’t know about. I think it was some small thing the impact of which we underestimated.
Like the way she really, truly loved Joe Louis, though her father or her uncle scared him off because he wasn’t of the right class and Joe let himself be scared because he was beholden to the Roxborough family. Maybe being unable to forgive the Roxborough men became unable to forgive her own Roxborough self.
Maybe the fact that Joe listened to the men in her family, when she wanted him to listen to her, undid her completely, pulled undone, never to be tied again, the bow that tied her to the Black community beyond her family, and from her family.
Or perhaps, if she killed herself—and, sitting in this late autumn of 1967, I am starting to believe she did kill herself—I think it might have had something to do with Langston Hughes. Or maybe it had nothing to do with Langston.
If she did kill herself, I’d like to think it was because one day she decided she would like to see what was beyond life. Curiosity carried her forward, curiosity and confidence that a bigger, brighter, neither Black nor white, nor male nor female, adventure was waiting for her upstairs. I like imagining she was rushing off to heaven to attend some celestial party, eager to greet someone she had never had the pleasure of meeting on Earth. My Elsie would want to meet people from a thousand years ago and from the other side of the globe. That was the Elsie I knew, a woman going on an adventure boldly.
Probably it was some small family thing: say, the third person in the family who told her a Roxborough’s going to jail was a far less worse thing than a Roxborough’s passing herself off as “Mona Manet” and going around with second-rate white people.
When she died, friends who wished to argue her death wasn’t a suicide pointed to there being stockings in the sink, saying that proved she wasn’t intending to kill herself, that she was anticipating going out.
How I read the gesture? Elsie rarely washed stockings; she had a maid, but she wanted to do that common thing once again before she died.
Two of her relatives (women who could, but didn’t, pass for white) went east to claim the body. They told the white friends the burial would be private. They kept her secret. The New York death certificate, according to the grapevine, had “white” written on it. We buried her Black in Detroit.
I wish I could have done for her what she does for me now: revive me. The other deaths make me sad. Elsie’s death makes me angry. Angry enough to pull on my thick-and-thin silk stockings, tiptoe out of the hospital, and stomp back into the world she abandoned like a toy, showing herself at the last to be a silly girl—and from first to last a savior. Before she abandoned the world, she whispered to me across a round barroom two-top: “There is still bright mischief to be made, on a bed of fallen leaves.”
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LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF ELSIE ROXBOROUGH:
Stockings in the Sink
½ pony of white crème de menthe
½ pony of apricot liqueur
½ pony of apricot eau de vie
½ lime, juiced
Place all ingredients in a cocktail shaker and shake well with ice. Strain into a cocktail glass.
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Week 18
Eighteenth Sunday after Father’s Day
In 2009, First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled a bust of Sojourner Truth in the United States Capitol. The artist who created the bust, Artis Lane, was described as a Canadian-born California artist. Colored Girl and her husband attended the unveiling. The husband had wangled the invitation, because he knew Artis Lane’s first significant commission had been a series of portraits for Detroit’s Gotham Hotel.
Artis Lane
PATRON SAINT OF: Painters, Sculptors, and Offstage Artists of Life
A fine mischief I could make would begin with Artis. That is her real given name, Artis, and she, Artis Lane—her married name—was born in 1927 in one of the all-sepian Canadian towns people don’t talk about much now, like they don’t talk about how some Canadians did own slaves and how a dusky Canadian doll, Marie-Joseph Angelique, all but burned Montreal down in 1734.
Artis’s hometown, North Buxton, was just over the river from Detroit. Her parents, the Shreves, moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Artis when she was still small. She didn’t return to Canada until she attended art school in Ontario, and then only briefly. Soon she was back in America at the Cranbrook Academy before landing in Detroit and painting twenty-seven oil portraits for John White to adorn my home, the Gotham Hotel.
If I had a pocket full of money, I would beg Artis Lane to paint me an Idlewild triptych so that Baby Doll and I could be up on the island in our downtown apartment. The first panel? An Idlewild morning. A World War I vet, the walnut-colored Sarge, passing through on horseback trailed by children just learning to ride, coming upon Diggs Sr. on that huge Percheron flanked by his son the congressman, with both Diggses nodding deferentially to Sarge. Second panel? Midday. Baby Doll, in a hot-pink one-piece, being towed on water skis across the blue-gray lake by a speedboat full of women sipping tiki drinks, driven by Anna Gordy in a muumuu. Final panel: Me coming upon Milt by accident, in the middle of the night, in the middle of evergreens and hardwoods. I love Baby Doll but she can’t woo me back in love with life. Artis is who I need. Artis paints so good I am writing her the one and only begging letter of my life.
Dear Artis,
We need a mural. Paint Father’s Day. Paint how we shoehorned five hundred into each of three sold-out performances by forgoing the round tables that came free with the Latin Quarter and renting long narrow tables that we could drape with fine linens and set up perpendicular to the stage so everyone had as good a view as we could give them—and we could squeeze those extra folk in. Paint how in the half-light pulled up to the tables were solid wood framed armless chairs upholstered in a nubby dark-ruby fabric. Let the world see the chairs were good looking and comfortable—just like my audience.
Paint the kids who didn’t come for the weekly class but once a year were drawn to be a part of the pageant of Father’s Day at the Youth Colossal by playing the role of “audience.” Paint the boys in suits and ties, some with double breasted jackets, girls in repurposed Easter dresses, church dresses, and sometimes flower girl dresses, swinging tiny purses on supple arms. Paint the kinky beauty of their curls and the bows in their hair. On the tables, Instamatic cameras and paper cups. We encouraged the small fry from all the different neighborhoods to take pictures by calling them shutterbugs, offering a $5 prize for “Ziggy’s favorite Instamatic photo.” Every year we dangled in front of them the carrot of an exhibit of the twenty best photos at the School of the Theatre in September. Diggs would pay to have all their photos printed, then I would choose the best and tape them to the walled mirror behind the ballet bar. Finally, Gloria and some of the other teachers would paint frames around the photos and invite the world to see what the children of Black Bottom had made more important and more beautiful by their observation and their art. Paint that mirror, Artis. Please.
Paint the matrons and their guests who would be seated in the elevated boxes that flanked the stage. The stage itself had a wooden circular floor bordered by potted plants and lights. We kept the room very dark. In the boxes there were little, low, tiny lamps on tiny tables that held big drinks.
Paint backstage: the young and all-but-professional Ziggy Johnson Dancers, the Monday Ballet Class, the Monday Models, the Tuesday Modern Dance Class, and the Exquisite Ones! Also, in that backstage tableaux the Friday Dance Class, the Saturday Tap Class, the Boys’ Tap Class, the Saturday Ballet Class, the Ballet Babes, the Advanced Ballet, and of course Gladys Knight getting the girls into tights and lipstick with other stars darting back to help.
And when you paint the backstage, do not clean the checkerboard of red and beige, always-grimy tiles. No matter how clean it was when we started and how often we cleaned, with all that rehearsing that floor stayed dirty. Latin Quarter grime set off the shine of our costumes. We designed those costumes and had them locally constructed, some hand-sewn, some machine-sewn. In ’66 I particularly loved our costumes. The Boys Tap classes wore creased white pants and three-button jackets striped black, brown, yellow, and beige, a sophisticated stripe with almost no repeat in the pattern, with thin black ties, white shirts, and beanies.
Can you paint a scent, Artis? Paint this for me, Baby. The scent I associate most with the Gotham: Arpège, Winston cigarettes, and fresh-pressed hair dabbed with Chex. If you can’t paint that maybe you can just paint a bottle of Arpège and a pack of Winstons and a jar of Chex and it will help some folks remember that Arpège smelled like a rose with a little bit of dirt on it and that everybody in our world loved the jet-black round black bottle emblazoned with a gold mother and child—and that we musicians appreciated the name as a slight musical reference to celebration of broken chords.
When you get through with all of that: Paint the American Lotus that grows on Alf’s island and how he keeps one in a fishbowl as a centerpiece. It has no scent and must not be forgotten. Paint that.
Paint the Sir John Hotel in Miami. Let there be an aspiring want-to-be recording artist on the diving board fully dressed, crooning to all the beautiful browns lounging poolside in bikinis. The rectangular-shaped pool is dramatically striped with dark and light paint around all its edges so that drunken revelers didn’t unintentionally plunge in fully dressed. The occasional intentional fully dressed plunge was expected and accepted. Paint the striped umbrellas with heavy fringe, and the lounge chairs. All of this is surrounded by two stories of hotel rooms connected by a wrap-around balcony. Always people in the water, always people sitting poolside, always people on the balcony. Always sun. Always palm trees. Paint the reservation clerk who always found me a room, Thora Keel, and paint her flirting with a brown and Spanish-speaking off-season baseball player.
Paint the Gotham. Paint it rising from the corner of Orchestra Place and John R. to a height of nine stories in all its gray and symmetrical glamour. Better yet: Paint the grand lobby with its patterned terrazzo floor and all the ceiling arches. Paint the massive metal chandeliers cascading down from ornate painted ceiling medallions. Paint the reception desk, glass brick and curved, with a hat or a purse resting there, as a guest signs the leather guest ledger. Paint the mahogany staircase leading to the second floor, that slash of anchoring wooden antiquity. Don’t leave out the huge potted plants hiding cigar ash or the pretty bellman pushing one of the tubular aluminum rolling luggage carts. Take care with the fabric at the windows; don’t omit the abstract geometric pattern on the fabric that signals a march into a smart and prosperous future. Paint my home true.
