Hooray for You

"You don't have to bend the whole world.   I think it's better to just enjoy it.  Pay your dues.  And enjoy it.  If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high....hooray for you."

          ---Dorian Corey, in Paris is Burning (1991) directed by Jennie Livingston


Today's quote is taken from Jennie Livingston's controversial, award-winning documentary Paris is Burning.  This film documents the black and Latino tranvestite subculture of New York City and their performances at balls.  Livingston introduces her audience to some of the key terms of the ball culture, such as "voguing," "shading," ""mopping," "legendary," and most importantly "realness."   Ball participants perform in a wide range of categories in which the goal is to look and act as much like one's white, straight (and most often upper-class) counterpart as possible.   

Livingston's work has been praised for the way that it exposes identity as largely performative.  Yet her film also underscores the impenetrability of racial, sexual, and class-based boundaries in defiance of the American myth of the self-made individual.

Dorian Corey is one of the older drag queens and his sage reflections provide a unifying narrative thread to the film.  His musings point to the possibilities and the ironies of life, not only within the drag community, but for the white, straight audience that Livingston seems to anticipate may be viewing her film. This quote--the final line before the credits---is not uttered with resignation as much as amusement and the knowledge that comes from years of successes as well as disappointments.  Corey's wry humor in addressing people we might well refer to as life's "archers" keeps his commentary from succumbing to the mere cliche.

Facing It Part III: Concealment

Today's quote is taken from Nella Larsen's novel Passing, published in 1929.  The book focuses on the relationship between two light-skinned, racially mixed childhood acquaintances, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry.  Reunited after a number of years, Irene, a New Yorker,  learns that Clare is passing for white in Chicago and has married a racist white man who does not know of her past or her identity. He jokes that Clare is getting "darker and darker" and refers to her by the pet name of "Nig."  Clare lives in fear of being discovered yet keeps taking considerable risks to reunite with the African-American community she left behind.  In this scene, Irene describes the "polite insolence" as well as the mystery conveyed through Clare's unusual features:

"[...] she'd always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat.  Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate.  A tempting mouth.  The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre.  And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes.  Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.
     Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes!  mysterious and concealing.  And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic."

--Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

Hair Part V: Big Hair/Bald Head, Or, An Allegory

Today's quote comes from Charles Chesnutt's short story "The Goophered Grapevine."  This story was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887, and was reprinted in Chesnutt's collection The Conjure Woman (1899).  In this tale, a plantation owner has the conjure woman, Aunt Peggy, put a "goopher" on his scuppernong vines to prevent them from being eaten by slaves from other plantations in the vicinity. The "goopher" is supposed to cause those who pilfer the grapes to die within twelve months.  Unfortunately, one of his own slaves, Henry, eats the scuppernongs.  While the overseer takes Henry to Aunt Peggy to remove the goopher, she is only able to partialy remove it.  Henry's state of heath begins to follow the life cycle of the grapes--he waxes in the summer and wanes in the winter.  His master, seeing an opportunity to capitalize on this new situation, begins to sell him during his waxing period and re-purchase him during his waning months.   Gradually, Henry begins to fade away in a story that is an allegory of slavery's misuse and destruction of both land and bodies.  This quote describes Henry's new life cycle in terms of the growth of his hair.  While initially "bald as a sweet potato" as the story goes, he begins to exhibit hair that resembles the grape vines--unmanageable "grapy hair,"  the "biggest hair on the plantation":

"So Henry 'n'int his head wid de sap out'n de big grapevime des ha'f way 'twix' de quarters en de big house, en de goopher nebber wuk agin him dat summer.  But de beatenes' thing you eber see happen ter Henry.  Up ter dat time he wuz ez ball ez a sweeten' 'tater, but des ez soon ez de young leaves begun ter come out on de grapevimes, de ha'r begun ter grow out on Henry's head, en by de middle er de summer he had de bigges' head er ha'r on de plantation.  Befo' dat, Henry had tol'able good ha'r 'roun' de aidges, but soon ez de young grapes begun ter come, Henry's ha'r begun to quirl all up in little balls, des like dis yer reg'lar grapy ha'r, en by de time de grapes got tipe his head look des like a bunch er grapes.  Combin' it didn' do no good; he wuk at it ha'f de night wid er Jim Crow, en think he git it straighten' out, but in de mawnin' de grapes 'ud be dere des de same.  So he gin it up, en tried ter keep de grapes down by havin' his ha'r cut sho't [...]

But de mo's cur'ouses' thing happen' in de fall, when de sap begin ter go down in de grapevimes.  Fus', when de grapes 'uz gethered, de knots begun ter straighten out'n Henry's ha'r; en w'en de leaves begin ter fall, Henry's ha'r 'mence ter drap out; en when de vimes 'uz bar', Henry's head wuz baller 'n it wuz in de spring, en he begin ter git ole an stiff in de j'ints ag'in, en paid no mo' 'tention ter de gals dyoin'er de whole winter.  En nex' spring, w'en he rub de sap on ag'in, he got young ag'in, en so soopl en libely dat none er de young niggers on de plantation couldn' jump, ner dance, ner hoe ez much cotton ez Henry.

--Charles Chesnutt, "The Goophered Grapevine," In The Conjure Woman, Ed.Richard H. Brodhead

Boundaries Part III The Harlem Book of the Dead Part II

This third installment of quotes focusing on the boundary between life and death (and the second installment of quotes from The Harlem Book of the Dead) features a portion of the interview between Camille Billops and James Van der Zee conducted in his 91st year of life. Van Der Zee not only photographed dead strangers, but also his own mother (who died at seventy-five) and daughter (who died at the age of sixteen). If Van der Zee's responses seem strange to modern ears for their pragmatic viewpoint towards life and death, they also offer a strange comfort in their refusal to make too much of either of these states of being--or perhaps too much of a distinction between either state of being.


The conversation begins with this comment from Van Der Zee:

"Why should a spirited mortal feel proud, when like a swift, fleet meteor or fast-flying cloud, man passes through life to his rest in the grave?" They've asked me, "How do I feel?" I told them that there's nothing to it; you do things the way they ought to be done. I don't see anything to be proud about. It's pretty difficult for a man to feel proud when knowing as he does the short space of time he's here and all paths, even those of our greatest glory, lead but to the grave. So it is very difficult to feel proud when Death says this. You're here today and gone sometimes today."

His description of his feelings about the death of his one-year old son, Emile seems to illustrate a surprising detachment, and yet this word does not capture the whole of his sentiment:

"I think he came when we was living in the Victoria Apartments on Lenox Avenue [in New York City] at that time. He only lived a year, and I didn't get a chance to know too much about him."

Not troubled by his role, he relates a mildly humorous dream that he had about a photographic subject. The humor emanates from his own response to the curious behavior of the subject. But in referencing a dream world Van Der Zee's commentary also draws attention to a space that seems to reside between life and death...the surrealist dream world:

"One time I dreamed I went to make a picture of a dead woman who reached in her chest and took out her heart and threw it over here, then she reached in there and took out something else and threw it over there. I just waited to see if she was going to take out something else...but I wasn't scared or nothing like that in the dream."

And finally, his thoughts on death in general.

Billops: HOW DO YOU SEE DEATH, MR. VAN DER ZEE?


Van Der Zee: So when one more clean shirt lasts me the rest of time. When I pass out on this long journey that I shall ever make and I cease to soothe with soft words and song a heart in which there is an ache, I trust that tears will dim few eyes and those who do weep will soon forget.


Billops (editorial note): (At this point, Mr. Van Der Zee lights up his cigar.)



--Camille Billops, Owen Dodson, & James Van Der Zee, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Boundaries Part II The Harlem Book of the Dead Part I

Continuing with the theme of the boundary between life and death, today's group of quotes are taken from Owen Dodson's captions for The Harlem Book of the Dead, an experimental documentary published in 1978. The work as a whole is comprised of commercial funerary images from Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s taken by African-American photographer James Van Der Zee, an interview with Van Der Zee conducted by Camille Billops, and, as mentioned, poems and captions by Owen Dodson. While it is impossible to fully grasp the power of this text without displaying the images, a few brief quotes offer a sense of its strangely pragmatic and yet poignant viewpoint towards death--and life.


Owen Dodson's startling poetic captions illustrate the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia,--revitalizing the dead by allowing them to speak again as in this quote, which accompanies a photograph of a dead man posed by Van Der Zee with the prop of a newspaper:

"I prayed that on the day I died
Nobody else prominent would be dead
The obituary page was supposed to be all about me today.
Florence Mills, the greatest, died on my day
Look-a-here Lord,
I was a faithful servant
Over many a money year."

In others, such as ones featuring parents holding their dead infants, the living address the dead with the hope of reunion:

"You'll always be my baby now, Johnella. Dream sometimes of Papa.
When you marry an angel boy,
The very best,
I'll attend your wedding."

Sometimes the dead speak to each other, as in this caption which accompanies a double funeral (and one of the most resonant of the work):

"We grew so far away from each other
And got lonesome. Please was
Our only vocabulary.
Now and again: Will you be with me please.
A word with a vegetable sound:
Please..."

Tomorrow, excerpts from Camille Billops' interview with Van der Zee...

---Camille Billops, Owen Dodson & James Van Der Zee, with a foreword by Toni Morrison, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)