In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (11 page)

Whether political, cultural, or personal, the skin-color divide in Harlem was inescapable—and potent. Nowhere was that tension more prevalent than in the teachings and attitude of Marcus Garvey.

Garvey arrived in Harlem from Jamaica in 1916 and, swiveling his thick neck, surveyed all around him. Elvera Sanchez would remember watching as people rushed in and out of the Garvey building near her own family’s apartment. Garvey did not like what he saw in America. Believing himself a prophet, Garvey dreamed of carrying the American Negro back to Africa. Never mind that few Negroes wanted to go back to Africa. Garvey still painted a picture of a wondrous and dreamy Liberia, his intended destination. It was the lack of rights that the Negro lived under that perplexed Garvey and drove him to map out such an exotic undertaking in his head. He asked: “ ‘
Where is the black man’s Government?’ ‘Where is his King and his kingdom?’ ‘Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, navy, his men of big affairs?’ ” Finding no answers to his rhetorical questions, Garvey deemed that the best chance for the American Negro lay an ocean away. In the exuberant community of Harlem, he found converts. Garvey tapped right into the Negro skin-color divide: huge numbers of his followers were dark-skinned. Garvey’s first mass convention, held at Madison Square Garden in 1920, drew twenty-five thousand people. Soon there were Garvey parades, emotional speeches, and the formation of his United Negro Improvement Association. “Up, you mighty race!” was his motto. (Garvey had watched the 369th Infantry Regiment’s march into Harlem following World War I. He was against Negro soldiers fighting in the conflict, and the procession angered him, so much so that he was seen sobbing.)

The Garvey parades were near-theatrical events: columns of men in pressed military uniform, the peek of white gloves from their belt buckles, African flags held aloft and flapping in the wind, mysterious medals adorning chests. Garvey himself wore a large plumed hat and starched military garb at such events. Among Garvey’s well-wishers were members of the Ku Klux Klan, who delighted in the possibility of a back-to-Africa movement for Negroes. Luisa had a distaste for Garvey’s politics, and she dismissed him and his pronouncements because “he was a race man,” sniffs Luisa’s granddaughter Gloria. A popular retort—believed to have been uttered by light-skinned denizens of Harlem—was that Garvey’s UNIA merely stood for “Ugliest Negroes in America.”

Garvey needed money to finance his grand plan. Harlemites became investors, offering five dollars to buy stock in his international dream. Ships were built and an armada readied to be set loose. But Garvey’s shipping company—the Black Star Line—was beset with financial irregularities. While Garvey had thousands of followers, he also had drawn the interest of the FBI, and Negro undercover operatives had reported his activities to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The government prosecuted Garvey in 1925—the year of little Sammy’s birth—for mail fraud relating to his stock offerings. There were Negroes from the beginning who had questioned his sanity. Now, seeing him wearing a long topcoat and being led away by Hoover’s G-men, Garvey’s doubters were supplied with reasons to snicker even louder, and they did. Many concluded he was but a con artist.

“
Look for me in the whirlwind,” Garvey told his followers, vowing that, with “God’s grace,” he would return to free the American Negro. His lofty proclamation made, Garvey was carted off to prison. President Calvin Coolidge freed him from an Atlanta penitentiary in 1927 following emotional appeals spearheaded by his wife. Upon release, Garvey was deported. His Falstaffian demise aside, Garvey had further let loose, beyond the confines of literature and nightclub job opportunities, the secret of the American Negro—the skin-color divide.

If the Sanchezes were haughty about skin color—and Rosa Davis and her son, Sam Sr., believed them to be—the Davises were just as haughty about their dark skin. They told Elvera that they were not intimidated by light skin color, that they would not bow before her and her ancestry. “I was that half-white bitch” to the Davises, Elvera says.

It was true that Luisa Sanchez—and her daughter Elvera—had no need for any hair-straightening concoction from hair magnate Madam C. J. Walker, and they certainly did not need Marcus Garvey to boost their self-esteem. “Luisa never thought of herself as black,” says Lorelei Fields, her grandniece. “She was Cuban.” Southern-born Rosa Davis, however, needed that hair cream, and many of the women whom Rosa Davis knew also did. Every time Elvera Davis looked in the mirror, she imagined ridicule from her in-laws. What she perceived to be the Davises’ Garveyesque feelings toward her left her in pain: “There was jealousy.” It did not go unnoticed among members of the Davis clan that Elvera sometimes mentioned that her son resembled—even after the hair had mysteriously disappeared from his face—“
a little monkey.” Playful as the comment might have been, it was uttered, the Davises felt, in the painful cauldron of skin color, and it would linger in family lore for years. There were also the quizzical looks members of the Davis family would cast in Elvera’s direction when she would start lauding her family’s Cuban heritage, which she knew very little of but clung to fiercely anyway. At times, it appeared Elvera could not win: Davis family members often believed the more she bragged of
her Cuban ancestry, the more she was mocking American Negroes and their painful history.

In 1928, Elvera returned to Harlem and gave birth, on July 20, to another child, a daughter, who was named Ramona. Ramona would be taken to her aunt Julia, Elvera’s sister, and raised by her. “My mother stopped going on the road when I was about two,” says Gloria Williams, Julia’s daughter. “She said she came home from the road once and she went to take me from my grandmother [Luisa] and I cried. She said, ‘That’s it. My child doesn’t know me. I’m not going back out on the road.’ ”

For a long while, Ramona would believe that Julia was her mother. After she recovered from giving birth, Elvera hit the road again. But this time when she left, she went one way—joining another theatrical troupe—and her husband, Sam, went another. “Mother wasn’t show business; ‘Baby’ was show business, and for her the whole world was fun,” says Gloria Williams of Elvera, who was often called “Baby.” “She stayed in it until the chorus lines disappeared.”

Sam Sr. and Elvera knew, during their previous road separations, that something was amiss. There was no longing in the heart as they spent night after night apart. They no longer possessed the thread that would keep a show-business marriage stitched together, and so they separated. They had produced two children in three years while rumbling about in the rough-and-tumble world of the vaudeville opportunities Will Mastin had provided them.

“Will put everybody to work,” Elvera, speaking of her family, would say many years later, gratefulness in her voice still.

V
audeville—its name originating from the French phrase
voix de ville
(“street songs”)—had its origins in European capitals during the mid-seventeenth century. In the years to follow, the term took on new incarnations—variety show, cabaret, minstrel show. By the early nineteenth century the word “vaudeville” was being bandied about in various American locales. English performers who had come to America left many would-be performers inspired. In 1824 an American impresario by the name of John Robinson was known to be the first to send a troupe out to perform in “packages.” By the 1870s there were vaudeville companies spread throughout America. Sargent’s Great Vaudeville Company, operating out of Louisville, had a contingent consisting of midgets, sword swallowers, contortionists, and female impersonators, the latter donning frightful-looking wigs. Soon enough, minstrel shows were drawing large crowds in the hinterlands.

The awfulness of slavery—lynchings, runaways, bloodhounds—was being played out daily in the backwoods and on the main streets of America. The institution, fraught with drama as it was, lent itself to another kind of drama: staged entertainments. Performers, in blackface, would show the country what really was going on in those secretive quarters of slavery.

The Virginia Minstrels—white performers in blackface—arrived in New York in 1843. They drew large and appreciative audiences. A year later they were abroad, onstage in Glasgow, heralding their show as
a “true copy of the up and downs of Negro life.”

Josiah Henson knew something of the “up and downs of Negro life.” Henson was born a slave in 1789 in Charles County, Maryland. He saved up $450, the amount he was told by his owner would be enough to buy his freedom. When the owner upped the price to $1,000, Henson, sensing trickery, fled with his family to Canada. His story might well have disappeared had he not run into a little-known New England writer by the name of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Stowe’s family was involved in abolitionist causes. Incensed at the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, Stowe began writing antislavery sketches in the
National Era
, known widely as an abolitionist journal. Her stories, presented as fiction, were emotionally driven narratives against slavery. A certain knowledge of slavery—which many found astonishing—appeared in her stories. Henson, whom she had befriended, was her secret muse. Stowe grouped her stories together, and, on March 20, 1852, they were published as a novel,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. The novel—which was subtitled “Or, Life Among the Lowly”—told of the dehumanizing force of slavery. Abolitionists trumpeted the book. It took off, selling at a pace of ten thousand copies a week; at the end of its first year of publication, a whopping 300,000 copies had been sold. The country had never seen anything like it. Stowe became famous, a literary sensation. Show-business minds were already making plans around the novel. Minstrel-show producers saw great possibilities in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Rights were sold, casts were organized, road shows readied—and trains boarded! (Stowe herself was always ambivalent about the stage, owing to her Christian upbringing.)

In the beginning, the casts were all white. The first production of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
reached New York in 1853, a mere year after the book’s publication. There was not a Negro among the cast. Uncle Tom was played by a white man in blackface. At first, Negroes could not even attend the play, a play ostensibly about them. The policy was relaxed—with caveats—and an ad was placed in the
New York Herald
later in the year:

For years
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
kept drawing audiences. Negroes were eventually added to the casts, apparently for authenticity. The advertisements promised “
a passel of darkies and a brace of hounds.” Yet another ad promised “genuine Negroes and real bloodhounds.”

One road company, billed as the Comedy Company, made history. The troupe was run by Gustave Frohman. They became stranded in Richmond, Kentucky—thirty-five miles from Lexington—in 1877. The idleness apparently sent currents of newfound thinking through Frohman’s mind: he decided to have a “real Negro” play Uncle Tom. Sam Lucas was given the part. Lucas, born
in Virginia, made his first marks as a minstrel entertainer with the Plantation Minstrels in St. Louis. In 1873 he joined the Original Georgia Minstrels. A year later the company wowed audiences in New York. When Lucas stepped into the role of Uncle Tom, he did so as if his very theatrical life depended upon it. He drew raves. Harriet Beecher Stowe saw Lucas’s performance and found it staggering. She lavished him with praise. After his Uncle Tom days, Lucas spent nearly twenty years in Boston as a single vaudeville act. From there it was off to England—where he received more raves—then back to America, where, along with his wife, he headlined Sam T. Jack’s Creole Company. Next up:
A Trip to Coontown
. Lucas emerged as a huge star on the vaudeville circuit, spoken of, wherever he went, as an Uncle Tom for the ages.

Still, Lucas knew the wickedness of the profession he was in, how unpredictable it was, how wrought with sadness it seemed to be. Many Negro vaudeville performers—Lucas and the celebrated Billy Kersands among them—had little choice but to perform wearing blackface. On whites, the blackface makeup was a joke, something else to ratchet up the laugh meter by mimicking the Negro in look. On Negroes, it served as the cruelest kind of joke—reimagining themselves as imagined, in blackface, by white performers. On June 29, 1915, Billy Kersands, who had been a member of the Original Georgia Minstrels with Lucas, died in his private railway car following a stage performance. Lucas—now the sole survivor of that Georgia group—wrote a memorial to Kersands that appeared in a New York newspaper: “By some strange fate I stand alone, the last of that merry company which was the first of our race to amuse the fun-loving public,” he wrote. “
On Billy Kersands the curtain has now gone down for the last time.”

The challenge to Negro vaudeville performers was to steal some of the limelight from Al Jolson. For many believed Jolson the greatest performer working the vaudeville circuit of his times.

The son of a rabbi, Jolson, born in Lithuania, began performing in 1897. Carnivals and tent shows were his milieu. In time he would be spending about forty-two weeks of the year on the road as a stand-up. And during those weeks, he smeared his face in burnt cork, achieving his notoriety as a blackface performer. It took him just ten minutes to apply his makeup, to go from white to “cooning” Negro in front of the mirror. White audiences came to revere him. At times Jolson wore dusty plantation clothes—straw hat and all—onto the stage. On bended knee, he played the minstrel role, and he played it for keeps. Women who sat close enough to the stage often burst into tears. They claimed Jolson’s eyes were soulful and lovely enough to make them do so.