Harlem Nocturne by Farah Jasmine Griffin

Author:Farah Jasmine Griffin [Jasmine, Farah Jasmine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465069972
Publisher: Basic Books

If Margie Polite

Had of been white

She might not’ve cussed

Out the cop that night.

. . .

A soldier took her part.

He got shot in the back

By a white cop—

The soldier were black.

. . .

They taken Margie to jail

And kept her there.

DISORDERLY CONDUCT

The charges swear.

. . .

She started the riots!

Harlemites say

August 1st is

MARGIE’S DAY.

About the riot, Petry later recalled, “I can remember walking through 125th Street when the street was filled with the shattered glass from the store windows. It made a crunching sound. I can still hear it.”42

Petry used these vivid memories to inform her fictional account of the riots and the events that led up to them. William Jones, the protagonist of “In Darkness and Confusion,” shares an apartment with his obese churchgoing wife, Pink, and her teenage niece, Annie May, a southern migrant who is discovering all the temptations of the city. Annie May was inspired by the young women Petry encountered in Harlem who were a bit younger than Lutie Johnson but, like her, also absent from the organizational meetings to which Petry devoted her time. However, young women like Annie May made their presence known on the streets of Harlem. Approaching three of them, Jones describes them with a tone of disdain:

As far as he could see, they looked exactly alike. All three of them. And like Annie May. Too thin. Too much lipstick. Their dresses were too short and too tight. . . . He knew too, that [Annie May] didn’t earn enough money to pay for all the cheap, bright-colored dresses she was forever buying. Her girl friends looked just like her and just like these girls. He’d seen her coming out of the movie houses on 125th Street with two or three of them. They were all chewing gum and they nudged each other and talked too loud and laughed too loud. They stared hard at every man who went past them.

Might these “too-too girls” be female counterparts of Ellison’s zoot-suit-wearing jitterbugs that his protagonist encounters on the subway platform in Invisible Man? In an unsigned editorial just after the Harlem Riot of 1943, Ellison suggested that black leadership fails if it does not seek to solve the riddle of the zoot. He wrote, “Much in Negro life remains a mystery; perhaps the zoot-suit conceals profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power.” This is a riddle he himself seeks to unravel in Invisible Man, and one that would occupy brilliant thinkers after him.43 The Lindy Hop and the emerging sound of bebop, according to Ellison, embodied the energies and frustrations of these young men—frustrations that led to the chaos and discontent of wartime race riots.

But let’s linger a bit longer with the young women, the “too-too girls.” We might ask, Who are they? What are their hopes, aspirations, dreams, and frustrations? What is their style? What songs do they sing as they work throughout the day to ease heartbreak or express a heart’s longing? What music

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