Miss Anne in Harlem: Jungle fever in 1920's Harlem

Book Reviewed: Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance, by Carla Kaplan

This book tells the story of white women in black Harlem collectively referred to as "Miss Anne," has never been told until now. White women who wrote impassioned pleas such as "A white girl's prayer" about their longings to escape the "curse" of whiteness were overlooked. The press sexualized and sensationalized their stories as sexual adventurers or lesbians. For blacks, she was unpredictable, and a "gleeful pickaninny." She is a woman of wealth who thinks she has the right to speak for blacks or a woman looking for a "sheikh," a term referred to young black men with athletic build. For most residents in Harlem, she was an intrusive guest and do not deserve a serious enquiry. Northeastern University professor Carla Kaplan has done a fascinating job of researching and writing this book about the forgotten white women who revolutionized and reformed the racial and ethnic mixing in 1920s Harlem. This story comes out of hard to get original archival material in the form of letters, journals, diaries and notebooks. Many women mentioned in this book are scarcely mentioned in other literary work although their experiences in Harlem were the most important and exciting period of these women's lives. NAACP founder Mary White Ovington, Harlem librarian Ernestine Rose, and philanthropist Amy Spingarn were most effective because they drew least attention.

The author analyzes facts to find what made these women to go to Harlem. In their days, Nancy Cunard was dismissed as bed-hopping communist, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, and Charlotte Osgood Mason, widely regarded as a malignant force, all followed their African dreams to black New York. The race spirit of Harlem renaissance was militant rebellion born from the galvanizing return of Harlem's triumphant regiment after WWI. This historical moment largely precluded white Negrotarians flooding Harlem except for few male white philanthropists who could find their way in if insider status was their goal. White women could do no such thing, most devoted white women activists were at the sea trying to find their way in. These women were documented in every imaginable form of female identity in the Jazz age; the New Woman, the Spinster, the Flapper, the Gibson Girl, the Bachelor girl, the Bohemian, the Twenties "mannish" lesbian, the Suffragist, the inverts, and so on.

The six women discussed in this book are grouped in three parts. "Choosing blackness: Sex, Love and Passing," Repudiating Whiteness: Politics, Patronage and Primitivism," and "Rewards and Costs: Publishing, Performance, and Modern Rebellion." The women discussed in this book are; Lillian E Wood, Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, Annie Nathan Meyer, Charlotte Osgood Mason, Fannie Hurst and Nancy Cunard.

All six women had influence and impact. Schuyler married one of the most important figures of Harlem renaissance and became a Harlem voice. Mason was most influential patron of Harlem and Cunard edited most comprehensive anthology of the era. Fannie Hurst remained famous because of her successful novel, "Imitation of Life."

These six biographies are an effort to hear what "Miss Anne" had to say about herself and her involvement with most volatile issue of the day that race is not a social construction and a white woman's place is certainly not in Black Harlem. The race erotica was unthinkable and unimaginable. This book aims to provide a sense of tension that the women in this book experienced and suggest how their efforts were viewed in their day. It provides a context in which their isolation and loneliness as well as their longing to belong, and everyone understand from their perspectives.

The following poem from form "A White girl's prayer" by Edna Margaret Johnson briefly illustrates the sentiments of the six women discussed in this book and scores of others who could not be accommodated in this work.

I writhe on the self -contempt, O God -
My Nordic flesh is but curse;
The black girl loathes to clasp my hand;
She doubts my love because I'm white.

From Nancy Cunard:

Last advice to the crackers:
Bake your own white meat-
Last advice to the lynchers;
Hang your brother by the feet.
One sitting pretty Black Man
is a million-strong on heat.