The 'Baby Dolls': Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition

5. “We Are No Generation”: Resurrecting the Central Role of Dance to the Creation of New Orleans Music

5 “We Are No Generation” Resurrecting the Central Role of Dance to the Creation of New Orleans Music We are no generation. We represent our ancestors; those that danced before us. —Davieione (Beauty from the East) Fairley, New Orleans Society of Dance’s Baby Doll Ladies I n 1940 robert mckinney asked, “Who is this Baby Doll and why is she referred to as such?” The answer lies in the co-location of the sociopolitical world in which these women were embedded with vernacular cultural traditions. By 1912, New Orleans Black expressive culture was taking on an enduring form of musicality to shape and influence the century’s artistry and popular culture. Buddy Bolden, a major originator of the “hot” jazz style, innovatively blended blues, marches, and Black spirituals in a manner that appealed to New Orleans’s Black youth. The Million Dollar Baby Dolls were also part of a new “youth culture,” one that would increasingly and self-consciously come to see itself as rebelling against mainstream culture and society. As poor women, the original Baby Dolls worked in the District, some as shift workers, and returned to their homes in Black working-class neighborhoods outside the District after their workday, unlike others who were absorbed by the underworld activities of gambling and petty crime in addition to prostitution.1 There was a permeable boundary between the District and middle-class life that some women used to good effect. These multiply identified women were part of the nighttime performative landscape that resurrecting the central role of dance • 101 included dancing, singing, playing as musicians on a par with men in jazz bands, and participating in the religious traditions of the Black Spiritual church, Catholicism, and Voodoun. For example, Eddie Dawson remembered a woman in the 1910s from Back o’ Town who played jazz at night and organ at St. Katherine’s Church during the day. Neliska “Baby” Briscoe’s mother, Neliska Thomas Mitchell, worked at St. Ann’s Church caring for the priests and nuns of the parish by day and at night took her eight- or nine-year-old daughter to perform as a dancer and singer at Alley Cabaret. They were Black women in a White-supremacist and male-dominated society . The ability to earn a decent leaving and be respected by their peers was challenged by the limitations of their employment and educational opportunities and the exclusion of women’s participation in political affairs that determined the very laws by which they were governed in the District and in society as a whole. Yet they managed to have an undiminished sense of their own self-worth. There are several enduring themes of the Baby Doll phenomenon. The first is the relationship between the women’s dances and the music of the times. The second is the women’s reappropriation of feminine symbols to critique and satirize the limitations on their sex, imposed by patriarchal legal and social norms. Third is the women’s own view of themselves as “tough,” resilient trendsetters and unconventional community leaders. Finally, as “women dancing the jazz” (from jass/jazz to swing, to bebop, to rhythm and blues, to hip hop and bounce), they carry a message of hope and resilience to a community that has always relied on its culture to make it through life. music and dance When Robert McKinney interviewed Beatrice Hill in 1940, she had lost much of her money and was living in the most deplorable of rooming houses populated by drug users and petty criminals. He described her unflatteringly as a dope fiend and syphilitic patient at Charity Hospital. Seemingly immune to the harsh condemnations of those outside her ranks, she evidenced no lack of enthusiasm in recounting her heyday working in the District. Even before they masked as Baby Dolls one Mardi Gras Day, women such as Beatrice inhabited a world whose center was ironically at the intersection of the streets called Liberty and Gravier. There, one might say, they met their restricted freedoms with much grit. McKinney made the 102 • the “baby dolls” wry observation that their attitudes were indifferent, their profanity that of a sailor, and they were prideful. They wore short dresses, danced with money in their stockings, and sang erotically charged blues songs. And they danced. At work, they danced nude and on the tops of tables and bar counters. They competed to see who could “shimmy” the best...