Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans by LaKisha Michelle Simmons (review)

W. E. B. Du Bois’s momentous question “How does it feel to be a problem?” provides the starting point for this fascinating exploration of adolescent black girls’ experiences in the Jim Crow city. Rethinking Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness from their perspective, LaKisha Michelle Simmons describes how African American girls in New Orleans came to understand themselves while caught within a gendered “double bind of white supremacy and respectability” (5). She traces the ways that young women are surveilled, disciplined, and constrained by both racialized violence and the expectations of black middle-class elders, but she also reveals the meanings they make of their experiences and the pleasures they create for themselves.

Simmons’s approach is multidisciplinary and theoretically informed, drawing on the analytic frameworks of geography, sexuality, and affect. She is adept at bringing these categories together to describe how black girls moved through racialized space and developmental time to create a sense of self in relation to myriad lessons imparted about their “place.” Crescent City Girls is the latest in a number of local studies that speak with and back to earlier theorizations of African American women’s gendered and, especially, sexual experiences. Focusing in the main on northern cities from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, these works seek to uncover what had been hidden not only by scholars’ exclusionary presumptions about whose history matters but also by black women’s own “necessary silence,” born from their experiences of racialized violence (83).¹ One of Simmons’s most important contributions is to move this literature into the urban South. New Orleans is not wholly typical of southern cities, but its uniqueness allows for a more complex and nuanced analysis of race and class because the ethnic and cultural distinctions between “American blacks” and “black Creoles” mapped generally, if not always neatly, on the city’s geography and on class divisions within the African American community.

Respectability politics were both a form of violence and a response to it. Simmons joins other scholars who challenge a flat, top-down model of respectability, but she nonetheless views it as a primary technology for constraining black women’s mobility, silencing their voices, and enabling the violence against them. Regardless of class, black girls’ movement through New Orleans—shopping in white-owned stores, walking to and from school, participating in leisure activities, or visiting black nightspots—exposed them to various forms of insult and harassment. Nonetheless, certain girls, particularly those of the striving and middle classes, were more able to perform respectability (for example, through their deportment, their avoidance of certain spaces, or the protective intervention of elders) and shield themselves from some of these assaults. Respectability, then, subjected black girls to racist assaults on dignity, as well as to the norms and strictures of middle-class African American authority figures, but it also could facilitate certain mobilities.

Sexual violence in myriad forms was endemic to the double bind. One chapter focuses on the 1930 attempted rape and subsequent murder of fourteen-year-old restaurant worker Hattie McCray by white police officer Charles Guerand. Guerand had been pressuring McCray for sex at her place of employment. When she tried to defend herself against him, he shot and killed her. Here Simmons reveals the extraordinary efforts of state officials and the white press to preserve the silence about white men’s sexual abuse of black women while drawing attention as well to the centrality of respectability in the black press’s coverage of the crime. A chapter about a Catholic convent and reform home highlights the ways that young black women were stigmatized as sexual delinquents whose “sins” were “written on the body” (150). Some girls ended up in the House of the Good Shepherd because their search for pleasure placed them outside the bounds of respectability; others navigated the economic, social, and...