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  • Florence’s Place: Host(ess)ing Revolution in Interwar Black Paris
  • Marina Magloire (bio)

On january 3, 1932, the performer florence emery jones died of heart failure in her Manhattan apartment.1 She was thirty-nine years old. Her death certificate declared that she was an “actress” and that she had been a resident of New York City for twenty-five years.2 It mentions nothing of the fact that she had spent most of the 1920s in Paris, nor that she was once celebrated as one of the most glamorous entertainers of the Parisian nightclub scene. This same Florence who died in a New York tenement once strolled between champagne-laden tables in a Parisian nightclub that bore her name, crooning sweetly; this same Florence once coerced a British prince into dancing the black bottom; this same Florence was, according to Langston Hughes, the first person of color he ever saw “deliberately and openly snubbing white people.”3 Florence walked a delicate balance between white admiration and white hatred, as evidenced by her interactions with Ernest Hemingway, a frequent visitor to her establishments. Hemingway describes her as “a typical Negro dancer, jolly, funny, and wonderful on her feet.”4 That is, until she “acquired an English accent and a languid manner” as a result of dancing with European nobility, and for Hemingway, “another of the really amusing after-midnight places was ruined by prosperity.”5 Hemingway’s characterization of Florence has multiple racist overtones: the assumption that she is solely a dancer, the idea that a black woman’s usefulness is only insofar as she provides him with amusement, and the derision of any black affect other than servile jolliness as a ridiculous putting on of airs. However, what is most remarkable about the themes brought up by Hemingway is the way they were used by other black expatriates of the time period to paint Florence as a cautionary tale of black women’s haughtiness. [End Page 23]

After Florence’s decade of license and luxury, it might seem that dying in a New York tenement was a fall from grace. Langston Hughes, while narrating the height of Florence’s success in 1924 in his autobiography, felt the need to foreshadow her demise: “Ten years later, Florence was dying on Welfare Island in New York,” while her rival hostess, Bricktop, “was the toast of the town, with dukes and princes at her tables.”6 While Hughes speaks to the vicissitudes of black women entertainers’ success during the interwar era as directly tied to performance, self-presentation, and race politics, he fails to fully appreciate and conceptualize Florence’s attitude toward her rich white patrons as an act of resistance. Effectively, he subtly undermines her model of inhospitable hostessing and valorizes Bricktop’s more diplomatic model of hostessing at Florence’s expense. This representation has had long-lasting effects on Florence’s historical legacy, which has been obscured in comparison to Bricktop’s.

Building on work by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, William A. Shack, and Brent Hayes Edwards, all of whom have situated Florence as a key player among African American expatriate performers in Paris, I use archives and historical accounts to triangulate her position and to read the written traces of Florence’s world in order to reconstruct the politics of her nightly performances.7 More specifically, I argue that Florence’s performance and practice laid claim to a symbology of black leadership in order to make her nightclub a space of resistance to mirror the political climate of the 1920s. While black nationalism was on the rise during the interwar period, and was often represented by its critics in magico-religious terms, very few of these critiques of interwar black leadership considered the notion that black women could be leaders or agents of revolution. Far from being a failure, Florence’s behavior was a masterful insertion of black femininity within a revolutionary matrix. As the hostess at two Paris nightclubs—first Le Grand Duc, where Langston Hughes was also working as a busboy, then at a larger club called Chez Florence—Florence attempted to radicalize the clubs. In these spaces, Florence unified the seemingly dissonant imagery of...

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