Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital

11. Kitchen Mechanics and Parlor Nationalists: Andy Razaf, Black Bolshevism, and Harlem's Renaissance

KITCHEN MECHANICS AND PARLOR NATIONALISTS ANDY RAZAF, BLACK BOLSHEVISM, AND HARLEM’S RENAISSANCE William J. Maxwell The first extended musical allusion in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), African American modernism’s most insistently allusive and musical novel, involves a bluesy torch song with an axe to grind. Near the climax of the monologue that fills the novel’s prologue, Ellison’s unnamed, invisible narrator admits to a desire that would provoke his New York neighbors to violence if he lived anywhere but in an abandoned coal cellar. “I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing ‘What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue,’” he divulges, “all at the same time.”1 One recording won’t do, he explains , because “when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body” (emphasis in original).2 Yet the narrator is excited by more than the sensual pleasures of pumped-up volume. The alchemy to be 11 heard as “Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound” offers Ellison’s unseen hero rare insights into African American time and history.3 “But what did I do to be so black and blue?” he asks in the prologue’s concluding lines, annexing Armstrong’s musical question as the key to his own Bildung and casting the novel that reveals it as “Black and Blue’s” libretto (emphasis in original).4 Apart from its status as an overture and narrative inducement, the version of “Black and Blue” heard by the invisible man earns its honored place among the novel’s intertexts for its distillation of some of Ellison’s abiding concerns: concerns with the masquerading of black tricksters who, like Satchmo, counter whites wearing their own visible and invisible blackface; with the attitudes toward history of those seemingly “outside the groove” of classical Marxism’s teleological plottings;5 with jazz generally and the rehabilitation of Armstrong’s post-bebop profile as a gifted Uncle Tom specifically. Given the novel’s focal theme of black invisibility and its encyclopedic ransacking of black cultural archives, however, its failure to unveil the African American who first posed the overwhelming question of “Black and Blue” is at least ironic. Before Armstrong mock-innocently asked, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” the inquiry had been raised by Andy Razaf, who wrote the lyrics to the tune in 1929. Before the song appeared on any Armstrong disc, it had been the showstopper in a New York black-cast musical called Hot Chocolates. Razaf’s words were the fruit of the kind of improvisational bravado that Ellison counted among the black gifts to American democracy. During rehearsals, the Jewish mobster and impresario Dutch Schultz confronted the lyricist with a nonrefusable offer to add “a little ‘colored girl’ singing how tough it is to be ‘colored.’”6 Razaf and his dazzling pianist, Fats Waller, responded with what has often been called America ’s first popular song of racial protest. In its original form, “Black and Blue” led with wickedly punning lyrics lamenting an interracial gentlemen’s agreement from the point of view of a lonely, dark-skinned black woman. “Browns and yellers / All have fellers,” went an introductory verse Armstrong would excise , “Gentlemen prefer them light. / Wish I could fade, / Can’t make the grade, / Nothin’ but dark days in sight.”7 Why are readers of Invisible Man still unlikely to know that the novel unwittingly perpetuates Razaf’s invisibility along with Armstrong’s edit of “Black and Blue’s” antiracist satire?8 Barry Singer, Razaf’s biographer, attributes his subject’s absence from a variety of historical repertoires to an anomalous career as a black song lyricist on Tin Pan Alley, a walking contradiction of the myth of the effortlessness of black musicianship.9 But Razaf’s U.S. semi-obscurity may also be due to his typicality. Some of the forgetting of Razaf, I believe, is an aspect of W I L L I A M J . M A X W E L L 220 the forgetting of the black anticapitalists among whom he wrote and argued, New Yorkers who bid to direct a racial renaissance powered by the black working class years before Harlem’s canonical vogue was declared in the mid-1920s. While Razaf’s personal history seems bent on disproving that the...