Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Lena Horne, Light Egyptian

Josephine Baker may have created the road for Black women on the stage and screen but Lena Horne paved it for all who came after. Starting with her 1943 breakout performance in Stormy Weather, Lena Horne became America's first African American sex symbol. Not only was she stunning she was talented. Not only was she talented she was savvy. Not only was she savvy she was not afraid to speak her mind. The original mocha showgirl. I met Lena Horne once when I was working as a manager at a kitchen store named Lechter's. It was 1995 or so. The store was located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I was near the back when I noticed a thin women of impeccable taste glissade into our establishment. I was used to seeing glamorous older women shopping  but something about her caught my eye. When I noticed who she was I rushed to the front and introduced myself. Her hands were soft and eyes dimmed with age were still full of life. I gushed like a chorus girl. After she left I turned to the cashier and said "Didn't you recognize her?" She said "Yeah, the lady from the toothpaste commercials." If I could I would have fired her on the spot.

Our paths crossed one again when I had the pleasure of seeing Lena Horne perform one of her legendary cabaret shows. The crowd was sparkling and I must admit I was probably 35 years younger than most of the patrons. Lena sauntered onto the stage and put on one of the most spectacular shows I've ever seen in person. I was thinking I was about to sip a cool iced tea made with refined sugar, what I got was potent blend of bourbon and sugarcane. She sang with such pith and soul I could feel each note tug at my heart. And she was bawdy and sexual. A woman in her eighties rolling the floor in a silk gown growling like a tigress in heat. I loved it. She was a Brooklyn girl.

Maybe Native New Yorker fierceness made her never shy from being candid. From working closely with Civil Rights leaders to speaking openly about Hollywood racism, Lena was a one of a kind. When the studio thought she wasn't reading "Negro enough" on film they had famed make-up artist Max Factor make her a custom shade named "Light Egyptian", as Lena recalled in her 1981 Broadway show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, the studio took the Light Egyptian make up put it on Ava Gardner and gave her the part on the movie version of Showboat.

In her long almost 100 years on this earth Lena Horne touched so many lives, from breaking barriers to breaking heart. She was always a class act and she always proved that Black Girls Rock.



Lena Horne and Bill Robinson giving musical realness, Stormy Weather, 1943

Lena serving you more legs than a bucket of chicken, darling

Lena's Tour de France, on board the steamship Liberté with her husband MGM musical director Lennie Hayton on their return to America, 1952

Pretty angry, Lena Horne by Ricard Avedon, 1958


Lena believed in keeping a fetching man around the house. Her first husband Louis Jordan Jones in Pittsburgh, 1937


 A studio still from 1935


Blackglamazon, What Becomes a Legend Most? Lena in fur that's what, 1969


Lena lifting spirits with Tuskegee Airmen in Alabama, 1943


 The King and Queen, Lena and Harry Belafonte threw Dr. Martin Luther King a party after the March on Washington, 1963


Lena with Medgar Evers shortly before his murder, 1963


Now Sissy That Walk, Lena using New York City sidewalks as a runway


Ava darling I love you but you know Lena shoulda been Julie LaVerne


Broadway Baby, Lena outside the Nederlander Theater, 1981 


Fight the Power, Lena fighting for equality at the March on Washington, August 1963

Her face is sickening!





Background noise, apparently the fitters couldn't take Lena

Baby I just want to join whatever cause these two are championing

Lena Horne's iconic pic that inspired me to write

Girl I make this look too easy!


In living color, 1947



Now we know where Miss Piggy got her style, Lena Horne on the Muppet Show





Thursday, April 16, 2015

Why she gotta be light-skinned?

"Why she gotta be light-skinned?"

The question was, I felt, accusatory in nature.  I was at a book event in Charlotte, North Carolina in the fall of 2011. I was signing copies of my books Solstice and The Goddess of Light when an attractive woman walked up to the table. She smiled broadly and placed the two books, one on top of the other, in front of me. I opened the one set on top, pen in hand ready to write some platitude like "Best Wishes!!" or "Good Luck!!--always two exclamation marks--along with my signature (which I've practiced to perfection--an oversized capital letter "D" followed by stylized scribblings with the last letter trailing off with a flourish) when her eyes bored into me. She was a short African-American woman dressed in an HBCU tee-shirt, ripped ever-so fashionably, a long skirt along with a hemp-woven bag. Think a pecan-version of Freddie from A Different World.

"Why she gotta be light-skinned?"

She wanted an answer. And thus I found myself thrust into that irksome quicksand known as colorism. The body politic that is unescapable if you are descended from Africans born in America. The young woman was asking me why the main character of my series of novels, Solstice Maccaffey, was light-skinned. The answer I gave her was that I based Solstice on an amalgam of my beloved female relatives. My mother's drive and ambition, my Aunt Lebbie's style and showwomanship; and her looks based on my aunt Fannie; my father's sister, who was from South Carolina. She was so light that when I was very young I would say "When we goin' to see the white lady in Rock Hill? I like her." That was only part of it. The other part was that since winning the Miss America Pageant I've had a huge crush on Vanessa Williams and wanted to write a story she could star in when Hollywood came calling to do a film adaptation. Still waiting on that. And 'Nessa if you're reading this you can buy the rights for my series at any time and for a very good price.

"But why she gotta be light-skined though?"

She seemed unsatisfied with my answer. I smiled uncomfortably as the line started to lengthen. Now others, mostly women, peered over her shoulders microscoping me, waiting, all with a "Well...?" expressions on their faces. I felt as if I was being questioned by a Lernaean Hydra, each head ready to swivel into attack at the tiniest hint of me being color-struck. I started to perspire under my clothes. These next few minutes would be crucial. I didn't miss the irony that I, a light-skinned brotha, was about to answer the question of why the main character of my novels was light-skined to a line of brown female readers. And to be honest its a fair question.

Complexion politics has always been with us in America. It doesn't matter that there are light brown indigenous people in West Africa. In American beauty and sexuality, intelligence and approachability, criminality and deviance has all turned on what degree of melanin that resides in our skin. So I looked her square in the eye and said "That's a complicated question."

The reason its complicated is because we live in a society that doesn't value us, Black People, as a group, but also judges us according to our complexion. We talk about it all the time. On social media when one activist calls out some one for marrying a light-skinned woman or when a rapper proclaims if President Obama was really dark he would not have been elected. We hashtag it with TeamLight or TeamDark. We instagram it with eggplants. We are photoshopped to be lighter (Gaboure Sibde) or we are photoshopped to be darker (OJ Simpson). We have complexion preferences--"I like my girls thick and chocolate" or "My man is light and sweet like my coffee." We use words like "interesting" to describe the texture of our hair. We use it passive aggressively "She's pretty for a dark girl." We even sing about it in Spike Lee movies. This makes Black literature a minefield when it comes to writing about complexion. Some get it right as does Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye, some don't as in any number of E. Lynn Harris novels or the legion of writers he spawned who are obsessed with the complexion of their characters. But overall, complexion is something that white writers don't have to worry about. Too a white writer a Black character is Black. Extrapolate at will. But a Black writer must tell the assumed Black reader the exact hue of skin Yancy Harrington Baxter is.

We've all seen the story of the Tragic Mulatto. I didn't want to write that. I wanted Solstice to be bold. To confront race. But while confronting race we also have to confront it ugly legacies. There are scenes in my books that hold the complexion debate under a microscope that have caused many angry and supportive readers to  emails to me. Ultimately Solstice is a series of fantasy novels about a witch living during the Harlem Renaissance. But even in a fantasy world we unfortunately have to drag 400 years of oppression with us. That's not to say race and politics have no place in speculative fiction, just reading Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okarafor or Brandon Massey will illuminate that. Rich, powerful stories effused with race, gender and class. I think that's why I chose to make Solstice's best friend so dark. Hooter, that's her names, was the color of ink.

"She looked over at Solstice whose fair skin was considered lavish compared to her matted darkness. Was she less of a person just because she had black skin? Hooter didn’t love her complexion as much as she identified with it. She bathed in its lonely and symbolic depths. She tended to it like a garden. It was the only thing that she could say truly belonged to her."
Through their very different eyes, through the very different treatment they get, we see a world we normally don't see. A world of racism and colorism but also of magic and possibility. A world so surreal that witches exist but one so real that hatred and bigotry do too. A fantasy world where a Black woman, no matter what her complexion, can conquer the world that's the way it should be.


Sunday, April 12, 2015

Josephine Baker: The Original Black Girl Who Rocked

When I was writing my first novel Solstice one of the reasons I wanted to write it was because I never saw People of Color in fantasy fiction. As a child growing up I was malnourished to see people like myself in the comic books I read and sci-fi movies I watched. I was a rather introverted child so I didn't have many friends. My cousins would visit on the weekend, but often times on a Saturday afternoon after cutting grass and washing cars I was perched in front of the TV. With reruns of Star Trek and Space: 1999 in all their color blocked glory my affinity for the genre blossomed. But something else happened on those lazy afternoons. Not just sci-fi movies were playing. I soon found Spaghetti Westerns, Cheesy Low-Budget Horror, Film Noir. Mid-Century Melodramas and Technocolor Musicals. And that's when it hit me:

Why can't there be stories with fabulously glamorous Black women wearing creations by Adrian or Edith Head, dripping in Joseff of Hollywood jewels; dashingly chiseled Black men with square jaw swagger and broad-shoulder sex appeal. All impeccably dressed and set in a world so magical the backdrop would make Douglas Sirk chartreuse with envy? From that question, Solstice was born to answer it.

Solstice Macaffey is a broad. More Joan Crawford and less Lena Horne. She's pushy, ambitious and has more personality and style than anybody I or you will ever know. My earliest influences were Old Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, John Gavin, Dorothy Dandrige and Harry Belafonte. If you want to see this fabulousness chronicled look at two of my favorite blogs are Corey@ I'll Keep You Posted and Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist. When I was writing Solstice I drew inspiration from icons of the past.

What makes an icon? A woman with a true sense of self. Confidence to set trends and not follow them. A taste maker. What she wears to breakfast people will be wearing to lunch. As Iris Apfel, who is an icon in her own right, puts it:


"When you don't dress like everyone else, you don't have to think like everyone else."

So for the next few weeks I am selecting one legendary woman for each decade that I feel epitomizes the outrageous and prodigious, the scandalous and sublime. The complete Ovahness an icon is.





Josephine and Albert Prejean on the set of Princess Tam-Tam,1935

Josephine and Princess Grace (Grace Kelly), Monaco, 1969


Josephine and her pet cheetah, Chiquita (the cat had a diamond necklace)

Josephine 1928 saying "Rihana who?"

Get your nails did

Beaded gown 1930

"Marlene, girl I make this look good!"

La Baker had legs darling, with dancer Serge Lifar


Killing it

Serving it



The original smoky eye

Alfred Flury, songwriter and priest, with Josephine in Berlin, 1965 

Yellow becomes her, Josephine 1960s

The cover of the July 1964 issue of Ebony magazine.
It was dedicated to her fabulous fashion

Josephine urging Smokin' Joe Louis to sing with her at her
opening performance at Club Des Champs Elysees, 1952

In color for your nerves

At the center of it all where she liked it. Her husband Jo Bouillon and
singer Georges Guetary, Olympia Theater, Paris, 1947

Bow down bitches! Josephine in Harlem, 1950