Amy looked at me speculatively from under her thick lashes. “You know, I’m second to none as a researcher, and I’d be glad to go on-line, or down to the Vivian Harsh Collection. But I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be more effective on that street than you.”
I felt my cheeks grow hot, but I remembered the cautious response I’d already received this morning. The kids might talk to me as readily as to a black woman, but the adults were more likely to be open with Amy.
“Point taken. Do you have a cell phone?” We exchanged mobile numbers. “I’m not sure what I can pay you for this-I hadn’t factored that into the estimate I gave Harriet for taking the case. But your help will make a big difference, and I don’t expect you to donate it.”
She shook her head. “It feels good to be doing something. Even after Marc moved here, I didn’t know him all that well, but Harry-Harrietis like my own sister. Doing something active to track down what happened to Marc, it’s the one thing I can do for her. You don’t need to be paying me.”
CHAPTER 17
We spent some time on-line, me looking for the Negro Theater Project, Amy checking the trains to the western suburbs. Marc could have caught a nine-thirty, which would have set him down in the station nearest to New Solway at ten-twenty. He still would have been miles from Larchmont Hall. One of us would have to fit in time to hunt down any suburban cabs or buses that might have picked him up. I ground my teeth at that prospect.
When the Web yielded only two meager references to the Negro Theater Project and none at all to Kylie Ballantine, I drove the fifteen miles south to look at real documents in the Vivian Harsh Collection.
Amy took off for Bronzeville when I left for the library. She’d described the Harsh Collection before we separated. Harsh, who’d been the first African-American to head a branch of the library, had been a private collector of material on black writers and artists. When she died, she donated everything-photos, documents, booksto the city. The Harsh Collection was the best of its kind in America, next to one in Harlem.
To my surprise, the papers were housed in a room off a major library branch-I’d pictured the collection in its own building. The library itself was doing a bustling business, mostly with women bringing their young children in to look at books, but also the usual collection of homeless and elderly that a library gathers. It’s a respectable destination. It’s warm, you can be with other people. All reasons why the Web cannot take the place of your branch library. Also it had books. And an archivist who knew and loved his collection.
At first, Gideon Reed frowned over my request. Yes, he knew those papers well, but why did I want to see them?
“I know Marcus Whitby’s been looking at them for some time,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
When I explained my role in Whitby’s death-finding him, working for the familyand showed him my ID, the archivist unbent. Mr. Whitby had been a real scholar. They didn’t get many here, mostly students working on term papers just wanting a few facts about Martin Luther King, not that he didn’t love showing young people how to use books and documents, but there was something satisfying about seeing this collection in the hands of someone who truly appreciated it.
Reed set me up in a temperature-controlled room with photographs of black poets and artists on the walls. While Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes smiled down at me, I went through the same papers that Marcus Whitby had studied. The letters and other documents were encased in plastic sleeves. I tried to skim, looking for names or events that might mean something to me, but Ballantine had a fine, spiderlike handwriting and she’d often written in pencil, making deciphering a maddening task. She sometimes wrote on pages torn from school exercise books, sometimes on thin green paper, where her pale handwriting became even more undecipherable.
I read Ballantine’s correspondence with Franz Boas at Columbia over her discoveries in Africa, her correspondence with Hallie Flanagan about the staging of Regeneration, her angry letter to W E. B. DuBois’s wife after Congress pulled the plug on the Federal Theater Project.
We were doing good work, we were doing important work. The notion that a ballet like Regeneration, or your own Swing Mikado, are Communistinspired because we try to tell the truth about Race in this country-is enough to make me look seriously at Communism. I don’t know what I live on now-back to private dance classes for earnest little girls whose mothers tuck away a dime a week from washing white women’s clothes so
that their children can learn in my studio what would have been their birthright in Africa.
The archive was patchy, sometimes holding letters like Ballantine’s to Shirley Graham without Graham’s response, sometimes letters or typed notes to her without any way of telling what she’d written to the correspondent. Several typed ones in the late forties came from an anonymous committee (“… the Committee is grateful for your involvement in the benefit. We were able to raise $1700, which our patron matched.” “The next Committee meeting will be on June 17 at the Ingleside church”).
Right before the Second World War, Ballantine somehow got a grant from the University of Chicago to travel and study in Africa. How she spent the war years, or where, wasn’t clear, but in 1949 she signed a contract with University of Chicago Press for her book on Ritual Dance Among the Bantu of West Equatorial Africa. They paid her five hundred dollars. Perhaps that was a standard advance in 1949.
Her second book dealt explicitly with slavery, and the dances she was able to trace from America back to Africa. The Longest Leap: African Dance in American. Slavery didn’t come from an academic press but from Bayard Publishing. That was a bit of a surprise: maybe Ritual Dance Among the Bantu had sold better than you’d expect. Maybe Ballantine had lived on her royalties. Or perhaps Calvin Bayard had known her personally and wanted to support her.
I stared at the Bayard logo on the title page, the jagged outline of a lion, as if it could tell me something, but finally turned to the book itself. There were photographs of masks, photographs of shyly smiling African girls demonstrating dance steps, shyly smiling African-American girls demonstrating what were supposed to be similar steps-I couldn’t tell from the pictures. I read paragraphs here and there about where Ballantine had been, what she had seen, how it compared with the dances she observed in the American South. She wrote fiercely about the patronizing attitude of white America to black dance.
They ignore the history of civilizations far older than theirs, African civilizations which each step and ritual encode. In their eyes, we Africans exist shamelessly in the body, and our dances are thought to be only a sign of our mindlessness, leaving the mind itself to the high civilizations that think up atom bombs and gas chambers.
A yellowed article from the Daily Defender, dated from 1977, gave a few biographical facts. Ballantine had been born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1911, but her family had moved to Chicago when she was six. She had attended Howard University, where she studied anthropology and dance. She’d gone to Columbia when Franz Boas was welcoming black students there, and achieved a master’s degree in anthropology before returning to Chicago, where she taught dance, performed dance, studied dance. In the Defender’s photograph, she was shown standing regally in front of a wall of African masks, wearing a dancer’s leotard and an African-print skirt.
The reporter had been more interested in her dance than in her academic career. He burbled in print over her energy-there she was, sixtysix, still dancing four hours a day, still teaching children in her Bronzeville home. He hadn’t asked how she’d spent the years from 1937 to 1977 except to discuss her trips to Africa-besides the two I’d already read about, she’d lived in Gabon for three years following its independence. The reporter did ask whether she felt any bitterness toward her treatment in the late fifties, and she had said that bitterness only wasted one’s energy.