We were on the street, walking to the Town Wharf for lunch. Frank said, “Really strange people, too. They’re all on drugs.”
“Nonsense.”
“I blame their parents.”
“Bull. They’re carsick. Listen, it’s a long drive.”
Provincetown before my time had been an appalling fishing village of dull clapboard houses, narrow streets, creaking porches, one severe church, and sand blowing down from the dunes eroding the Puritan geometry. It had always had its Sunday painters: water-colorists change nothing. It was the poets, the queer antique dealers, the escapees, the actors and loonies and curio sellers who gave it life. The summer people in their roadsters carried frenzy here and saved the place from being just another sand dune.
Until I did it, Provincetown was portrayed as quaint and dead. The painters painted the dunes, the photographers took pictures of the wooden houses, the sculptors collected driftwood and made these warped sticks into lamps and horror-objects. The writers ignored it; they rented shacks and wrote about their terrible childhoods. But I had been born on the Cape; these houses and boats meant nothing to me, and I had seen enough fishnets and lobster pots to last me a lifetime. It was the rest that excited me — the funny little boathouse that had once been a theater, the fairies walking along Commercial Street with their pinky fingers linked, the visitors who stuck out a mile. Throughout the Twenties and into the Thirties I took pictures there. I saw a man with a perfect head and photographed him, and later I found out he was the poet Cummings — a wonderful memory because I thought he was a genius before I saw a single line he’d written: I liked his head and the way his jokester’s thick lips curled when he laughed. He was much funnier than the other one, who looked ruined and squinting, the sunlight removing half his face, O’Neill. Pugmire and his vast collection of medicine bottles, Bunny Wilson and his cronies, the tragic Bruno Bassinet who was found floating face down in his underwear in Hatches Harbor, the get-togethers O’Neill arranged above Peaked Hill Bar: this was my Provincetown.
And there was a direct link between Provincetown and New York City. In the space of ten years I did two sets of Robeson pictures, the first before the notorious hand-kissing scene in All God’s Chillun, the next in 1932 during the New York revival of Show Boat. Robeson sang (always “Lindy”) as I did him and he had more moods than anyone I had known.
“They want me to play Othello,” he said at our first session.
“That’s only natural.”
“I really want to play Hamlet.”
But in the event he played Emperor Jones.
He was my first boogie-man. Even as a celebrity, Robeson was considered a savage by most people, like the Ubangis my uncle Tod brought over from Africa, who were paraded out as freaks on the stage of the Old Howard in Scollay Square. “They were so sad,” he said. He guessed they were homesick, and to cheer them up Uncle Tod let them sit near the furnace in the basement boiler room where they sweated until one — the man — died; the woman was shipped back to Africa. This story infuriated Robeson, who had the idea — mistaken, I think — that the Ubangi man was an African chief in boiler-room bondage. “But it’s not your fault, honey.”
Next to Orlando, Robeson was the most complete man I had ever met. He was success-conscious, impressionable, and had no political savvy, and he had a fatal gift for rhetoric; yet he had a law degree, a corrosive intelligence, an athlete’s sinew, and a gentleman’s charm. He was fearless, dignified, and polite, the sort of superman envious weaklings gang up to destroy. He was bowled over by my photographs. He had dressed up in fantastic costumes, like an African prince, a statesman, a revolutionary, a convict, a pirate; he got the duds out of the wardrobe of the New York theater and made the right faces for them. He told me not to tell a soul, and he bought the more outlandish pictures from me so that I couldn’t exhibit them. I thought at the time that they were parts he wanted to play, because he gave little speeches for each one — jabbering like an African, orating like a president; but later it occurred to me that they were people he wanted to be, and it didn’t surprise me when he went to Russia, because one of the pictures (fur hat, overcoat, and growling minski-chinski) foretold that.
It was Robeson who introduced me to the other blacks in New York, the Show Boat cast, the hangers-on, girlfriends, spivs, and bookies. “My people,” he called them, “my brothers and sisters”—it was my introduction to those words used in their larger senses. Some of them were religious types, Holy Rollers and preachers and evangelists, with names like Father and Daddy; or sly fast-talking sharks with sharp teeth and an odd black puppety walk and names like Pigga and Doolum; others pretended they were real Africans, and one told me he was God. A few tried to interfere with me, but I said I would not stand for it and if they didn’t cut it out they could get their picture taken elsewhere. But how they dressed! Top hats and tails, earrings, blankets and war bonnets, leopard skins, bandanas, and one in his shorts, just a pair of boxer’s trunks. Strange as the others seemed, dressed up as Uncas and General Othello and Crispus Attucks and Shriners in red fezzes, it was the boxer who caused the sensation: no one had ever seen a confident muscle-bound black man before. He was a bizarre Negro who looked like a bullfrog and claimed he was an Indian and called himself Tashmoo.
“Maude’s cannibals,” people called them. Robeson had supplied me with New York subjects, Frenise helped me on the Cape. Many blacks lived then, as they continued to do, on Martha’s Vineyard, They were servants, houseboys, cooks, sometimes gardeners, but never chauffeurs (the Irish did that, though Papa disapproved: “I would never hire a man who believed in an afterlife to do a dangerous job”). For years I traveled around the Cape and out to the Vineyard doing blacks, and when I had my first exhibition in that wharf gallery in Provincetown people were astonished — not by the blind portraits, or the perfect one of Cummings or Clam diggers or the nasty one I had set up called Eel in a Toilet, but by the blacks, because they had never seen them before, so many of them, like human beings.
For one thing, they were not black. Instead of printing them the usual way I fuddled around a stage further and made negative prints. A few years later, even amateurs knew how to do this, reversing the order, backassward, printing a positive to get inkblot whites and illuminated shadows. But then it was considered wildly imaginative, and to use black subjects in negative prints a stroke of pure genius. They appeared lighted from within, an internal glow that livened the skin and blackened the eyes and picked out the teeth like obsidian choppers. They were incandescent golliwogs in two dimension, but it was especially creepy because my pictures showed the familiar in reverse, solarized people with white hair and white noseholes and gray fingernails and black teeth, and I must admit that the first few I did nearly scared the pants off me with their superhuman looks, right out of a rocket, as if there were a million more somewhere in the sky in the Mothership who were about to land and take over the world. And although some of the blacks were printed as usual (I didn’t take any liberties with Robeson) none looked as black as those whitened negative prints or caused people to study them so closely. Thereafter, whenever I took a picture that I thought people would not look twice at — some ordinary scene I felt deserved attention — I printed it this way and never failed to drown the viewer in it. My white Negroes made the show; they were arrestingly familiar and yet had the definition of sojourners from the spirit world. Now people noticed the lip-shape, the long crown, the huge noseholes, the forehead ridge, the small beautiful ears.