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| CLUB HOPPING WITH W.C. HANDY Dorothy Height "The Reminiscences of Dorothy I. Height," interview by Polly Cowan in Black Women Oral History Project (Cambridge, MA: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Insitute for Advanced Studies, 2 February 1975), 105–10. DH: Because I came to New York University at an early age, I have spent the greater part of my life in Harlem. And I really lived in several different parts of the Harlem community. Early in my life, I lived near what is called the Dunbar Apartments. I lived opposite those, lived with my sister and brother in law. Later, I lived down in the Morningside area with the family with whom I lived most of the time that I went to school. It was a part of my own independence that I was able to be a part of a family. The mother, Mrs. Maude Myers, was a very fascinating woman who had had an unusual career. Because she was the widow of Will Dixon, the composer, she had an interest in music, but she herself was a designer. Long before blacks were admitted to many things—because she was very fair with red hair—she moved about into many very interesting places. I went to live with them when I was . . . PC: Did you pay rent, room and board payments? DH: Oh yes, room and board, it was that kind of thing. I had met their daughter when I was at NYU. She was a musician, and she is a very accomplished pianist. She's now teaching at Howard University in the School of Music. The thing that I think was of interest to me in the Harlem community was where we lived at 114th Street and Seventh Avenue—and again on Morningside Avenue—at that time, those were newly opened to black people. The Seventh-Avenue building was a huge eight and a half room cooperative that at that time was the equivalent of any we'd see in the finest area of Park Avenue. It was a lovely setting. PC: Whites had gone from it? DH: Black people had moved in. Mrs. Myers, who was a very enterprising businesswoman, was also an officer in the cooperative. It was a cooperative, and these people had bought the apartments. It was the kind of place where she could have one grand piano in one end of the apartment, and that was the music room, and adjacent to it was my room, and that sort of thing. And then she could have a Steinway in the front, and then there were living rooms all around. It was the kind of thing that I think most people don't think about there ever having been in Harlem. PC: Certainly I wouldn't. DH: Yes, there were a few Spanish speaking people, yes. Actually, on the northeast corner of 114th Street stood a very famous Spanish church. It's still there, a Roman Catholic church. Two doors from us was the home of W. C. Handy and his daughters. Mrs. Myers's daughter and I became very close friends with them, and it was just a matter of interesting entertainment. Oh, sometimes Mr. Handy would take three or four of us under his wing, and we would go from one club to another where people played. And wherever we went, of course, they played the "St. Louis Blues" in tribute to Mr. Handy. Or another time, Mr. and Mrs. Handy—his first wife was living then, she's the mother of his children—and we used to have evenings where we would sing or he would have different artists. Andy Razaf had just written a song, and he would come to try it out. And someone else had just received great accolades for something he'd recorded, so Mr. Handy would have him there. So in my early life, I got to be associated in a kind of musical circle that was very interesting. PC: Except that your music had been classical background, and now you moved into classical jazz. DH: Well, actually Mrs. Myers's daughter Frankie was a classical pianist. I really had really an interest in classical music. Most of my experience really had been related to church and church music, that sort of thing. But this was more from an angle of saying how I came to see the Harlem community. PC: It was rich. DH: Yes, it was very exciting. And during those days, of course, the Depression hit, and the WPA was set up. I remember that Mrs. Myers had a young fellow named Jimmy who was sort of, not a caretaker—but because of the size of this place, and she had other property on Seventh Avenue—this young man had been a helper to her. And I remember when the old Lafayette Theatre was revived, and they began during that period to take on helpers, and Jimmy was one of those who went to the Lafayette Theatre. I suppose that I've always had a kind of social interest in what's happening. PC: I don't even know what they played at the Lafayette Theatre. DH: Well, at that time, they did a whole series of things, largely Shakespearean. Their Macbeth was very famous. But it was a WPA theatre. The important thing was, it was giving jobs to so many musicians and others. That was a very important thing. One of the funniest things that happened there was that Jimmy came home one day and told me—he was one of the stagehands—they were all going on strike. And I began to try to tell him how if you're on WPA, you're on a work-relief program and stay by the job. Well, when it was all over, I discovered that the reason they were on strike was that they didn't want to be dominated by two white characters who turned out to be Orson Welles and Jack Houseman. Those were the two. And so I don't remember what it was—it showed up very shortly thereafter—what Orson Welles did—and Jimmy forever after would come back to me and say to me, "Well, how did you know?" At least, it helped to get him back on the right track, and he was able to help them hold the fort. But the success they were having with their production had been so great that it had reached the point where it was hard for them to realize how much help they really were getting from these two people that they were so concerned about. Another facet of that whole period for me in Harlem, you see, was that there was a group in Harlem called the American Negro Theater, and Abram Hill and several people had put this together. I never had any real interest in acting, but I had an interest in plays, and they used to do a great deal of play reading. They had a place at 130th Street, one of the Elks Lodges, and you would go there and hear the plays read. That's the first place I ever saw Harry Belafonte or Sidney Poitier. They were just among those reading plays. And Anna Lucasta was one of the plays that came out of that. It was a kind of, what I would say, near starvation thing. I mean, everybody who was there was really doing it because they were interested, or some of them did get on WPA, and then, on the side, they would do the things that they wanted. The reason I cite this is that my attachment to Harlem was based upon the way in which I got rooted in Harlem. Do you see? I've talked about the whole development of the youth movement and that sort of thing. That was one facet. But then there was this whole network of things in which I was involved, really with different segments of the community. I remember, when I was a student at NYU, I was appointed as a practice teacher at the Little Red Schoolhouse, at Miss Irwin's school. The first black child assigned to that school was a little girl named June Allen, and her mother lived in the ground-floor apartment of this building where I lived at 114th Street and Seventh Avenue. Well, it really was her aunt. Her mother was not in the picture, and her aunt was rearing her. She was a perfectly beautiful child, looked like a white child, but she was a black child and very conscious of it. It was very singular that when I got into the Little Red Schoolhouse, that little June went home and told her aunt that she'd seen Miss Dorothy down at the Little Red Schoolhouse. The aunt was a very outstanding Harlem schoolteacher. So she came to me and was very disturbed—because she wanted to know how did June ever get into a school where she was willing to pay the tuition, because she wanted her to have the finest and the best, and she was very culturally inclined this aunt was—she was dumbfounded; this child had come home making Jello! She thought that this was a waste of time and money. Well, I didn't know that much about it, but I had learned from my exposure in my first few weeks in the school that Miss Irwin always said, "You never teach a subject, you teach a person, and you have to give the person something that that person can deal with, so that things will fall in place." So I asked this little child June to come up and tell me what she was doing. Then I understood enough of it to be able to say to her aunt that what June was learning was proportion. And it wasn't just numbers. And that she also had instructions that she had to follow, so that she had to use her mind and all her faculties, and that until . . . It wasn't Jello, it was jelly. Not the commercial . . . PC: Oh, jelly. A little more complicated. DH: Not the commercial Jello that would jell anyway, but it was putting in the pectin, putting in all the different things. And, of course, it would remain watery until she got the things in proper proportion. So forever and a day for both the aunt and the child, I was always related to whatever they were doing. But one of the interesting things for me was that it gave me a child in my own community who was of the same cultural identification as the other children at the Little Red Schoolhouse. And that I found very interesting. So I didn't make a study of this in any depth, but I found it useful, because I could try ideas out with June, when I was working with things. But it also showed me that here was a child, although she was black and lived in Harlem, she was more like the white children in the classroom than she was like the other black children in the community, because her aunt had kept her so sheltered. She was very bright, very precocious, but just sort of like in a little island by herself. She and I became kind of friends, because she, as a young adult, could relate to me a little more easily in some respects, and also because we had school to talk about. I would tell her about the trips that I was taking with the fives or the sixes, and she was a seven. She would tell me, when she was a six, when she was a seven—it was that kind of thing. But I got to know something that I think very few people realize about the Harlem community: that it is many communities and it has a broad diversity, and that it had—as Langston Hughes and some of the poets tried to express—it had a cultural heritage that was different as you touched different parts. I look back with a great deal of joy that I was a part of a lot of developments. When I was in school at NYU, I belonged to a group, and we would have, in the Harlem community . . . well, we used to have a student group called the Rameses. It's made up of black students. One of the significant things was that we would do things like have lectures with Dr. Du Bois, like have an afternoon to hear James Weldon Johnson or Countee Cullen or Langston Hughes. And at that time, see, those people were poor. PC: Later you had them at the YWCA? DH: Then I used to have Langston Hughes and others. I'd bring them there. But that's where I got—that's my contact. When I go back and look at it, that's where my contact came. I got to know them as persons, before I became a YWCA staff member, seeing them as an important resource in the community. And that was through the different kinds of groupings of which I became a part. When I was in college, my sister moved up on Sugar Hill. You see, that's up on Edgecombe Avenue, and I had lived with her. That is a totally different kind of thing. Next door lived the Mills Brothers, and all kinds of stars. It was a very famous place then, called the Lincoln something, 321 Edgecombe Avenue, and I lived next door at 323. PC: Lincoln Arms? DH: Park Lincoln, or something like that, it was called. But it had all kinds of not just celebrities, but people who were doing interesting kinds of things. And that I think is a whole side of Harlem now that can easily get overlooked, because even my sister, who lived in that house forty three years, moved last month to a new place up in the Bronx. But in that period of time, the whole neighborhood has changed. But both when I lived there and also when I lived on 114th Street, as young people do, our idea of an interesting Saturday evening would be to go up on the Hill, to some of those places where you could hear people sing. There used to be, at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue, a place called Billy Taylor's—that if you got in there about eleven o'clock, in would come all kinds of actors from downtown, and this quartet itself would sing Rigoletto or whatever they wanted to sing, and that would start the evening. And then, from then on, no one would say anything. Fats Waller would get up and go to the piano and play, or Noble Sissle or Eubie Blake—it was a kind of musical haven, where the people came, and they exchanged. I suppose it was because they weren't making much money that they weren't very competitive. Everyone was about equally poor. PC: No matter how young. DH: Yes, and no matter how talented they were, they were quite poor. As I said, Mr. Handy or one of his daughters or one of the musicians, Andy Razaf, or, I don't know, so many of them would say, "Well, come this evening to such and such a place." And you'd just go and it would just be marvelous. So there was a life to Harlem that I've seen go out. Those places now, I'd be afraid to go down, to go near them. PC: Well, that's why there isn't any. People are afraid. DH: And at that time, of course, the white community came into the Harlem community. The Cotton Club was there, and the Savoy was there, and we would go to the Savoy Ballroom for our special activities. Or groups that I belonged to would have their dances there. And everybody thought of it as just the heart of the community life. The Savoy used to have two orchestras, so that they played continuous music. Then they would have the formal dances. Then, after the dances, people would have breakfast in different homes that you'd move up to. It's a totally—it almost seems to me now that it was a dream, because it sounds impossible for it ever to have been like that, when you see what's there now. |