Customer Reviews

Born to Be (Blacks in the American West)

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With the rise of multiculturalism in high schools and colleges in recent decades and the introduction of academic programs in African-American Studies, a good many works from the Harlem Renaissance period have been rediscovered with great enthusiasm. Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and the poetry and fiction of Langston Hughes, for example, are now unquestionably canonical, and other writers, including Claude McKay, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and George Schuyler, are widely read and taught.

However, there are still a few sharp needles to be found even in this well-searched haystack, and Born To Be is one of those. An autobiography of Taylor Gordon, who achieved significant success in the U.S. and in Europe in the 1920's as a singer of African-American spirituals, the book describes Gordon's beginnings as the youngest son of the only black family in White Sulfur Springs, Montana, to which unlikely spot his parents had moved because of his father's job as chef for a gold mining company. It proceeds through Gordon's youthful jobs as messenger for the town's brothels, pin setter in a bowling alley, and preparer of opium in the town's Chinese opium den, before Gordon leaves home to become a chauffeur, Pullman porter, auto mechanic, and chef in the personal train cars of John Ringling (of circus fame). Gordon concludes his story with his rise to success as a performer, singing for the elites of New York (among them Carl Van Vechten and Muriel Draper, who contributed somewhat condescending introductions to Taylor's book) and Europe (including Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una Troubridge--presumably just before Hall's troubles involving her 1928 lesbian and/or transgender novel The Well of Loneliness and its highly-publicized obscenity trials).

In part, Born To Be is of interest because of its unique perspective on race relations in the West at a time when few African-Americans lived there. Gordon's presentation of his childhood in Montana rarely mentions his race, and portrays a perhaps idealized view of whites, blacks, and Chinese immigrants living together in a small town with little or no conflict. But the few mentions he does make suggest that his race was not unnoticed so much as simply accepted and even privileged in revealing ways. In discussing his work in the brothels, for example, he notes:

"I fitted right in the network perfectly on account of the pigment of my skin. I was accepted both high and low, never questioned why or what I was doing in conspicuous places. ... [G]enerally my face was a passport stamped in full. I was even admitted into the saloon long before boys of my age were. Some of these people would turn over in their graves, if they are dead, if they could know what many of my movements were for." (17)

But more than any profound revelations about race that may be present in the book, Gordon's own writing--unpolished, conversational, and brilliantly colloquial--is Born To Be's greatest strength. First, Gordon on singing spirituals:

"I have grown to really enjoy singing them, even if I do have to concentrate hard on dead people (chiefly my mother) so I can get their interpretation. The dead people I think of sang them in true Christian belief. ... When I sing to people, ten thousand sing to me." (191)

Later, Taylor returns from his European tour and almost immediately goes south again to give a performance. Here is his stark description of the event:

"I went west to Louisville, Kentucky, for a concert. The three days' old smoke with a peculiar tart aroma of burnt human flesh was still in the air. . . It was on a Sunday afternoon, December the 22nd, when we sang spirituals on the Brown's Theatre stage in Louisville, not far from my mother's birthplace. I called her out of the grave to sing the songs for the people that once held her in bondage. A queer electric halo seemed to hover over the audience, as they listened to dead slaves, whose forms seep through walls, ceilings, and windows--a thousandfold--to sing the Christian fables to their pagan melodies and rhymes. After the concert they waved their webby forms back to their bones to rest in the grave, until they are needed again." (221)

Even if Gordon's prose is not always equally powerful, it is certainly always entertaining, a picaresque story with, by turns, sudden bursts of hilarity or melancholy poetry, and Born To Be deserves to be more widely read and acknowledged than it so far has been.

[If you enjoyed this review, please check out my blog at www.minormoderns.blogspot.com, which is devoted to exploring lesser-known writers and texts from the first half of the 20th century.]