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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Touch of Innocence,
This review is from: A Touch of Innocence (Dance) (Hardcover)
This is Katherine Dunham's autobiography and family history and spans the period from her birth until her 18th year. Her father, Albert Dunham was a tailor, dyer, dry cleaner and carpet cleaner. He was raised by Germans and seems to have had some German ancestry. His grandfather was a Malagasy slave from Madagascar, who married a Guinea slave from West Africa. Perhaps it was his mother who was German. Her mother, Fanny June Dunham, was French-Canadian, English Canadian and Canadian Indian, with some "Asiatic blood" and maybe Jewish thrown in for good measure. There also seems to have been some Choctaw on her father's side. She was a divorcee, perhaps twenty years older than Albert Dunham and died when Katherine was a young girl. The upshot of all this was that Dunham's family's racial heritage was about as mixed as you can get. Neither Dunham, nor her father really considered themselves to be black (during this period of her life) and tended to resent it when other people made this identification.The lesson here is that the racial situation in Chicago and Glen Ellen (where Katherine grew up) in the period between the wars was very complex. There were infinite variegations of color and class and to call Katherine Dunham simply black is to hide a lot of this variation. This is not to say that she and her family did not experience racial prejudice, they did. But her alters were not so much the white people, as the southern blacks who were coming north in ever-growing numbers throughout this period. Katherine's mother owned property in what would become Bronzeville. But her father convinced her to move to Glen Ellen, buy land and build a house because that town (it was more of a town then than a suburb) was as yet untouched by the black Southern migrants and the racist white reaction that they brought with them. Still they had to resort to chicanery even to be sold the property and someone firebombed the house while it was still under construction. Albert Dunham made a show of walking through town with a shotgun and took to sleeping in the tool shed in front of the house and there were no more incidents. He opened a tailoring and dry cleaning shop. The family's only trouble was with the adult children, nieces and nephews of Fanny June Dunham. These were perennially on the verge of poverty and pregnancy and were always imposing on the Dunham's hospitality. When Fanny June died her property on the South Side was sold to pay off their debts. After her mother's death, Katherine's father became a traveling salesmen of "Men's Suiting" and Katherine moved to Bronzeville where she lived with her aunt Lulu Dunham, her father's sister. Lulu was a hairdresser to wealthy white clients at the Fair Building downtown. She lived near 31st and Indiana. It was there that Katherine had her first contacts with black people. They lived in a tenement in relative squalor. Katherine did not seem to see much kinship between herself and the recent migrants from the South who were coming to Bronzeville. When she reproduces their black dialect there is a hint of condescension. She loved Lulu and the Fair building. She notes that Lulu (who was darker than her father) was allowed to carry out food from the building cafeteria, but knew her place too well to try and eat there. As the trickle of Southern migrants became a flood, this privilege was suspended. Eventually she lost her lease on her beauty parlor because people in the Fair building didn't want a black person around. The lesson here is that racial prejudice in Chicago intensified dramatically with the influx of Southern migrants, and although those who had been around for a few generations saw themselves as inherently different, they were not always seen as such by the local whites (though those who were their patrons seemed more understanding). Eventually one of Katherine's half-sisters (her mother's daughter from a previous marriage) came and took Katherine away from Lulu. She took her to court where Katherine testified (unknowingly and at a very young age) to the squalor in which she was living. Her father was present. Custody was given to Fanny June the younger, who installed her in whiter, more affluent circles. It was during this time that Katherine had her first exposure to the theatre in the South Side black cabarets. Katherine's father Albert returned with a new wife from Iowa and Southern Illinois named Annette Dunham. Annette too was of ambiguous racial heritage. Her grandmother had been a slave who had a child by her owner. She married a Texan of mixed white and Indian descent and they had Annette, whom was of lighter complexion than Albert. She became Katherine (and her Brother's) second mother and doted on them. Albert opened a dry cleaning shop in Glen Ellen and prospered. He especially prospered when he expanded into carpet cleaning and bought a machine that Katherine calls "the dust wheel" it apparently removed dust from carpets by swinging them around but Katherine is not at her best when describing mechanical apparatus. He purchased horses, eventually trucks and eventually a Studebaker convertible. He also bought a brick house. But even as his business prospered he became increasingly irritable and violent towards his children. Annette Dunham attended an African Methodist Episcopal church but Albert and the children did not. Katherine's brother was very studious and self-possessed and eventually went on to earn a degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago. But his studies constantly clashed with his father's wishes that he learn the tailoring and dry cleaning business and be content to continue it. He was obliged to work for his father and studied during stolen moments. One of Annette Dunham's sisters moved in and obliged Annette to take Katherine to a never-ending round of church services, youth groups and what not. Katherine hated this stuff, did not believe in the church's teachings and regards it all as a grand waste of time. She made a showy conversion during a revival meeting and regarded it all as a hypocritical farce. But the AME church gave her first opportunity to dance in front of an audience, when she organized a "Cabaret Party" as a church charity function. (This eventually caused a schism in the church since there was dancing and Jesus hates that.) She excelled in writing, sports, acting and dance. But she was not allowed to pursue them because her father obliged her to work at the shop and take an hour and a half of piano lessons every day. At first she liked the piano but she grew to hate it. Her lessons came to symbolize the yoke of her father's authority. Her father grew increasingly violent toward Annette, her brother and herself. This had something to do with the decline in his fortunes precipitated by the great depression. Her brother even pointed a gun at their father to keep her from hitting Annette. Her brother graduated as valedictorian of his high school class and went on to Junior college, applying for fellowships on the sly. Her father always made him work at the shop. Eventually after lots of fighting he won a fellowship and moved out. But he was so poor that he did not eat and ended up in a sanatorium. Her father refused to send money. Katherine went to high school and became popular. But her popularity declined because she could not participate in the activities that she excelled at since she had to work in the dry cleaners. Also her father would not let her go out with boys. One of her nieces (from her mother's previous marriage) moved in. She was older than Katherine and her father made sexual overtures which she repulsed. Katherine's own first experience with sex was when a man masturbated in her presence in a park. She was almost the victim of incestuous sexual abuse from her father, but she prevented it with presence of mind. Eventually she applied for a job at a public library and passed the civil service examination. She went to work in posh Hamilton park, where once again she felt the insidious racism of her colleagues. But she didn't care, she had gotten out of Glen Ellen. At eighteen she had never been kissed and had the issues with her appearance that one would expect. It is hard to have too much sympathy for someone who would found a brilliant career on her grace and beauty. She said that she never thought too highly of her legs until her impresario had them insured by Lloyds of London. We don't get anything in this book about her time at the University of Chicago, or in Haiti, or her career as a dancer. All of that is barely even hinted at. I've taken a "just the facts" approach in this summary, but it is a beautiful lyrical book about racially ambiguous girlhood in the between the wars period. She wrote it in the Habitacion Leclerc in Haiti in 1958.
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