Oh. T-Square. W. E. B. DuBois’s Talented Tenth of the Negro Race turned into a celebrity magazine.
“Were you helping Marcus Whitby with his story on the Federal Negro Theater Project? I don’t really know much about it.”
“It was part of the WPA, see, in the thirties, the federal theater project that FDR set up for out-of-work performers. They were trying to provide work for artists and playwrights, and they had this idea of people’s theater. Can you imagine the government today doing something like that?” She grinned engagingly.
“So there was a Yiddish theater, experimental puppets, a lot of different things, including Negro theater, which existed in twenty-two cities, although they were only really productive in three, Chicago and New York,
and, for some reason I don’t understand, Seattle. So we had Richard Wright and Theodore Ward here in Chicago, they were playwrights, and Kylie Ballantine was a choreographer. Shirley Graham-she was DuBois’s wife and a well-known stage director. They did some pretty amazing things the Swing Mikado was the most famous, but Ward wrote something called the Big White Fog about the real state of race relations in this country. Then the Republicans in Congress got freaked, almost like they were today’s fossils screaming about the NEA: they claimed the Federal Theater Project was a Communist front and shut it down after only about two years.”
“Was it, do you think?” I was curious.
She leaned forward, the brown check of her jacket sleeves straining against her plump forearms. “See, this was when Gone With the Wind was published, and everyone-well, a lot of white America-was buying Margaret Mitchell’s idea that we were all contented little pickaninnies until the evil Yankees came and ended slavery. There were definitely some fellow travelers in the project, but mostly it was people for some brief time getting a chance to put real theater on real stages, instead of having to do minstrel shows or play mammies and Stepin Fetchit.”
“So what was Mr. Whitby’s interest? The ideological battles?”
She shook her head so vigorously her short curls danced. “No. Some folks think the NTP-the Negro Theater Project was just a chance for the white bourgeoisie to exploit black artists, but Marc wasn’t interested in the ideological angle. He wanted to follow the Chicago Writers Workshop that a lot of these artists belonged to, to see what happened to them. And he was especially interested in Kylie Ballantine. She was so complex, she danced, she did choreography, but she also was an anthropologist and wrote books on African dance and ritual. She had a studio in her home in Bronzeville. Marc tried to buy her house-he’s been hoping to turn it into a museum-had been,” she corrected herself mournfully, “but the new owner cut it up into a bunch of little apartments and refused to sell. So Marc bought a place close to hers, then he started a campaign to get her home in the national register of historic buildings. Maybe I’ll try to take that over.”
She gave a little hiccup and busied herself with her notebook for a minute. I waited until she regained her composure, then asked if she knew how much of Kylie Ballantine’s story Marcus had finished.
“It was more like, how much he was cutting it back. He had so much material on Kylie, he was turning it into a book. The piece for T-square was almost finished. He’s been doing occasional pieces on the history of Bronzeville, you see. You know Bronzeville, right?”
I made an apologetic grimace. “Not really. It was the corridor along Cottage Grove Avenue where African-Americans were restricted when they started moving to Chicago in large numbers after the First World War, I think.”
“Not exactly,” she said, with a friendly smile that made me glad it was she, not Delaney or Simon Hendricks who was educating me. “You’re right that we were pushed into that narrow stretch along Cottage on the South Side. But Bronzeville-oh, in some ways it was a state of mind-it included the wonderful mansions on King Drive, you know, a bit west of Cottage-that’s where Ida B. Wells lived, for instance, and Richard Wright when he was here, and Daniel Hale, he had a clinic there because even though he did the first open-heart surgery in the world none of the white hospitals would let him practice. But also, because the downtown stores were segregated there was a shopping district around Thirtyfifth Street. No one misses segregation, but it’s really sad all those stores and little businesses disappeared.”
We were both quiet for a minute, mourning the passing of the little shops, or perhaps the passing of Marcus Whitby.
Aretha gave her curls another shake. “Anyway, Marc was fascinated by Bronzeville. He came from Atlanta, so he had such a different experience-better in some ways, worse in others, but definitely different-and he felt like he had a mission to preserve and record Bronzeville. Then he fell in love with Kylie.”