When the Web yielded only two meager references to the Negro Theater Project and none at all to Kylie Ballantine, I drove the fifteen miles south to look at real documents in the Vivian Harsh Collection.
Amy took off for Bronzeville when I left for the library. She’d described the Harsh Collection before we separated. Harsh, who’d been the first African-American to head a branch of the library, had been a private collector of material on black writers and artists. When she died, she donated everything-photos, documents, booksto the city. The Harsh Collection was the best of its kind in America, next to one in Harlem.
To my surprise, the papers were housed in a room off a major library branch-I’d pictured the collection in its own building. The library itself was doing a bustling business, mostly with women bringing their young children in to look at books, but also the usual collection of homeless and elderly that a library gathers. It’s a respectable destination. It’s warm, you can be with other people. All reasons why the Web cannot take the place of your branch library. Also it had books. And an archivist who knew and loved his collection.
At first, Gideon Reed frowned over my request. Yes, he knew those papers well, but why did I want to see them?
“I know Marcus Whitby’s been looking at them for some time,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
When I explained my role in Whitby’s death-finding him, working for the familyand showed him my ID, the archivist unbent. Mr. Whitby had been a real scholar. They didn’t get many here, mostly students working on term papers just wanting a few facts about Martin Luther King, not that he didn’t love showing young people how to use books and documents, but there was something satisfying about seeing this collection in the hands of someone who truly appreciated it.
Reed set me up in a temperature-controlled room with photographs of black poets and artists on the walls. While Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes smiled down at me, I went through the same papers that Marcus Whitby had studied. The letters and other documents were encased in plastic sleeves. I tried to skim, looking for names or events that might mean something to me, but Ballantine had a fine, spiderlike handwriting and she’d often written in pencil, making deciphering a maddening task. She sometimes wrote on pages torn from school exercise books, sometimes on thin green paper, where her pale handwriting became even more undecipherable.
I read Ballantine’s correspondence with Franz Boas at Columbia over her discoveries in Africa, her correspondence with Hallie Flanagan about the staging of Regeneration, her angry letter to W E. B. DuBois’s wife after Congress pulled the plug on the Federal Theater Project.
We were doing good work, we were doing important work. The notion that a ballet like Regeneration, or your own Swing Mikado, are Communistinspired because we try to tell the truth about Race in this country-is enough to make me look seriously at Communism. I don’t know what I live on now-back to private dance classes for earnest little girls whose mothers tuck away a dime a week from washing white women’s clothes so
that their children can learn in my studio what would have been their birthright in Africa.
The archive was patchy, sometimes holding letters like Ballantine’s to Shirley Graham without Graham’s response, sometimes letters or typed notes to her without any way of telling what she’d written to the correspondent. Several typed ones in the late forties came from an anonymous committee (“… the Committee is grateful for your involvement in the benefit. We were able to raise $1700, which our patron matched.” “The next Committee meeting will be on June 17 at the Ingleside church”).
Right before the Second World War, Ballantine somehow got a grant from the University of Chicago to travel and study in Africa. How she spent the war years, or where, wasn’t clear, but in 1949 she signed a contract with University of Chicago Press for her book on Ritual Dance Among the Bantu of West Equatorial Africa. They paid her five hundred dollars. Perhaps that was a standard advance in 1949.