The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess

Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera

Ellen Noonan

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781469617534, 9780807837160
• eBook ISBN: 9780807837337
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

Created by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and sung by generations of black performers, Porgy and Bess has been both embraced and reviled since its debut in 1935. In this comprehensive account, Ellen Noonan examines the opera’s long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, culture, and the struggle for equality. In its surprising endurance lies a myriad of local, national, and international stories.
For black performers and commentators, Porgy and Bess was a nexus for debates about cultural representation and racial uplift. White producers, critics, and even audiences spun revealing racial narratives around the show, initially in an attempt to demonstrate its authenticity and later to keep it from becoming discredited or irrelevant. Expertly weaving together the wide-ranging debates over the original novel, Porgy, and its adaptations on stage and film with a history of its intimate ties to Charleston, The Strange Career of “Porgy and Bess” uncovers the complexities behind one of our nation’s most long-lived cultural touchstones.

1 A Romance of Negro Life

Porgy, 1925

1925 was the year of the “New Negro.” There was the anthology of African American fiction, poetry, and essays by that name; edited by Alain Locke and published in December of that year, the work became a manifesto for a generation of black artists determined to be passionate, productive, race-conscious, and visible. African Americans were leaving the South in unprecedented numbers, extricating themselves from the bonds of segregation’s economic, political, and social disenfranchisement to find new opportunities in northern cities. Known as the Great Migration, it brought more than a million African Americans out of the region and marked a critical collective step toward greater black political participation that would grow as the twentieth century progressed. Robert Abbott, editor of the Chicago Defender, one of numerous African American publications active in 1925, dubbed this mass movement “a second emancipation.” In 1925 A. Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, an all-black union whose activism gained benefits for its members and selection as the first African American union granted a charter by the American Federation of Labor. That same year, the pioneering black film director Oscar Micheaux released Body and Soul, his silent film melodrama about a corrupt black minister, produced by his own Micheaux Film Corporation.¹

Paradoxically, 1925 was also a banner year for those who preferred, for lack of a better term, the “Old Negro,” or even no negroes at all. The “Old Negro,” created by decades of white cultural distortion, retained a powerful grip on American culture. In 1925 Maxon Lester Graham opened the first Coon Chicken Inn restaurant in Salt Lake City, which featured fried chicken, African American waiters, and a smilingly servile black man as its ubiquitous logo. In Chicago, white entertainers Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll developed the radio characters Sam ’n’ Henry, heirs to the blackface minstrel past and forerunners to their more famous Amos ’n’ Andy show, which debuted two years later. The comic actor Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry made his Hollywood debut in the film The Mysterious Stranger; his later stage name, Stepin Fetchit, would become synonymous with the grossly stereotyped characters that he was forced to portray for most of his career. In August the resurgent Ku Klux Klan marched 40,000 strong down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, cheered on by 200,000 spectators. Nationwide, Klan membership stood at nearly 2 million, an all-time peak, with members in every state. Seventeen African American men died at the hands of lynch mobs in 1925, and across the United States, “fitter families” contests at state fairs and expositions promoted the “science” of eugenics and rewarded families for their psychological and physical health; the winners were invariably white.²

The dust-jacket art and copy for a late 1920s edition of DuBose Heyward’s Porgy sold book buyers on a tale of “the Southern negro” with a “deeply moving” love triangle in a setting that was dark, decaying, “chaotic,” and savagely menacing.

As these mid-decade events suggest, the 1920s were a conflicted era when it came to race, both looking backward toward a white-supremacist past and holding the promise of growing African American political, social, and cultural agency. Literature, art, and music created by and about African Americans flourished among white urban elites during the 1920s and seemed to promise exciting new opportunities for black artists. At the same time, white southern women in the United Daughters of the Confederacy petitioned the U.S. Congress for a statue on the Washington Mall to commemorate the faithful “mammy” figure of southern lore.³ The debut novel of a little-known regional poet, DuBose Heyward of Charleston, South Carolina, arrived in the midst of this contradictory cultural milieu. His Porgy, published in 1925, reflected its decade’s racial contradictions. Heyward was by no means a Klansman or a eugenicist, but his novel promoted a vision of African Americans in the South that was sentimental and paternalistic, looking backward to a “Golden Age” in the midst of a century-changing migration of African Americans out of the South. Uneducated, sensuous, religious, violent, hardworking, colorful, good-humored, wise, serenely long-suffering in the face of segregation’s myriad injustices—Heyward’s black characters epitomized a vision of American race relations congenial to southern and northern whites alike. Literary critics across the country embraced Porgy.

White supremacy came in many forms in the 1920s, and sentimental paternalism certainly lacked the menace of a Klan rally, a lynching, a eugenics fair, a coercive sharecropping contract, or a voter-registration literacy test. Yet it carried significant political and cultural costs, particularly when, as was the case with Heyward’s Porgy, it gained a national audience for a racial worldview shaped by white southern privilege. Literary critics around the country praised Heyward for his authentic understanding of black southern life; nearly all believed that, as a white southerner, his proximity to African Americans gave him special knowledge and insight that others lacked. Yet Heyward, like virtually all white southerners, lived in a segregated world that structured how he understood both class and race in profoundly important ways. Born into an elite Charleston family whose straitened economic circumstances required him to work from a young age, he came into contact with African Americans as workers in domestic and commercial settings, such as when he worked as a cotton checker on the Charleston docks. Black working-class life was readily apparent to his observing eye, and he rendered it on the pages of Porgy and other novels. But the existence of Charleston’s black middle class was either invisible or uninteresting to him. Common sense suggests the latter; from middle-class or elite backgrounds themselves, white southern writers likely found the lives of middle-class African Americans insufficiently exotic. The structures of segregation suggest the former; educated, middle-class African Americans confounded the southern system of racial hierarchy as it formed during the post-Reconstruction era. White southerner George Washington Cable noted this tension in 1885, when he argued that blacks of “character, intelligence, and property” should not have to endure the conventions of public segregation. Cable was a lone voice, however, and the system of Jim Crow segregation remained impervious to class distinctions.⁴ But middle-class African Americans persisted as an unspoken challenge to the premises of racial segregation, and they remained largely absent when white writers and artists portrayed authentic southern blackness. In the fiction of white southern authors during the 1920s, the few middle-class black characters were marginalized and corrupt, as Heyward’s “lawyer” Simon Frasier, or ill-fated, as in Paul Green’s 1926 play In Abraham’s Bosom, where the aspiring Abraham McCranie is thwarted brutally by whites and passively by other blacks.

Porgy also touched down in the midst of debates among African American writers and intellectuals about authentic black culture and its artistic presentation. The cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance promoted the creative powers of African American artists of all genres, and many sought out “folk sources” among the black rural poor for their visual and literary art. Many black writers, chief among them W. E. B. Du Bois, debated the intellectual, political, and marketplace considerations that shaped black artistic production and offered up prescriptions for sources and approaches that would have the greatest impact on black social advancement. All sides in these arguments viewed issues of cultural representation and racial authenticity as inseparable from questions of social class in the African American community. These Harlem Renaissance writers did not fail to praise white writers, including Heyward, who attempted serious literary portrayals of black characters, but the main focus of their critical dialogues remained the need to cultivate more, and more unfettered, cultural production by African Americans themselves.

Heyward also linked social class and black authenticity, but to a very different end. Central to his understanding of African Americans was the idea that encroaching urbanization and modernity (forces to which he often obliquely referred in his writing as “reform” or “reformers”) were destroying their rural innocence. Heyward’s authentic South was unhurried, earthy, and perfectly symbolized by its resilient and forgiving black workers. His poetic antimodernism had a nonfiction counterpart in the manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, a collection of essays published in 1930 by a group of southern intellectuals who dubbed themselves “Agrarians.” The Agrarians argued that industrial development fostered a culture of consumption that undermined small-town, rural southern values. Heyward’s sentimental conflation of racial identity and antimodernism was part of a larger southern intellectual tradition, one that stretched back to the decades following the Civil War and Reconstruction. In those late nineteenth-century decades marked by rapid industrialization and an attempt to reconnect a badly sundered polity, northern and southern elites found common ground in a shared nostalgia for the preindustrial values and social control symbolized by antebellum plantation society. This shared nostalgia became an important basis for the symbolic “reunion” between North and South, one that abandoned southern African Americans and ceded their fate to the white southerners who were deemed to understand them best. As the famed southern historian C. Vann Woodward observed, “One of the most significant inventions of the New South was the Old South.”⁵

Porgy, and the critical dialogue about race, class, and region of which it was a part, embodied just such a conflation of Old and New South. In a decade that looked backward to a fantasy of racial hierarchies glossed over by folkloric charm and forward to ever more assertive African American intellectual and political demands, Porgy’s success gave continued credibility to a southern view of race relations. It was a southern liberal view, to be sure, and the praise heaped upon the novel and its author had implications primarily in the literary world. But such cultural validation sprang from the same northern assumptions of southern white authority over African Americans that jeopardized their well-being and opportunities at every turn after the final pullout of federal troops from the South at the end of Reconstruction. The long-term effects of untrammeled southern white supremacy led, by the 1920s, to an exodus, as African Americans by the millions registered their opinion of white southern authority by departing the South. Porgy, as a text and a catalyst for cultural commentary, spotlights a moment in U.S. history when the status and visibility of African Americans was changing, a harbinger of even more profound change yet to come.

Set in an ill-defined Golden Age, probably the earliest years of the twentieth century, Porgy combines melodrama and meticulously drawn details of character and locale to paint a picture that is deeply sympathetic to many of its characters yet also draws freely on a host of racial assumptions and stereotypes. Heyward’s novel tells the story of Porgy, a local beggar with crippled legs, and Bess, a drug-addicted prostitute, who together experience transforming love and ultimately heartbreak. With this story at its center, Porgy also details the lives and customs of the black residents of Catfish Row, a decaying grand mansion in Charleston now inhabited by numerous poor black fishermen, stevedores, domestic workers, and their families. The central characters also include Crown, a fiery-tempered stevedore and Bess’s lover; Maria, proprietress of a cookshop and a protective maternal figure; Serena, the deeply religious wife of Robbins, who is killed by Crown; Sportin’ Life, a drug dealer who has traveled beyond Catfish Row to New York City; and Peter, a grandfatherly friend to Porgy.

The novel’s plot is set in motion by a dice game that ends in bloodshed, as a drunken Crown, believing he has been cheated, kills Robbins with his cotton hook. The residents of Catfish Row disappear into their homes to avoid the inevitable police attention to come. Robbins’s widow, Serena, prays with her neighbors and collects money from them for her husband’s burial, and then the community processes to the local graveyard to bury Robbins. When a white detective comes to Catfish Row and interrogates Porgy and Peter about the murder, he hauls Peter off to jail as a material witness, to be held until Crown can be found. A few weeks later, Bess appears in Maria’s cookshop, begs a meal, and proceeds to Porgy’s room, knowing that his begging earns him “good money fum de w’ite folks.”⁶

After Serena asks her “w’ite folks” for help in freeing Peter from jail, a white lawyer named Alan Archdale visits Catfish Row and arranges to have Porgy deliver a payment for Peter’s bail, thus freeing the old man. Bess remains with Porgy, and both are newly content, despite the hostility of Serena, Maria, and the other women of Catfish Row. Their domestic serenity ends, however, when Sportin’ Life tempts Bess into snorting “happy dust,” or cocaine, and Bess gets into a fistfight with another woman, causing the police to arrest her. After ten days in jail, Bess returns feverish and delirious to Porgy’s room, and Porgy tries both prayer and a conjurer’s spell to cure her. After she is well, all of Catfish Row’s residents participate in the annual parade and picnic put on by the “Sons and Daughters of Repent Ye Saith the Lord” lodge. At the picnic, on the Charleston coastal island of Kittiwah, Bess encounters Crown as he hides from the law; he vows he will return to Charleston, and her, when the cotton crop is in.⁷

Back at Catfish Row, several of the men set out to sea in their fishing boat, the Seagull, one of the many small boats manned by African American fishermen that made up Charleston’s “Mosquito Fleet.” Not long after the boat’s departure, a sudden hurricane blows up, forcing the residents of Catfish Row to huddle together for safety, praying and singing, on the building’s second floor. During a lull in the storm, Clara runs out of the house in search of her husband, Jake, leaving their baby with Bess; she too disappears when the storm flares again. In October, when the stevedores return to the port to load its cotton crop onto outgoing ships, Bess begs Porgy to protect her from Crown. Late one night, as Crown attempts to enter Porgy’s room, Porgy kills him. White detectives investigating this murder first question Serena, then Bess and Porgy, and come to no conclusions. Porgy is summoned to identify Crown’s body at the coroner’s office; in his superstitious fear of looking upon the dead man’s body, he attempts to flee the officers and is charged with contempt of court. The novel ends when Porgy, jailed for five days, returns to Catfish Row to discover that Bess is gone, lured by alcohol to accompany a group of stevedores to Savannah.⁸

Porgy is a sympathetic but profoundly conservative novel in the truest meaning of the word. Heyward wants Charleston and its African American residents to stay just as they are, locked in the amber of his novel’s Golden Age. Published in the midst of a mass migration of African Americans out of the Jim Crow South, Porgy argues for the futility of escape or advancement. Maria, a mammy figure and the soul of no-nonsense pragmatism, embodies Heyward’s celebration of the status quo, while Sportin’ Life represents all that is wrong with black life outside of the cocoon of Charleston and Catfish Row. Yet the novel, with its deeply paternalist view of race and overreliance on long-established stereotypes of black behavior, also evinces an understanding of white supremacy’s arbitrary and vicious power and the limited economic options available to most African Americans in the early twentieth-century South.

While critics gave Heyward credit for special insight into the African American setting he portrayed in Porgy, the novel’s use of narration and dialect marks out sharp divisions between white and black characters. The third-person narrator, who observes and comments upon the characters and situations, has a highly literate and articulate voice. In the novel’s opening pages, the narrator, a stand-in for Heyward himself, describes Porgy’s aptitude for begging as evidence of “a beneficent providence for a career of mendicancy.” Such phrasing establishes the narrator as a detached observer, sympathetic to the characters but highly educated and having nothing in common with them. The narrator’s tone can also be ethnographic, asserting racial judgments by describing a funeral cortege as “almost grotesque, with the odd fusion of comedy and tragedy so inextricably a part of negro life in its deep moments,” and black church members at a picnic as “exotic as the Congo.” The narrator’s grammatically correct and perfectly spelled language also marks a difference from the characters being described, whose conversations are rendered in heavy dialect. The dialogue of the novel’s few white characters (Alan Archdale, police officers, judges) is also rendered without any accent or dialect, although they would have possessed at least the southern accents of any white Charlestonian. In this way, dialogue becomes a marker for literacy and education among the characters (a convention of difference continued in the opera Porgy and Bess, where white characters speak rather than sing their lines).⁹

Linguistically marking all of the novel’s African American characters as uneducated and even illiterate is just one among many racial stereotypes that Heyward relies upon in Porgy. Despite Heyward’s sentimentality toward and even affection for his characters, the novel is laden with descriptions and situations that echo broad stereotypes—many rooted in blackface minstrelsy—of African American character and behavior. Picnic preparations by members of the “Sons and Daughters of Repent Ye Saith the Lord” lodge include the loading of watermelons onto a boat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Romance of Negro Life
• INTERLUDE Charleston, 1680–1900
• 2 A Chocolate-Covered Lithograph Strip
• INTERLUDE Charleston, 1920–1940
• 3 Gershwin’s Idea of What a Negro Opera Should Be
• 4 Neither the Measure of America nor That of the Negro
• INTERLUDE Charleston, 1940–1969
• 5 Forget Any Version You May Have Seen Before
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index