Happy Birthday Alberta!

April 1st is the 120th anniversary of Alberta Hunter's birth in Memphis.  That was a a lucky day for the blues and not at all an April Fools joke.  Hunter went on to write and record innumerable hit songs and  have her compositions recorded by popular blues artists for decades.

In working on my play about Alberta I alternate between simply imagining what her life was like and doing research.  The research can be a little frustrating because she kept a tight rein on her image and allowed few frank facts about her personal life to come to light.  She had many reasons to be protective of her privacy.  

Despite her fame she was always haunted by the general consensus that she was too dark and did not have 'classic' enough features.  She was no Lena Horne or Fredi Washington. But when she sang "Darktown Strutters Ball" her emphasis was on the pride, the strutting, the musical joy of being dark   and lovely. 

She also kept her personal life quiet because she was a lesbian.  She wasn't unique in that; many artists of the 1920s and 1930s were queer from Duke Ellington's most famous collaborator Billy Strayhorn, to famed poet Langston Hughes (although his estate maintains otherwise).  

In order to gather whatever fragments of information that might be floating around I visited the Schomberg Library for Research in Black Culture (SFPL) as my way of celebrating Alberta's birthday.  Her papers are housed there and offer a treasure trove of miscellaneous insights.  My visit to the Library didn't turn up any torrid love letters or handwritten versions of her hit songs (I still have half of the collection to go through so maybe...). But most surprising and delightful was the discovery of how philanthropic Alberta Hunter was.  

When she was at the height of her earning or when she was living on a nurses salary when she retired from singing...it didn't matter.  She wrote checks big and small to every thing from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to a southern family living in poverty to the St. Lab re Indian School.  She sent off boxes of clothing and household goods to needy families--their thank you letters are in the folders.  

Sometimes she kept tallies of her donations on the backs of envelopes; neat lists that testified to her commitment to sharing the money she'd worked so hard to earn.  One note was even a reminder to help a friend pay her car note.  

Philanthropic studies usually show that the largest percentage of funds to non-profits come are small amounts from individual donors.  It's that tradition that Alberta was faithful to.  No matter the amount, sometimes $5 on occasion $500, she mad sure that her support was consistent.  Some folks spoke about Alberta's facility with finances as if she was cheap or tight fisted.  From her files it looked to me like a woman who'd come from nothing and was determined not to end up with nothing.  And she wanted others to share in her good fortune.

I felt really proud of Alberta's commitment to philanthropy; it's one I always saw in my own family even though we were living on the economic edge.  Now I want to figure out how to reveal that aspect of her personality so my Alberta on stage shows bother musical genius and her generosity.  Now I need to write a check to support....

In the Life

It's a long, perhaps unending, journey to self-identification.  Writer and AIDS activist, Joseph Beam  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_F._Beam   used the title "In the Life" for the first anthology of writing by Black Gay Men in 1986.  Lesbians (for once in our lives) were somewhat ahead of that game.  Having been closed out of mainstream publishing so thoroughly women created the Women in Print Movement which gave birth to magazines and publishers such as "Ache`" and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

With the urgency of the AIDS crisis Joe understood the importance of getting the lives of Black gay men into print.   That legacy was key both to the cultural survival of next generations but also an important building block for political activism.  As was true with any movement (If I can paraphrase myself from my play "Waiting for Giovanni,") finding one's own name is the first step toward liberation.

Unfortunately historically-speaking all the words have been wrong.  'Homosexuality' is a medical term, really, and puts the emphasis on 'sex' obscuring the many elements that make up a gay life.  Although I've always favoured it 'gay' sometimes sounds too 'lite' as if we're always at a party.  (Would that were true!)  And because of media bias gay quickly came to be identified only with white males.  More recently 'queer' has been rescued from its negative past to be used as the umbrella term for all the initials: LGBTQIA, etc.  I like it but it does contribute to the tendency for women/lesbians to be minimized

So Joe turned to a historical term, "in the life," which has been around in the African American community for generations.  In my neighborhood it could mean you were a lady of the evening or gay.  I liked it because it suggested that being in the life was an active experience.  It was something you were doing, not a passive or victim experience.

I'm bumping up against the same issue as I work on LEAVING THE BLUES.  How do I describe Alberta and her lover, Lettie? (who's a composite character)   The language is problematic because people worked so hard to not say it out loud.  Staying hidden was how individuals stayed safe from persecution.

I've recently been working on how two characters can come out to Alberta and it's a challenge.  The two characters are from two different generations--one gay man born in the early 1900s; the other a lesbian born in the 1940s. 

The male/female experience is definitely different and the generations make a difference in the language they'd use.  I'm still researching and exploring what I might create; but it reminds me how crucial language is to our personal and our social liberation.  Each of us has to find the names that suit us.  I think one reason Alberta was never happy to say out loud who she was grew out of a problem with the words available to her.  Whether it's our multiple ethnicities, our class origins, our sexual orientation or gender identity...finding the specific words to express all of who we are is the first stop on the train that takes us to freedom.