Daphne Ann Brooks, "The End of the Line: Josephine Baker and the Politics of Black Women's Corporeal Comedy" (page 6 of 6)

Cross-Eyed and Painless

"Lost my shape - Trying to act casual!"

—Talking Heads, "Cross-eyed and Painless"

Figure 7

One of Baker's most famous trademarks as "a funny woman" was in fact her most ostensibly nonsensical gesture—that of crossing her eyes. We're told, "Baker mugged cross-eyed through her first solo appearance." And she herself boasted, "At $125 a week, I was the highest paid girl in the chorus.... All because I could cross my eyes!" "Nothing very beautiful about a cross-eyed coloured girl," wrote a reviewer for Dance Magazine in a laudatory review of one of Baker's performances. "Nothing very appealing. But it was the folding knees and the cross-eyes that helped bring back the choruses for those unforgettable encores" (Dalton and Gates, 910). We might then ask what it means to cross one's eyes. Why is this a "funny" gesture?

Clearly, it is nonsensical. It evokes the absurd. It crosses a line, as it were, within the realm of "logical" facial expression. But we might also consider the ways that this subtle move is also quietly wayward and oppositional. To cross one's eyes is to draw attention to the physicality of the eyes and not the ass. When one crosses one's eyes, one is looking two ways at once, refusing the gaze of the spectator, drawing the gaze in and yet disrupting attention and ways of looking. To cross one's eyes is to short-circuit a way of looking at just one object. It is a form of looking, but not necessarily a form of looking at one's audience. Eye crossing might be read as an almost enveloping gesture, one that signals the cross-eyed performer's efforts to pull inward rather than returning the stares of onlookers. From this standpoint, we might read crossing one's eyes as perhaps a refusal of sorts, as a resistance to engaging with the looker, and as a form of retreat. As the punk-new wave heroes the Talking Heads once put it in their late-seventies classic "Cross-eyed and Painless," "I'm still waiting, I'm still waiting ... Lifting my head, looking around inside."

Baker's "cross" to the inside—at the very moment when her outside was the subject of so much discussion—would no doubt register as an unexpected move and as yet another form of movement for the black female entertainer. And it is a gesture that situates Baker in relation to other eccentric performers who made their bodies move in unexpected ways: from the conjoined twins Millie and Christine of the antebellum era to the racially ambiguous antebellum star Adah Isaacs Menken, who rode across the stage in a flesh-colored bodysuit; from cakewalk superstar Aida Overton-Walker, who appeared in drag as the understudy for her husband George Walker on Broadway, to Hattie McDaniel, who successfully led her own all-female minstrel revue in Denver long before the wind done gone; from Moms Mabley, who appeared in burnt cork and danced her comic routines across the 1920s black vaudeville circuit, to the tragically underrated Jasmine Guy of the now defunct A Different World TV series, who found ways of manipulating a sly physical humor to match her sharp tongue and impeccable timing. (Yes, I just said that! Check out the Nick at Nite marathons and the episode in which she performs a Baker routine.)

And so, in closing, if anything, Josephine Baker's work reminds us that we have a long way to go in recuperating the lost moves and the hidden genealogy of black female performers who found ways of making opaquely funny gestures with their own bodies and turning their own figures into wickedly double-vocal punch lines as a way to harness a means to an end in the public eye.

Many thanks to Farah Griffin and Kaiama Glover for inspiring me to explore Josephine Baker's work in this context. I'd also like to thank Briallen Hopper, Camara Holloway, Noliwe Rooks, and Anne Cheng for their helpful suggestions and support while working on this piece. Special thanks to Reginald Jackson for his brilliant observations and feedback about Josephine Baker's comedic and corporeal politics.

Endnotes

1. Girl 6, dir. Spike Lee, starring Theresa Randle, Isaiah Washington, and Spike Lee, 20th Century Fox, 1996. Monster's Ball, dir. Marc Forster, starring Halle Berry, Billy Bob Thornton, Mos Def. Lion's Gate Films, 2001. [Return to text]

2. For more on Sojourner Truth, see Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: Norton, 1997). See also Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006), 155-160. The spectacular politics of Frederick Douglass's description of the topless torture of his Aunt Hester has been explored at length by several scholars. See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave (New York: Penguin, 1982). Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford UP, 1997). Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). [Return to text]

3. Girl 6, dir. Spike Lee, starring Theresa Randle, Isaiah Washington, and Spike Lee, 20th Century Fox, 1996. [Return to text]

4. Sander L. Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature," ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. "'Race,' Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 223-61. Anne Fausto-Sterling, "The Comparative Anatomy of 'Hottentot' Women in Europe, 1815-1817," eds. Jennifer Terry and Jaqueline Urla, Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1995), 19-48. Janell Hobson, Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005). [Return to text]

5. Mae G. Henderson, "Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre: From Ethnography to Performance," Text and Performance Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2 (April 2003): 127. All future references to this text will be made parenthetically unless otherwise noted. [Return to text]

6. bell hooks as quoted in Michael Borshuk, "An Intelligence of the Body: Disruptive Parody Through Dance in the Early Performances of Josephine Baker," eds. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Alison D. Goeller. EmBODYing Liberation: The Black Body in American Dance, Forecaast (Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies), Volume 4: 53. [Return to text]

7. Carla Peterson, "Foreword: Eccentric Bodies," eds. Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson, Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Representations by African American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2001), ix-xvi. [Return to text]

8. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Race Mimicry, Black Chorus Line Dancers & the Modern Body (Durham, NC: Duke UP, forthcoming), 7. All future references to this text will be made parenthetically unless otherwise noted. [Return to text]

9. Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Summer 1998): 910. [Return to text]

10. Margo Jefferson, interview, "Josephine Baker: The Woman," DVD extra, Zou Zou (King Video, 2005). Margo Jefferson, interview, DVD extra, Princess Tam Tam (Kino Video, 2005). [Return to text]

11. Anthea Kraut, "Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham," Theater Journal 55 (2003): 438. [Return to text]

12. Kara Walker, Thelma Golden, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Annette Dixon, Pictures from Another Time (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002), 12. [Return to text]

13. Walker, Golden, Reid-Pharr, and Dixon, 12. [Return to text]

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