Halle Berry 911

It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since the black feminist trickster-playwright-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist Suzan-Lori Parks created a comedic heroine who actively grappled with her own sexual exploitation in the film industry. Although Parks's collaboration with director Spike Lee was allegedly a fraught one (and how could it not be? See his film She Hate Me), the film that would result from their creative involvement with each other—Girl 6—would nonetheless produce one of the most memorable scenes of black female nudity in recent memory, save for the now infamous coital scene in the Halle Berry classic Monster's Ball.[1]

In Parks and Lee's rendering of spectacular black female nudity, the fictional heroine, an actress know only as "Girl 6," sits uncomfortably in the glare of camera lights during a screen test and struggles to deliver her monologue for a rude and rapacious director played by Quentin Tarantino. In the icy glare of a camera-driven inquisition, "6" (as she's called in the script) is coaxed into disrobing in a move that hurtles the scene into the violence of history. With her dress pulled down around her waist and in the throes of a dizzying elixir of resignation, rage, and disbelief, our heroine morphs into Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass's Aunt Hester, and the slave "Delia" in a well-circulated antebellum daguerreotype from South Carolina,[2] all canonical representations of violation and toplessness. It is 1996, but the film suggests (as if we needed reminding) that it might as well be 1846, 1896, or 1926 at the Folies Bergère. Indeed, black female corporeality remains in danger of being captured in the void of someone else's fantasies, caught in the eye/I of someone else's lens.

Yet Parks's screenplay posits a solution to this harrowing situation in the deliciously histrionic scene that immediately follows this first one. "6" meets up with her acting teacher (played by the remarkable Susan Batson, whose only crime in life is that she put Sean "Puffy" Combs on Broadway). And I argue that it is the acting coach's words that crackle with the spirit and ethos of Josephine Baker's brilliance as a comic corporeal performer.

6: [mumbling] "The reason I consented to doing this is because I wish to clear my name ..."

Coach: [yelling in disgust] " ... Where is the pain? ... C'mon! It needs a bottom! Where's the bottom! What's this shallow shit? A bottom!"

6: "No! I can't think—"

Coach: [yelling with more frustration] "... Drop into the pain! DROP-INTO-THE-PAIN! ..."

6: "I can't think straight—''

Coach: "Acting is about doing and feelings! Drop into the pain!..."

6: [mumbling her lines once again]

Coach: [mocking and mimicking]: "The only reason. The only reason. The only reason!"

6: "Look, I went into an interview, big Hollywood interview, and this asshole tells me to take off my shirt."

Coach: [yelling] "So what?!!! So what?!!! SOOO WHAT! GROW UP! Grow up now!"

6: "What are you talking about?"

Coach: "I'm talking about you growing up. I'm talking about you facing the reality of this business."

6: "Which is?"

Coach: "Taking off your top, BABY!"

6: "That has nothing to do with the work. You taught me about the work."

Coach: "It has plenty to do with the work! That's the business, honey bunch! MAKE IT ART! Turn it into something special! Do you get it? .... Are we going to grow up? ..."[3]

With a heated, Eartha Kitt purr, 6's instructor demands that she locate what the monologue lacks, and she implores her pupil to "DROP into the PAIN!" Passionately, she commands her to recognize the gaping hole in her performance—to realize that it, in fact, "NEEDS A BOTTOM."

The Bottom of Power

What kind of multiple meanings does this thespian-inspired, titillating piece of dialogue possibly suggest? Must 6 hit rock bottom? Must she create a critical foundation in her life and art with a bottom on which to stand firm? Or must she perhaps find a way to (re)possess the eroticism that her bottom represents? Must she discover a means to avoiding the invisibility of no-bodiness somehow? To escape the bottomless pit of sexual commodification, the film suggests that Girl 6 must follow the path of Josephine Baker. She must turn the site of (un)covering into her own fiction. She must, as Baker would famously proclaim, exploit "the intelligence of [her] own body" for her own purposes.

The bottom is where I want to begin today and it is, I suggest, one of several sites where the "intelligence" of Baker's performance aesthetic lies. It is the bottom that links Baker not only to the words of 6's acting instructor, but of course to Sara Baartman, the "Venus Hottentot," a woman whose buttocks and genitalia were dissected and displayed at the hands of European science and whom Parks surely had in mind as well when she imagined her heroine's dilemma.[4]

Baartman's sexual exploitation, as Mae Henderson has shown, set a precedent for the kind of ethnographic spectacle that Baker would have to navigate in the primitivist frenzy of 1920s Parisian music hall culture. However, as Henderson makes clear, whereas Baartman functioned as "pure display ... an icon of black sexuality and the (black) female sexual grotesque," Baker, removed by a century from Baartman, was able to turn the static body of black female sexual exploitation into a dynamic, mobile enterprise.[5]

I want to think in particular about Henderson's important claim that Baker was "a seasoned comedienne" who "combined a performance of the erotic with elements of the parodic" (124). I want to walk through some of the specific modes of comedy that Baker stylized and perfected—moves that highlight her corporeal elasticity and underscore the ways in which Baker and other black female entertainers utilized comic insurgency to wrest their bodies from socio-historical conventions. Below, I suggest that we might ask what kinds of jokes Josephine Baker could tell with her body and whether the body is capable of lobbing a few punch lines.

Figure 1

In this regard, I would have us think more about this notion of the bottom as it literally and figuratively relates to Josephine Baker. Specifically, I am interested in the "place" of the bottom in black women's comedic corporeal politics and the ways in which we might extend this concept of the bottom to refer not only to the physical body of the black woman but to other ends that reveal her innovative comedic strategies of gestures and corporeal eccentricities. Read from this perspective, we can consider the ways that Baker's body perhaps re-oriented the spectacular attention directed at black female bodies in public spaces and potentially disabled the kind of exploitative spectatorship that circumscribed Sara Baartman.

As bell hooks has made clear about Baker's body, "one can hardly overemphasize the importance of her rear end." Baker herself reportedly argued that the "rear end exists ... I see no reason to be ashamed of it." Hooks thus contends that with "Baker's triumph, the erotic gaze of a nation moved downward: she had uncovered a new region for desire."[6]

But we might move from this physical region of "plenty" to consider its metaphorical dimensions. Perhaps, when we think about Josephine Baker, we're dealing not just with the triumph of a physical black bottom on display, but with other kinds of ends and posterior spaces as well. Baker was all about the end, I would argue, but her genius surfaced most brilliantly in choreographic tales/tails that exceeded the frame of her body.

If we think, for instance, of these alternative endings as spaces that yield the kind of gestures that Carla Peterson terms "eccentric"—"an empowering oddness" and "a notion of off-centeredness" that suggests "freedom of movement" for black female performers,[7] we might move then from ends to Josephine Baker's eccentric means so as to interrogate the specific gestures that she utilizes to disable, to disrupt, and to deflect more limited regimes of looking.

The End of the Line

Figure 2

We know from Jayna Brown's brilliant forthcoming study of early twentieth-century black female performance culture that Baker was one of many working black female entertainers at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance who experimented with counter-hegemonic forms of modern dance that generated "satirical comment on the absurdity" of "spurious racialisms."[8]

By Brown's account, these female pioneers of black dance—women like Ida Forsyne, Ethel Williams, Baker, and many others—actively transformed canonic blackface roles through their own innovative movements on the stage. In the hands of these women, iconic minstrel caricatures—from nameless "pickaninnies" to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Topsy—transmogrified into tools of farce that had the power to "disrobe authority" (7). As Brown has persuasively argued, "Topsy has a keen sense of time, as her body has been marked by the uses to which her body, and the bodies of other slave children, was put. Topsy has no investment in keeping the 'master's time.' She contorts and bends it—syncopates it, rags it, swings it.... She creates play zones out of its distortion. Pushing at boundaries of time's rhythmic containing, the dancing slave takes time out of its routines, its disciplinary actions on her body" (Chap 2, 41).

Baker got her start in theater by performing these Topsy-like, black vaudeville minstrelsy roles, but she came to stardom extending the innovations of Ethel Williams, as several cultural critics have duly noted. It was Williams who first stylized the routine that became known as the "mischievous girl at the end of the [chorus] line," and Baker would later follow suit. As Brown reminds us, Williams "refused to toe the line." And as Williams puts it, "'I would be doing anything but that. I'd do the 'ball the jack' on the end of the line every kind of way you could think about it. When the curtain came down, even my fingers were doing ball the jack outside [the curtain]'" (Chap 2, Chap 5, 10).

Baker would later gain great notice for following Williams's moves. As one contemporary reviewer remarked of Baker's performances, "she was the little girl on the end. You couldn't forget her once you'd noticed her, and you couldn't escape noticing her. She was beautiful but it was never her beauty that attracted your eyes. In those days her brown body was disguised by an ordinary chorus costume. She had a trick of letting her knees fold under her, eccentric wise. And her eyes, just at the crucial moment when the music reached the climactic 'he's just wild about, cannot live without, he's just wild about me' [from "I'm Just Wild About Harry"], her eyes crossed."[9]

While I'll return in a moment to the topic of those perpetually crossed eyes, I want to think a bit more about Baker's mischief at the end of the line.

Figure 3

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Karen Dalton remind us, for instance, that Baker's moves were both dazzling and disorienting. They point out that in her breakthrough role as a chorus line girl in Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along, "audiences were bowled over by her frenetic dancing and outrageous clowning, the visual equivalents of malapropisms" (910). What, we might ask, does it mean to do the "wrong" dance at the right time? What are the consequences of making incongruous gestures within certain contexts?

Such questions should remind us of the points that Margo Jefferson raises about how one of Josephine Baker's gifts was her ability to navigate incongruities, to take "contradictory dances and make them one or even show them operating at the same time." By mixing American musical theater with blues and jazz phrasings and French music hall aesthetics, Baker was able to create dissonant humor. This dissonance, one might argue, emerged out of that end space.[10]

Figure 4

Josephine Baker's end of the line is not just spatial, but temporal as well. We should recall that Baker's own Topsy incarnation in the 1924 musical The Chocolate Dandies, Topsy Anna, showcased her in full "blackface, wearing bright cotton smocks and clown shoes" and provided her with the platform from which to distort time with her lightning movements. The poet e.e. cummings, sounding like Charles Dickens watching the African dancer Juba, would revel in the racist spectacle of this "'tall, vital, incomparably fluid nightmare which crossed its eyes and warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner." (Dalton and Gates, 911)

While cummings was representative of white spectators who fetishized what they perceived as physical deviance in Baker's dance style, Baker's choreography actually amounted to intelligent and inspired aesthetic design. Anthea Kraut argues that "Baker inevitably seemed to forget the steps she had been taught" but would wind up "performing her own idiosyncratic moves in their place."[11] We might think of this gesture as a kind of choreographic interpellation. By this I mean that Josephine Baker inserted a kind of dance into a space where it was not expected.

The Silhouette Artist and the Shadow Dancer

Baker's unpredictable, Topsy-like comedic moves lead us to an unlikely yet highly provocative twenty-first-century trickster and comic artist, one who also embraces the pickaninny figure as one of her muses. This artist is Kara Walker.

Figure 5

Critic Annette Dixon suggests that we consider the comedic elements of Walker's controversial art. Walker's humor, she argues, "is slapstick and debasing (evoking that of the minstrel show), yet without it, the horrific aspects of the scenes would be unbearable."[12] But we might stop to ask what it is about the space that the silhouette creates that enables humor. Humor is allowed to ferment and thrive in these darkened spaces. What makes this possible is that although the silhouette is historically "tied to the conventions of caricature," Walker has managed to utilize this form in order to "engage the question of how one represents race through reduced means. It is through outline and shape, and the intervals between shapes, that information is conveyed," explains Dixon.[13]

Figure 6

Walker lobs ribald and pornographic punch lines through the exaggerated, grotesque shapes of her forms. Often in profile, her minstrel figures break out of their straitjacketed shapes in bursts of startling historical and political malapropisms. Beyond the disobedience of their pickaninny figurations, though, Walker and Baker have even more in common if we consider Baker's performance in Zou Zou and her use of the mobile silhouette—the playful shadow puppets [video] that she deploys at the end of the film as Zou Zou literally tries her hand at a career on the stage.

Zou Zou: Shadow Puppets [Back to text]

In Zou Zou, Baker's shadow puppet performance operates as the critical turning point in the plot. It provides a bridge between Zou Zou's role as a laboring laundress and her point of entry to the stage and subsequent stardom. But perhaps even more suggestively, this climactic scene in the film demonstrates and celebrates Baker's deft use of her hands. Invoking a whimsical gesture associated with child's play and innocence, Baker nonetheless reaffirms her sophistication as a professional comic performer in this mischievous scene. Through the savvy work of her hands, she conveys her phantasmagoric gifts at making shapes in shadowed profile and exploits the darkness of her own shadow. Oscillating, bobbing, and weaving inward and outward in the creation of multiple and unexpected shapes and images, Baker here defies the visual reification (and calcification) of her own body. Here the hands of the shadow puppeteer shift our attention away from the overdetermined, sexualized body parts of Baker and black womanhood and toward the virtuosic hands that make both recognizable and nonsensical shapes that transmogrify and transfigure in the space of the shadow. And it is Josephine Baker's ability to utilize the nonsensical in her performances that finally reinforces her alluring comedic gifts.

"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]