CHAPTER TWO
STRAIGHTENED MY RACK, KINKED MY HAIR
One of the unlikelier Hollywood in-spots during the 1940s was a puppet show on La Cienega Boulevard called the Turnabout Theatre. It was the creation of Harry Burnett, Forman Brown, and Richard “Roddy” Brandon, who’d started the Yale Puppeteers at Yale Drama School in the 1920s and later settled in Los Angeles. Burnett and Brown—gay cousins who’d once briefly been lovers—and their friend Brandon (who became Brown’s lifelong romantic partner) dreamed up an innovative brand of musical theater, with Burnett, who looked like a lankier version of Chico Marx, acting as master puppeteer, the more dapper Brown composing the music and serving as emcee, and Brandon handling the business side of things, as well as helping pull the strings. The first half of the show featured some of Burnett’s hundreds of singing marionettes, including caricatures of celebrities from Franklin Roosevelt and Groucho Marx to Bette Davis and Alfred Hitchcock. After an intermission, there was vaudeville-style entertainment, with a cast headed by Elsa Lanchester, a big-eyed British character actress best known at the time for her film portrayal as the Bride of Frankenstein.
The Turnabout took its name from the surplus Red Car trolley seats installed between the two stages perched at opposite ends of the theater. After intermission, audience members swung over the backs of the reversible seats to face the other way, so the last row for the puppet show became the first row for musical theater: turnabout was fair play. With its topical humor and gossipy vibe, the Turnabout, just a stone’s throw from the Sunset Strip and the tony mansions of Beverly Hills, attracted a glamorous crowd, with Charlie Chaplin, Jane Russell, Greta Garbo, and a host of others among the glitterati turning up to take in the latest send-up of Hollywood or Washington, DC—and to see themselves as marionettes.
Flora Felious, now a single parent (she would never remarry), had gotten a part-time job as a custodian for the Turnabout by 1946, supplementing her domestic work. On Saturdays, she took Odetta and Jimmie Lee with her to the theater, and they helped her with the cleaning before heading together to the farmers market to do the week’s shopping. That is, sometimes they helped with the cleaning. “Harry was always playing operatic records, so Odetta would sit and listen and moon over the records instead of doing the dusting as her mother wanted her to,” Forman Brown recalled. “But we found she had a lovely voice.” Flora had been trying to earn enough to afford Odetta’s voice lessons, but she couldn’t keep up with the payments. Desperate, she hatched a plan: could she bring Odetta in to sing for the Puppeteers, a tryout of sorts? “I got up there, and at that point I was a coloratura soprano, very high voice, and I screeched out a few notes and they heard something evidently that led them to believe that maybe it would be good to give me voice lessons,” Odetta remembered.1
Burnett agreed to sponsor her, and Odetta found her first serious voice teacher, Janet Spencer. A contralto originally from Boston, Spencer had toured the US and Europe as a concert and oratorio singer in the early 1900s and made some of the first records for the Victor Talking Machine Company’s famous Red Seal label. When her concert career ended, she retired to Hollywood, where she took on singing pupils. Odetta began a study of German lieder and other art songs.
When it came time for ninth grade, Odetta and Jo got separated. Odetta lived closest to predominantly white Marshall High School, but she was bused to Belmont High in nearby Westlake, a school with a large proportion of Asian, black, and Hispanic students. Officially, Los Angeles had a no-segregation policy for education, but in practice, gerrymandered school districts and other sleights of hand concentrated blacks and other minorities together. “All of us went to the same school, until we got to high school,” Odetta recalled. “But [blacks] were sent to Belmont High School and we had to take a bus there. And that’s not hard for an innocent kid to read.”2
As she began high school, the Cold War that would play a big role in Odetta’s early political awakening had escalated, and the search for subversives filtered all the way down to Belmont. The atmosphere in Los Angeles, as in many American cities, became oppressive and thick with suspicion—and not just for closet Communists. Robert Carl Cohen, who was a year ahead of Odetta at Belmont High, remembered taking a current issues class at a time when a state legislative committee was investigating the views of local educators. “One day the teacher . . . said we’re focusing too much on politics,” Cohen recalled. “So when my turn came I started reading the baseball scores. At which point the woman instructor broke into tears and ran out of the classroom. . . . They were scared shitless that they were going to be called before the Un-American Activities Committee. And they didn’t want students speaking about things like the Berlin airlift and stuff like that.”3
In high school, Odetta kept a low profile. In her four years at Belmont, she showed up for only one yearbook photo—the group glee club portrait during her sophomore year. But for the first time, she began attracting attention for her singing. Aside from joining the glee club, she became the soloist in the school’s Madrigal Singers.
She rebelled against segregation by joining the South Hollywood Civic Chorus, an interracial community group that gathered Monday nights in an elementary school auditorium. With the city’s race relations at an ebb, the group was considered innovative enough in 1949 to merit a profile in the Los Angeles Times: “Here you find voices of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers—all singing in harmony. . . . Voices may range from the baritone of 78-year-old James Atkinson . . . a retired schoolteacher, to the soprano of Miss Odette [sic] Felious, 18.”4
Other than for her musical pursuits, Odetta remained shy and reclusive in her social life, unable to shake her outcast status. She still occasionally saw Jo, who tried to push her into uncharted waters. “I was a stuck-in-the-mud, follow-the-rules kind of kid,” Odetta recalled. “Jo was adventurous. I don’t even think I’ve begun to figure out how that woman, that personality, helped release me.”5
Once, on a lark, they visited Club Laurel in Studio City, one of the first lesbian nightclubs in the area. They slicked their hair back, put on jeans and leather jackets, trying to look tough and butch. “You’ve never seen a sorrier set of dykes than Odetta and me,” Mapes remembered. “Odetta couldn’t bring her eyes up off the sidewalk, and I felt foolish.”6
Odetta graduated from Belmont in 1949. A photo snapped after the ceremony shows her standing tall, her straightened hair poking out from under her mortar board, a proud, if subdued, smile on her face as she grips a golden trophy in her large hands. It was a Bank of America Achievement Award for fine arts.
After high school, she worked briefly as a maid in a department store during the day, while attending Los Angeles City College (LACC) at night. With Harry Burnett’s sponsorship at an end, however, she found she needed to earn more to pay for her singing lessons, so she soon found work in a button factory, and then as a housemaid, doing the cleaning and taking care of two children, presumably for a white family.
At LACC, she studied European classical music. She was a chorister in productions of Verdi’s Requiem and Bach’s Mass in B Minor. She joined the Sharps and Flats club, serving as club secretary, and appeared in musicales as a soprano. She performed art songs such as Schumann’s “Die Lotosblume” and Rachmaninoff’s “In the Silence of the Night,” and lyrics by Lord Tennyson. Even with her concert training, she harbored no illusions about an opera career. It was still a few years before her idol Marian Anderson, considered one of the great singers of the century, was invited to perform Aida at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, breaking the color barrier. “So I didn’t fool myself there,” Odetta said. “I thought, I had a dream of getting a quartet together, learning the repertoire of the oratorios, and then offering ourselves to schools and churches.”7
Her first real brush with folk music and progressive politics came by happenstance. When producers announced a revival of Finian’s Rainbow to be staged at Los Angeles’s Greek Theatre in the summer of 1950 and issued an open casting call, Odetta and her friend Janie Craddock both tried out for the musical and passed their auditions, Janie as a dancer and Odetta as a member of the chorus. For the future voice of the civil rights movement, it was the perfect entrée into show business. Yip Harburg, who’d supplied the lyrics to the Tin Pan Alley hit “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” and “Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz, had conceived the play in a fit of anger over Southern opposition to the cause of black civil rights and as a direct challenge to men like Senator Theodore Bilbo and Representative John Rankin, both of Mississippi, who virulently defended the tenets of white supremacy in Congress. “The only way I could assuage my outrage against their bigotry was to have one of them turn black and live under his own laws and see how he felt about it,” Harburg recalled.8
The play is set in the mythical Southern state of Missitucky. It revolves around Finian McLonergan and his daughter, Sharon, who arrive from Ireland with a pot of gold. There’s a leprechaun, a racist senator (who proclaims, “My whole family’s been having trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country!”), white and black sharecroppers, and a union organizer named Woody, after Woody Guthrie. At the end of act 1, Sharon tells the senator that he should live life as a black man to experience the crippling effects of Jim Crow firsthand, and thanks to the leprechaun, her wish comes true.9
The original show ran on Broadway for 725 performances in 1947–1948 and was seen as ahead of its time in how it dealt with race issues: aside from its clear political message, whites were depicted living and working congenially alongside blacks, and the black and white performers danced together and held hands, almost unheard of on the Great White Way at the time.
The summer stock revival opened at the outdoor Greek Theatre in Griffith Park on July 17, 1950, with the original Broadway cast, including stars Ella Logan and Albert Sharpe and the blind country blues harmonica virtuoso Sonny Terry, who reprised their roles. According to one account, Odetta thought Finian’s Rainbow might launch her into legitimate concert work, albeit not the opera career she craved.
And that’s what happened, although not in the way she imagined. Her stage debut behind her, Harry Burnett came calling. With the Turnabout Theatre’s success, he and Forman Brown had created a version for children. Turnabout Jr. opened on December 1, 1950, with Odetta in the cast alongside Burnett and Dorothy Neumann, who would go on to a career as character actress in film and on television. The initial monthlong production, which didn’t have a puppet show like the adult version, was staged like a circus in a little tent in the parking lot of the farmers market on West Third Street and Fairfax Avenue. Even with Burnett portraying a clown, it was Odetta who won the most raves. “Outstanding singing came from Odetta Felious as ‘The Nurse You Never Had,’” the Los Angeles Times said. Frank Hamilton recalled that when Odetta started singing for the Turnabout, she was still in a classical mode. “Odetta was singing there very much like Marian Anderson,” he said, “kind of like with a contralto voice, singing show tunes and classical tunes.”10
For her newly realized contralto—the deep, dramatic singing voice that would make an unforgettable imprint on the nation and the world—she had a new voice teacher to thank. Janet Spencer had died by then, and Odetta had begun studying with Paul Reese, a transplanted New Yorker, who helped her find the lower end of her vocal range. Hamilton, who later studied with Reese, said Reese also suggested that Odetta try to take advantage of the brewing excitement in folk music, but Odetta, taught to look down on such lowbrow fare, wasn’t quite ready to heed that advice.
The Weavers, who smoothed out the rough edges of folk songs to make them suit the buttoned-down tastes of Americans in that era, were then tearing up the Billboard charts with an orchestra-backed, almost chipper version of Lead Belly’s mournful ballad “Goodnight, Irene,” propelling folk music momentarily into the stratosphere. “The summer of 1950, no American could escape that song unless you plugged up your ears and went out into the wilderness,” Pete Seeger recalled.11
Throughout the previous decade, folk music had been striving to gain a true foothold in American life. Seeger and Woody Guthrie had led the grassroots push with the Almanac Singers, who had tried, but mostly failed, to fuel a singing union movement and boost the fortunes of progressives in and out of government. Still, leftist groups had provided much needed work for folk singers, including Lead Belly himself, who had died just months before the Weavers rode his song to the big time. The Weavers’ success spawned a new surge of interest in folk songs, and in most big cities, groups of young people began picking up guitars and banjos, looking for ballads and blues to sing at hootenannies.
It was in this atmosphere that Odetta was asked, in the summer of 1951, to once again appear in the chorus of Finian’s Rainbow, as the revival, its original cast still intact, moved up to San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House. It ran in San Francisco for only two weeks, beginning on July 16, before returning to Los Angeles, but as far as Odetta’s life was concerned, those fourteen days proved pivotal.
Now twenty, Odetta hadn’t been away from home before. “It took about three days before I was crying because I was homesick,” she recalled. One night, her old friend Jo Mapes, who got word Odetta was in the show, came to see her. Mapes already had fallen in love with folk music and hopped a Greyhound bus to San Francisco to become a bohemian. She’d dyed her hair black with a silver streak; dressed, she recalled, “like a French whore”; and started singing folk songs. She met her husband Paul Mapes, a merchant seaman, in a bar. He was drunk. They married two weeks later.12
Six decades after the fact, Jo Mapes vividly remembered Odetta in Finian, resplendent in a spangled gown and wearing one of those ornate and shaky headdresses as she paraded down a stairway. “She was one of the Ziegfeld girls, dressed up like one, who came down the famous Ziegfeld stairway. . . . And there was ’Detta, anything but slim, anything but a dainty beauty.”13
Some compared San Francisco’s North Beach to the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s and ’30s, with its mix of colorful types: artists, writers, poets, folk singers, gritty sailors, and women with long hair and large hoop earrings. One night, Jo and Paul took Odetta to Vesuvio’s, a little bar with sawdust on the floor where the poets and musicians hung out reciting verse and singing folk songs. When the bar closed at 2 a.m., a big group headed to the Mapes’s garret apartment, where, perched amid sloping beams and candlelight, they sang all night long.
It was there that Odetta, drinking Gallo wine to ward off her homesickness, had an epiphany, hearing tunes like Lead Belly’s “Take This Hammer.” “I heard songs that touched the core of me,” she recalled. “In the songs I heard that night, including prison songs, I found the sadness, the loneliness, the fear that I was feeling at the time. It turned my life around.”14 During her brief stay, Jo and Paul also introduced Odetta to her first lover. She left San Francisco and returned to Los Angeles, her passions stirred.
Back home, Odetta borrowed a guitar from a neighbor, who taught her C, F, and G seventh chords and gave her a capo to easily change keys on the instrument. With some effort, she learned to play “Down in the Valley,” but after that she proved to be a quick study. She got hold of some folk music books, such as Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag and, later, recordings of prison and chain gang songs made by the Library of Congress to build up a repertoire. She also delved into Negro histories to better understand the songs and their lyrics. Folk music was just a hobby at first. To support herself, she got a job as a live-in housekeeper on Hoover Street, near where her mother now lived. Late at night, Odetta would call her friend Janie, barely able to contain her excitement about folk songs. “Listen, listen, Janie!” Odetta would say, and she’d put the phone down and sing her a new tune she’d learned.15
Soon Odetta fell in with the folk song crowd in LA, a coterie of young people like her who traded tunes and sang together at parties and hoots. She met Frank Hamilton, still a teenager but already a virtuoso on several instruments, including banjo and guitar. Hamilton taught her some guitar techniques, including a rhythmic double-thumb strum used by Josh White that she would eventually modify into what became known as “the Odetta strum.” She became a very adept finger-style guitarist, although she never gave herself the credit she deserved, calling her guitar playing mere “self-defense.”16
It didn’t take long, however, before she began to stand out at hoots, where young musicians tried to display their growing repertoires and instrumental prowess and ability to tap into the murky wellspring of “authenticity” that would become prized during the folk revival. Marcia Berman, who later became known for her albums of children’s songs, was about twenty when she heard Odetta sing at a Los Angeles party around 1952. “Many of the folk songs we were singing were just kind of telling a story and the singer was very objective, you know the singer doesn’t put their emotion into the song,” Berman recalled. “But of course she was picking up different styles of music and she herself could go deep, I mean she could be very emotional.”17
That’s because, for Odetta, folk music was no abstraction. It was the story of her people and a potent antidote to society’s wholly fabricated version of her history, its insistence that there was no respectable place for her in her own country. The music also became an outlet for Odetta’s deep-dyed anger, which she shared with a whole generation of young blacks who felt stymied at every turn and, in the words of the writer and social critic James Baldwin, were “taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open to the world.”18 When Odetta sang chain gang songs such as “Take This Hammer” and “Another Man Done Gone” or spirituals like “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned,” she harnessed her rage to produce music that was already beginning to move people in a powerful way. Not that they understood the source of her power, which she later explained in an interview:
We were living at a time when I couldn’t say I hate me and I hate you and I hate. But I’m frustrated. I’ve been told that I’m worth nothing. I’ve been told I’m dumb. Hollywood has told me that. School has told me that. White population has, society has told me that. . . . As I sang those songs, nobody knew where the prisoner began and Odetta stopped and vice versa. So I could get my rocks off, being furious.19
Odetta, Hamilton, Berman, and a few others formed a group that performed for neighborhood folk song clubs and progressive organizations. Hamilton and Odetta became friends, which didn’t come very easily to her, he said. “She was always very defensive. She was very careful in her dealings with people and she wanted to retain an aura of protection around her. There were only certain people that she would allow into her purview, so to speak. And she was very careful that she selected her friends, who would be understanding of her.”20
It was a good bet that if you sang folk songs with any seriousness in either New York or Los Angeles (and many other cities) in the 1950s, you were going to come into contact with progressive politics, so it’s not surprising that some of Odetta’s first gigs took place in front of a gamut of left-wing groups, some of them branded pro-Communist. For the performers, who were rarely paid more than a pittance, if anything at all, it was a chance to sing for a captive crowd, maybe even to inspire the union faithful or an activist group and feel the connection between an old lyric and a modern cause.
Today’s schoolbook histories often depict the McCarthy era in simplistic terms, as a clash between suspected Communists on one side and overzealous watchdogs intent on safeguarding democracy on the other. But the American political landscape at the time was more complicated than that image suggests. Even amid the deepening of the Cold War, by which time the Communist Party had lost much of its influence on the left, the lines between card-carrying Communists, socialists, trade unionists, and liberals with various agendas including pacifism and civil rights remained amorphous, their causes frequently overlapping. That was especially true in the years before Joseph Stalin’s atrocities in the Soviet Union became well known, crumbling Communism’s mythology in the eyes of all but the most blinkered fellow travelers in the West. It was the broad spectrum of the left that had nurtured folk music and helped keep it alive, before and after World War II, and Odetta would have been exposed to a lot of leftist orthodoxies as she became more entrenched in the folk scene.
In one of her first performances as a folk singer, Odetta sang for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in Los Angeles, with Hamilton backing her up on harmonica. The group was then staging pickets and boycotts in an effort to unionize several Los Angeles garment factories. “They were immediately taken with her, particularly the left-wing groups,” Hamilton said. “Because the civil rights [era] hadn’t happened yet but it was bubbling just underneath. It was about to happen.”21
An older white couple, Seema and Jack Weatherwax, both Communist Party members, lived in an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in East Hollywood, where they were neighbors with Odetta and her extended family. The neighborhood had grown blacker than it had been before the war, with most of the whites and other minorities having moved away. “It was not Watts, not a black ghetto, but practically all the people who lived there were black,” Seema Weatherwax remembered. “There were some large families, like Odetta’s, who lived in three or four houses. These were modest homes, not expensive. About one-third of the people owned their own homes and the rest were renting, and they were charged higher rents than whites for comparable housing.” Sometimes on Friday and Saturday nights, Odetta invited friends over to drink wine and hear her sing. “Her voice and her presentation were wonderful, full of power,” Weatherwax said. “I thought, ‘My god, why isn’t she known more?’”22
The Weatherwaxes supported an array of progressive causes, from the peace movement and labor strikes to pickets aimed at businesses that refused to hire blacks. It’s likely that they had many political discussions with Odetta, though Odetta never espoused any hard-core Communist views.
The biggest influence on Odetta’s politics was Paul Robeson. By any realistic measure, Robeson was one of the most gifted Americans in history—and one of the most unfairly maligned. A pro football player, lawyer, actor, singer, and orator, he attained a popularity that was highly unusual for a Negro in the 1930s and ’40s, filling stadiums with his bass-baritone and showing up in polls as one of the most admired Americans around the world. He used his bully pulpit to advocate fiercely for blacks, who he said were second-class citizens in the US, and he called for a “dictatorship in the South” to secure Negro rights.23
After World War II, Robeson praised the Soviet system for its treatment of blacks and implied that American Negroes weren’t interested in a fight against Russia—a sentiment that, with the intensifying Cold War, brought him withering condemnation from many black leaders as well as white. (It didn’t help that the Associated Press misquoted Robeson, attributing to him a much broader sentiment, that blacks would refuse to fight in a US-Soviet war.) The Truman administration revoked his passport, and Robeson became one of the early victims of the blacklist, his concert work drying up, though he did manage to find sympathetic audiences. Robeson would later defiantly tell the House Un-American Activities Committee, “I am being tried for fighting for the rights of my people,” and his plight served not only as an inspiration but also as a warning to black activists of Odetta’s generation that they could pay a steep price for standing up against oppression. Of Robeson’s influence, Odetta said, “Paul Robeson was the one that politicized me. Through his works and his words, I found that it was necessary for me to be responsible to my brothers and sisters all over the world.”24
In her early days as an amateur folk singer, Odetta got involved with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group that had been founded by religious leaders such as A. J. Muste and social activists, including Jane Addams, to oppose US entry into the First World War. As with many left-wing organizations of the early 1950s, it had a far-reaching agenda, one that encompassed nonviolence in general and opposition to war in particular, including military escalation against the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, however, any group like the Fellowship that spoke out against a military buildup was an easy target for Red-baiters. While it’s true that peace groups had often made common cause with the Communist Party in the 1930s, many, including the Fellowship, had parted ways after the Communists were too quick to follow orders from Moscow. The Fellowship, in fact, had officially barred working with the Communist Party beginning in the 1940s, but that didn’t mean there weren’t Communists within its ranks. For American blacks, however, the group’s pull usually had less to do with a Communist political agenda than with other more pressing concerns.
Bayard Rustin, director of the Fellowship’s civil rights department, had spoken in Los Angeles about local racial problems such as “the inability of Negro boys and girls to swim in the pool,” according to the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black newspaper.25 In 1947, the Fellowship, along with the Congress of Racial Equality, had spearheaded the first Freedom Ride in the South to protest segregation on interstate buses—a protest that cost Rustin thirty days on a North Carolina chain gang. It was a precursor to the more activist agenda of the next phase of the civil rights movement, and Rustin would later plan the March on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr., calling on Odetta to lend her voice to that seminal event.
In 1952, the Fellowship was helping raise money for the defense of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the young married couple from New York’s Lower East Side convicted the previous spring of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. While their attorneys spent two fruitless years trying to get the Supreme Court to review their death sentences, the Rosenbergs maintained support in some left-wing circles among those who thought they were innocent or that their civil liberties had been violated. “I remember being involved with the injustice to the Rosenbergs,” Odetta recalled. “And I remember taking petitions around and having petitions signed to save the Rosenbergs.”26 Odetta’s comment, decades later, suggests that rather than having a staunch commitment to the case, she approached it as would a young woman getting involved with a cause that other progressives were championing.
What’s clear is that her deepening involvement in folk singing and the left-wing movement played a seminal role in one of the most important decisions she ever made. In the summer of 1952, she was still appearing with Turnabout Jr. during the week while working weekends as a counselor at a progressive summer camp connected with the Fellowship outside Los Angeles. One Friday after her Turnabout show, she drove back to camp, headed into her bunk, and surprised her all-white group of girl campers, who hadn’t gone to bed yet. “OK. Let’s get some scissors,” she said. “I want you to cut my hair.” They went into the bathroom, began snipping, and as Odetta’s long straightened locks fell to the floor, the girls grew agitated. “They started getting scared because it was so short,” Odetta recalled. “[I said,] ‘Never mind. It’s OK.’ They cut and cut and cut. And then I went into the shower, washed my hair, and came back. It was nappy, short.” She tied the decision to her newfound appreciation of black culture, “learning the folk songs and the stories that came along with the songs, which was a history of us, and was definitely not in our history books, and I often said it straightened my back and it kinked my hair.”27
Odetta’s niece, Jan Ford, believes her aunt experimented with leaving her hair unstraightened, or “natural,” as far back as high school, but if that’s the case, the decision this time was permanent. And political. “Oh, yeah, nothing but political” was how Odetta characterized it many years later.28
Odetta’s immediate inspiration for what Americans would come to know a decade and a half later as “an Afro” came from a chance encounter at Los Angeles City College, where Odetta continued to take classes but would never earn a degree. There she bumped into a black dancer named Jeni LeGon, who’d been getting ready to do a program at LACC on Africanesque dances and had washed her hair and left it long and kinky. LeGon was originally a tap dancer who got her start at age sixteen in the chorus of the Count Basie Orchestra, and she later tapped her way to history, becoming the first Negro woman to sign a contract with a major film studio, MGM. But like most blacks in Hollywood, she played mainly stereotypical roles, usually finding herself in a maid’s costume. She quit Hollywood in the early 1950s, opened a dance studio in Los Angeles, and took an interest in African and Caribbean music.
It was one thing, however, for a Negro woman in the US to sport kinky hair for a theatrical performance with an African theme, another entirely to adopt the hairstyle in her everyday life. Hair straightening was so ingrained in African American culture by that time that it was rarely questioned, at least publicly. It had begun at a time when enslaved black people with lighter skin and straighter hair—usually the mixed-race descendants of slaves raped by their owners—were often favored with domestic work in comparison to the enslaved people with darker skin and kinky hair who were relegated to the fields. The unmistakable message was that people with straighter hair and lighter skin were “good” because of their physical proximity to whiteness, while those with more African features were “bad.”
By emancipation, straight hair had become a standard sought by freed blacks looking for acceptance in the wider white world. Some black churches, mindful of public relations and social strata, were even said to have had a “comb test” to keep out the kinky-haired. By the twentieth century, straight hair was seen as one more aspect of “proper” grooming that would help blacks to advance in society.29
That’s not to say that hair straightening, also practiced to a lesser degree by men—who otherwise wore their kinky hair cropped—was never a matter of debate. In the 1920s, the Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey demanded that his followers stop using skin lighteners and hair straighteners and famously thundered, “God made no mistake when he made us black with kinky hair. . . . Take the kinks out of your minds instead of your hair!” Carter G. Woodson took up the cause in the 1930s. “The face-painting, hair-straightening Negro, then, goes a step beyond the white man who dubs the race an inferior group,” he wrote. “Such a Negro in addition to acknowledging this inferiority purchases the badges of it.” But their pleas mostly went unheeded.30
A huge economy had formed around the culture of hair straightening, keeping many black barbershops, salons, and cosmetics companies afloat. Madam C. J. Walker earned one of the earliest fortunes as an African American by advertising her patented hair-care products in black papers across the country, including combs and lotions used for straightening. The black press, which played a heroic role in the advancement of black culture and civil rights, said relatively little about black subservience in matters of hair. The hair straightening industry, in fact, fed the coffers of black papers by supplying a significant percentage of their advertising for combs, heaters, wigs, attachments, hair straightening creams, and “hair culturists” adept at removing kinks. One early 1950s ad in the Los Angeles Sentinel for Aida’s Hair Pomade showed a black woman with kinky hair on one side and long straight hair on the other, treated, side, with the caption: “Keeps your hair BEAUTIFUL in HOTTEST weather.” For men, an ad on the next page featured Marques Haynes of the Harlem Globetrotters as pitchman for Perma Strate, which promised up to six months of “soft, straight, attractive” hair for every application.31
James Baldwin, who was a few years older than Odetta, wrote of the shame blacks felt about their hair and skin, beginning in childhood:
One’s hair was always being attacked with hard brushes and combs and Vaseline; it was shameful to have “nappy” hair. . . . The women were forever straightening and curling their hair, and using bleaching creams [on their skin]. And yet it was clear that none of this effort would release one from the stigma and danger of being a Negro; the effort merely increased the shame and rage.32
Jan Ford, in recalling her aunt’s lonely stand on the issue, said that growing up, the idea of deemphasizing one’s blackness was so routine that it didn’t have to be taught. “We were just raised [to] straighten your hair, look presentable,” she remembered. “Your natural state, like with no makeup or your natural hair . . . none of that was being natural.”33
Odetta, who wasn’t given to boasting, would later lay claim to being the first black American woman to embrace natural hair in a public way. “I was the only black going around with nappy hair then . . . and I looked so exotic, so unlike other black American women, that people assumed I was an African.”34 Dancers such as LeGon and Pearl Primus would occasionally put their hair in a natural state on stage, but photos of both from the 1940s and ’50s show them with straight hair. Odetta’s haircut may seem like no big deal today, but for a young woman whose size, color, and natural hair didn’t measure up to white society’s definitions of beauty, it was a courageous statement of individuality and pride. And it sent a message to anyone who beheld her: I am no longer willing to be who you want me to be; I’m going to write my own narrative.
When Odetta returned home from camp, her mom didn’t mince words. “Lord, look at that fool,” Flora said, but neither did she press Odetta to pick up a jar of hair straightener. Jo Mapes recalled of her friend’s political awakening: “She was going through changes, becoming Odetta, but she was always just ’Detta to me.”35
Others weren’t so forgiving. Some barbers arched an eyebrow when Odetta sat on the chair, forcing her to make a quick judgment. “If the barber looked like he questioned it, I all of a sudden thought of an appointment to go to, because once you cut it, there’s nothing you can do about it,” she remembered. And others too looked askance. “There was a lot of times when I would get on a bus and people would snicker and laugh, and it was very difficult at the beginning.”36
But Odetta pushed on. Ford said her aunt was often teased, and once a man came up to her on the street, intent on causing a scene because of her Afro. “And this guy, a white guy, told her, ‘This is what we do to blacks,’ or whatever word he used, and he lassoed her with a rope,” Ford recalled. “And she beat the shit out of him.”37
While it’s hard to imagine the outwardly gentle young Odetta displaying her fury quite as forcefully as Ford remembered, one thing is certain: the young woman with the natural hair and prodigious singing voice wasn’t about to be pushed off the course she’d so boldly set for herself.