High times in Harlem: Ben Neihart bases his new historical novel on the scandalous life of a good-timing Jazz Age heiress and her queer coterie.Rough Amusements: The True Story of A'Lelia Walker A'Lelia Walker (June 6 1885 in Vicksburg, Mississippi-August 16, 1931) was an African-American business woman and patron of the arts. She was born Lelia McWilliams to Moses McWilliams and 17 year old Sarah Breedlove, who went on to become an extremely successful , Patroness of the Harlem Renaissance's Down-Low Culture * Ben Neihart * Bloomsbury * $21.95 Welcome to the Faggots Ball, an annual blowout during that glorious explosion of African-American creativity known as the Harlem Renaissance Harlem Renaissance, term used to describe a flowering of African-American literature and art in the 1920s, mainly in the Harlem district of New York City. During the mass migration of African Americans from the rural agricultural South to the urban industrial North . The year is 1930, and virtually everyone who is queer and clever has gathered at the Manhattan Casino on West 155th Street, including poet Langston Hughes, artist and poet Richard Brace Nugent, aging drag queen drag queen Female impersonator, gynemimetic Sexology A ♂ with ♀ affect–often 'overplayed'; a ♂ homosexual and ♀ wannabe, with ♂ genitalia; DQs may take hormones to ↑ breasts, and thus are hormonally, but not surgically Jennie June, novelist Carl Van Vechten Carl Van Vechten (June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964) was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein. , and heiress A'Lelia Walker--the central figure of Ben Neihart's charming trifle, Rough Amusements. Neihart, the author of Hey, Joe and Burning Girl, calls the work "historical fiction," but it seems closer to nonfiction with an infusion of made-up conversations and reflections. Such plot as there is has to do with whether gangster Dutch Schultz's goons will kidnap Walker, who has been freely spending her sizable fortune--left to her by her mother, cosmetics tycoon Madame C.J. Walker, inventor of the first hair straightener for African-American women--on high living and subsidies to Renaissance writers and artists. Mostly, though, Rough Amusements is an excuse for Neihart's ballgoers to gossip and reminisce rem·i·nisce intr.v. rem·i·nisced, rem·i·nisc·ing, rem·i·nisc·es To recollect and tell of past experiences or events. [Back-formation from reminiscence. . Beautiful man-about-town Harold Jackman recalls the ruckus caused when he and Renaissance poet Countee Cullen went to Europe together after Cullen's marriage. "The headlines were jokes, a hundred variations on 'Groom Sets Sail With Best Man, Bride Stays Home.'" June remembers her heyday as a plaything for "sports"--young men from the rising middle classes who roamed the city at night, some homosexual, some just horny horn·y adj. 1. Made of horn or a similar substance. 2. Tough and calloused, as of skin. and not too particular. Though she received countless beatings over the years, there were compensations, especially an interlude when she had the run of a military barracks bar·rack 1 tr.v. bar·racked, bar·rack·ing, bar·racks To house (soldiers, for example) in quarters. n. 1. A building or group of buildings used to house military personnel. . Some nights the soldiers put her to bed "as tenderly as a mother puts her babe in its cradle." Rough Amusements is rich and palatable, not unlike the lobster and champagne consumed by A'Lelia Walker on the night of her (apparently natural) death on August 17, 1931. Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World. |
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