Labor Day, in the United States, is celebrated on the first Monday in September. In New York City, the date is also marked by a massive parade organized by the West Indian American Carnival Day Association. “West Indian” generally connotes English-speaking Caribbean islands, but WIADCA’s bash also includes representatives of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as mainland nations like Panama, Guyana, and Belize. Yet there’s no denying that during the late summer rite, Trinbagonians are the first among equals.
Port of Spain is the capital of Trinidad & Tobago. The former British colony has been independent since 1972, and a republic since 1976. Spend any time at all in that tropic municipality, and the links to Brooklyn soon become apparent. If the waitress who hands you a cold Carib lager has not herself lived in Crown Heights, she probably has an uncle in Canarsie or a best friend in East Flatbush. Roti shops, pan yards, and mas camps abound in the biggest borough, and the Labor Day procession reaches its apotheosis on the grounds of the Brooklyn Museum.
Things were somewhat different 85 years ago. In the 1930s, the cultural epicenter of the Trini diaspora could be found around 115th Street in Harlem. Surprisingly, one of the best sketches of that vibrant milieu comes to us from the pen of a white journalist, raised by strict Baptists on a farm near Fairmont, North Carolina.
Born in 1908, Joseph Mitchell went to college in Chapel Hill before moving to New York in 1929. The Great Depression would soon destroy fortunes around the world, and leave millions without work, but Mitchell’s career was just taking off. As a reporter for daily newspapers, his tales of crimes and fires distracted readers from their personal woes. Such was his popularity that publishers adorned their delivery vans with his image. The writer’s nationwide reputation was established in 1938, when Harold Ross hired him at The New Yorker.
The switch from daily to weekly reportage allowed Mitchell to tone down the sensationalism. He maintained a focus on Gotham’s less glamorous demimondes, but no longer felt an obligation to shock or titillate. Rather, he cast an empathetic light on Bowery nuns and bums, the “kings” of New York’s Romany people, police detectives and Mohawk steel workers. Undoubtedly, his most famous portrait was that of a “Blithe and emaciated little man” who circulated among the bohemians in Greenwich Village. A Harvard Graduate and scion of an old New England family, Joseph Ferdinand Gould was the subject of “Professor Sea Gull”, which ran in 1942.
To anybody who cared to listen (and many who did not) Gould would mention an epic work in progress, An Oral History of Our Times. Describing the status of his magnum opus, the chronicler never failed to solicit donations to The Joe Gould Fund. The coins and banknotes thus collected usually went toward drinks at the Minetta Tavern and other downtown watering holes. Any money left over paid for a flophouse bed – except on nights when it not.
After the New Yorker profile was published, Mitchell and Gould maintained a friendship of sorts. At one point, the manuscript of the Oral History was said to be approaching nine million words. Eventually Mitchell discerned that, save for a few repetitive fragments, it did not actually exist. Gould died in 1957; “Joe Gould’s Secret” was revealed in 7 years later. In 2000, it was made into a film starring Stanley Tucci and Ian Holm.
A couple of years before “Professor Sea Gull” hit the newsstands, Mitchell met a man whose passport read Edgar Lee Sinclair. The same individual’s birth certificate identified him as Frederick Wilmoth Hendricks. In the annals of musical history, he is known as the prolific calypsonian Wilmoth Houdini.
The two wordsmiths were introduced by Ralph Perez, “a Puerto Rican of Spanish descent”, then in the employ of Decca records. Tasked with growing the label’s catalog of Latin American and Caribbean music, he frequently traveled to Trinidad. He scouted the thatch-roofed bamboo “tents” where calypso singers vied to reign over the Carnival season. Perez paid the most talented performers to visit a makeshift recording studio. There they would cut a record, albeit one that omitted the obvious double entendres so typical of classic kaiso.
“Houdini’s Picnic” came out in the spring of 1939. The event in question was no bucolic feast. Rather, Mitchell depicts a late-night affair in a hired hall off Lenox Avenue, organized by an expatriate group calling themselves the Trinidad Carnival Committee. Eloquently described, the gala evokes classic American rent parties and the BYOB “cooler fetes” that remain a fixture of T&T bacchanals.
A certain braggadocio has always characterized successful singers. Houdini has a healthy supply: “I tell you the thing I don’t comprehend is why some big night club does not hire me to sing calypso in it…that will happen sooner or late. Whiskey don’t murder me, Madison Square Garden is where I wind up”
As things turned out, he was not far from the truth. During World War II thousands of US military personal were stationed in Trinidad. It was part of the Destroyers For Bases agreement negotiated between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Returning soldiers, sailors and airmen helped fuel a postwar calypso boom. In 1946, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan charted with “Stone Cold Dead In The Market”, a Wilmoth Houdini composition originally titled “He Had It Coming”. The following year, Houdini headlined CALYPSO!, a showcase at Carnegie Hall which also featured a stick-fighting exhibition and performances by Princess Orelia And Her Native Dancers.
Though the really lucrative gigs were still to come, he was already a local legend in 1930s Harlem. His centrality extended beyond entertainment to the realm of catering. Mitchell describes Houdini arriving with a case of booze and a roasting pan full of pelau – a dish akin to jambalaya, jollof rice, and other delicacies. (A native of the Carolinas, the author adds that it is spelled pilau in Charleston). The singer also extols the virtues of home-brewed ginger beer: “This is the drink that dominates alcohol. Whiskey can go to your feet if you have ginger beer in you, but it can’t go to your head because it’s dominated”.
Over the course of the evening the crowd is serenaded with such melodies as “Daddy Turn On The Light”, “Johnnie Take My Wife” and “Tiger Tom Kill Tiger Cat”. Pausing between sets, Houdini reminisces about 1916, the year he chose – or was chosen by – the calypso life.
Before that, I was just nobody. In the year 1916 a band were organized in Port-of-Spain by a distinguished girl named Maggie Otis. She was Queen of the band. I was King. It was called the African Millionaires. It had twenty-four men and girls. The men wore striped green silk shirts, flannel pants, and white shoes, and each had strung to him a camera, a stuffed crocodile, or a pair of field glasses. That was to ape the rich tourists who come to Trinidad. The girls dressed in a manner likewise. At Mardi Gras, which falls on the two days before Lent, the big stores and companies in Port-of-Spain give prizes of rum and money to the Calypsonian who improvises the best song about their merchandise. In 1916 I had the African Millionaires behind me, and I was inspired to become a Calypsonian…
Houdini is a compelling enough figure that his presence alone makes the article worth reading. But the real triumph of Mitchell’s prose is that, in barely 10 pages, we get a solid survey of calypso in the interwar years. This was the era when the genre came into its own as an artistic and social force. We meet Rufus Callender, a/k/a Lord Caresser, who composed a ballad about Edward VIII’s abdication so he could marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. The erstwhile Monarch is said to have cherished his personal copy of the record.
Of course, not all West Indians were devoted subjects of The Crown. Raymond Quevedo, who performed as Attila the Hun, was often fined or jailed for his critiques of the colonial order. Later, as T&T transitioned to independence, he was elected to various legislative positions. Scathing wit, which calypsonians wielded against government officials and faithless lovers, was also directed against their competitors. Houdini’s feud with Lord Executor (Philip Garcia) produced insulting songs that put money in the pockets of both artists – “diss tracks” avant la lettre.
Frederick Wilmoth Hendricks resided and worked in New York most of his life. After his passing in 1973, he was interred in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Yet his native island remained a font of his creativity: “I have to go back to Trinidad to renew me inspiration. It is like a door that has been shut a long time. The hinge get rusty. But the minute the rust fall off the hinge, the door come back supple again. I have to go back to Trinidad to drop off the rust on me.”
A questionable understanding of oxidation perhaps, but a sentiment any migrant can appreciate. Harlem and Brooklyn, Trinidad and Tobago: Despite decades of change, these places remain bound by ties of finance and family, merriment and music.
“Houdini’s Picnic” was originally printed in the May 6th, 1939 edition of THE NEW YORKER. A slightly different version can also be found in the collection UP IN THE OLD HOTEL, published by Vintage Books
(ISBN 978-0-679-7463-7)
Thanks for our first encounter with the other Houdini. Fascinating!