A Breezy Chameleon, Blurring Social Borders
When the literary scholar George Hutchinson was in the archives at Howard University one afternoon a decade ago, he thought he knew which story of a neglected African-American woman writer he was chasing.
He was at work on a biography of Nella Larsen, whose classic Harlem Renaissance novel “Passing” was rediscovered in the 1970s. But while poking around, Mr. Hutchinson noticed a listing for the papers of Anita Thompson Dickinson Reynolds, an obscure contemporary of Larsen’s, and decided to take a look.
There, amid a jumble of letters and cassette tapes, lay an unpublished memoir breezily recounting the Zelig-like adventures of a woman who had starred in some of the first black films made in Hollywood, mingled with the Harlem Renaissance elite, been drawn by Man Ray and Matisse in Paris and touched down in Spain during its Civil War, before packing up her Chanel dresses and heading home to a more conventional life as a psychologist.
It was a story of passing stranger than anything Larsen had imagined, recounted with uncommon sexual frankness and blithe disregard for racial barriers. “I was fascinated by the way she threaded together all these different worlds, with this total nonchalance,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a recent interview. “I had never read anything like it.”
Previously, Reynolds’s name had survived mainly in a few scattered footnotes. But now, Harvard University Press is publishing her memoir, as “American Cocktail: A ‘Colored Girl’ in the World.”
Extensively notated by Mr. Hutchinson, a professor at Cornell University, the book is no one’s idea of a literary masterpiece or a work of trenchant social criticism. In a foreword, the legal scholar Patricia Williams calls out Reynolds — a stunning beauty with nearly white skin — for name dropping, racial opportunism and a calculating manner “uncomfortably reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara in full curtains-into-evening-gown mode.”
For all that, it’s a striking addition, scholars say, to the still-small shelf of published memoirs by African-American women of the early 20th century.
“She tries on all sorts of identities the way someone else might take clothes on and off,” said Carla Kaplan, the author of “Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance.” “She brings the perspective of a black woman who felt like she belonged anywhere, but could alter the meaning of her blackness at will.”
Anita Thompson was born in 1901 into a politically engaged middle-class African-American family. Langston Hughes was a cousin; guests at the family home in Los Angeles included Booker T. Washington and W. E. B Du Bois (who may have been her first lover). “I’m afraid you have a little Bolshevik on your hands,” Du Bois once told Anita’s mother, who replied, “Oh, she’ll dance it out of her system eventually.”
Reynolds’s unapologetic party-girl tone suggests that’s what happened. In early-1920s Hollywood, she attended Charlie Chaplin’s “anarchist” meetings, studied dance with Ruth St. Denis, played an Arab servant girl in “The Thief of Bagdad” and starred in one of the earliest black-produced films, “By Right of Birth,” in 1921, about a black girl whose adoptive white parents conceal her racial origins. (One of her climactic lines in the film, recounted in the memoir with a literary eye roll: “My god, I’m a Negro!”)
Later, in New York, she traveled easily between the mostly white bohemia of Greenwich Village and the clubs and salons of Harlem, seemingly meeting everyone who was anyone. (When she felt like it, that is: She declined an invitation to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s house on the grounds that “the newly rich Irish and arriving Southamptoners” were “rather dull and unintelligent, I’d heard.”) She soon moved on to Paris and then the expatriate colony in Morocco, along the way collecting lovers, several aborted writing projects and a torrent of acquaintances with droppable names, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Claude McKay, Paul Bowles, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, Picasso and Coco Chanel.
Wherever she went, she was buoyed by her ambiguous beauty, never actively denying her racial identity but allowing lovers and others to see her variously as American Indian, East Indian, “high yaller,” “wild baby,” “part Cherokee,” “brown-skinned,” “yellow peril” or “sugar cane,” to cite just a few terms cataloged in the memoir.
“Usually, when asked, I said I was an ‘American cocktail,’ ” she writes of her days in France, adding, “The ‘cocktails’ were often welcome in many places where white Americans were not.”
Reynolds, who had no children, began working on the memoir in the late 1970s, with the help of a young journalist named Howard M. Miller, whom she met in the Virgin Islands, where she spent her last years. (She died in 1980.) It was a moment of booming interest in female African-American writers, thanks to the success of authors like Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston, whose books, like Nella Larsen’s, were brought back after decades of obscurity. But no publisher was interested in the life of an unknown woman whose blurred racial identity and preoccupation with parties over politics seemed out of step with the times.
“There was more interest in African-Americans as famous heroes or as victims overcoming racism,” Mr. Miller, now a professor of education at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., recalled recently. “Here was somebody no one had heard of, who moved very happily in all her worlds.”
Today, Reynolds’s tendency to focus on silverware and wallpaper over the struggle for racial justice can make for exasperating reading. “I feel a little guilty,” she writes, “saying how much fun I have had being a colored girl in the 20th century.”
But to Mr. Hutchinson, it was precisely her refusal to be pinned down racially or politically that makes her such a useful observer. “If she hadn’t been the kind of person she was, she wouldn’t have been able to move through all these different worlds,” he said.
“She was the kind of person who was always gazed at, who inspired drawings and characters in novels,” he continued. “But here you see her telling the story of her own life exactly how she wanted to tell it.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 17, 2014, on page C1 of the New York Times.