Porgy's Charleston
Kendra Hamilton
African-American workers at the phosphate mines
along what Heyward called "Meeting House Road"
Dubose Heyward's literary imagination was fired by the "exotic" life he saw all around him--the docks swarming with stevedores and fishermen, the downtown neighborhoods where African-American domestics and doctors lived cheek by jowl with the aristocratic families that formerly commanded their lives and their labor. In Heyward's time, the lives of former slaves and their former owners were circumscribed by a dynamic of proximity and distance--separated by an impassable social gulf, linked by a physical proximity, indeed a physical intimacy, that sharply contested the constraints imposed by the social milieu.
Avery Institute, where the sons and daughters
of the city's black elite were educated
Avery Institute, now a research center
devoted to the collection and preservation of African-American culture,
is located on Bull Street--a tony address only blocks from where Heyward
grew up, the ill-educated scion of a family whose hopes and finances had been
ruined by war and depression. The brown-skinned "strivers" who
attended Avery--the sons and daughters of the pre-war free black elite
as well as Reconstruction-era politicians and businessmen--are all but
absent from Heyward's Porgy.
Aspiration, whether in the case of the lawyer selling phony divorces or
the seductive machinations of the so-called octoroon Sporting Life, is
portrayed in ambiguous terms--as a subject for ridicule or the occasion for
profound social dis-ease. Instead, Heyward concerns himself with the
struggles of the poorest of the poor--or, indeed, the purest of the pure,
"unadulterated Congo blood," as Porgy is described (13).
The pastor and parishioners of Charleston's Morris Street Baptist Church
Heyward's novel opens with a profoundly romantic, antimodernist gesture:
Porgy lived in the Golden Age. Not the Golden Age of a remote and
legendary past; nor yet the chimerical era treasured by every man past middle
life, that never existed except in the heart of youth; but an age when men,
not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten
before it destroyed. (11)
In such lilting prose, time, seasons, love, and murder become elements in a
naturalistic disaster tale stitched together by Heyward's poet's imagination
and the bits of African-American folklore he had gleaned from his black
"Mauma" and the people he observed around him on Charleston's streets
and along the wharves where he worked as a youth, a lowly functionary for a
city cotton factor.
The address believed to be Catfish Row
before its restoration to its former splendor
The novel describes Catfish Row as
...not a row at all, but a great brick structure that lifted its
three stories about the three sides of a court. The fourth side was
partly closed by a high wall, surmounted by jagged edges of broken glass
set firmly in old lime plaster, and pierced in its center by a
wide entrance-way. Over the entrance there still remained a massive
grill of Italian wrought iron, and a battered capital of marble
surmounted each of the lofty gate-posts. The court itself was paved
with large flag-stones, which even beneath the accumulated grime of a
century, glimmered with faint and varying shades in the sunlight. (21)
Heyward's vision of the Row's denizens, especially the saintly beggar
Porgy, sat oddly with the real-life reminiscences of those who remember
"Goat Cart Sam" as a drinking, gambling bogeyman whose specter was
invoked to frighten youngsters into good behavior. It was to sit even more
oddly in contrast to the visions invoked ...
Catfish Row on Broadway--the first Gershwin production
...by the Broadway...
Catfish Row in Samuel Goldwyn's 1959 film version
... and Hollywood dream factories.
Heyward never saw the lovely Dorothy Dandridge play Bess. But he often complained that the actresses chosen for the various stage versions never came close to his original conception of the character.
[Maria] was in the act of fastening the window, when the tall, gaunt form
of [a] woman lurched through the door into the faint illumination of the
smoking lamp...The woman raised her head. An ugly scar marked her left cheek,
and the acid of utter degradation had etched hard lines about her mouth; but
the eyes into which human consciousness was returning looked fearlessly into
the determined face of the big negress...
"Who lib in dat room 'cross the way?".
"Porgy,", she was informed, "but such as yuh ain't gots no use
fuh he..." (52-4)
Indeed, it would require a stretch of the imagination to imagine Dandridge enacting this scene:
One morning while she was doing her marketing on the wharf, one of
the river men who had known her in the past, hailed her too familiarly. He
was at that moment stepping from the round top of a ladder on to the wharf.
"How 'bout ternight?" he asked with a leer.
She was holding a string of whiting her her left hand, and was hanging upon
the final penny of a bargain with the fishman. She half turned, and delivered
a resounding slap with her right hand. The man staggered backward, hung for
a moment, then vanished. There was a tremendous splash from the shallow
water. (77-8)
Both stage and screen had better luck with Sporting Life, the city slickster whose machinations doom the happiness of Porgy and Bess.
"It Ain't Necessarily So,"
from the Gershwin stage version
Sportin' Life lifted his elegant trousers, so that the knees would not bag,
and squatted on the flags at [Bess's] side. He removed his stiff straw hat,
with its bright band, and spun it between his hands. The moonlight was full
upon his face, with its sinister, sensuous smile....
He poured a little pile of white powder into [her hand]. There it lay in the
moonlight, very clean and white on her dark skin. "Happy dus!" she
said, and her voice was like a gasp. (81-3)
Many models for this trickster figure existed already in the American imagination--from the earliest minstrels to Cab Calloway, who also played the role on Broadway, and beyond. But much that was in Heyward's vision defied the conventional codes of portrayals of African-American life of the times--and so had to be invented, in ways that would have astounded the people upon whose lives the inventions were based.
A headline from the Charleston News and Courier
Thus the poignancy of Anna Hamilton's lament: "Goat Cart Sam, Goat Cart Sam, dead and gone and they still making money off him."