“Bright and Good Looking Colored Girl”: Black Women’s Sexuality and “Harmful Intimacy” in Early-Twentieth-Century New York

Abstract

AIABEL HAMPTON'S EXPERIENCES IN early-twentieth-century Harlem quite measured up to popular image that many New Yorkers (and later world) held of black neighborhood. In 1924, as twenty-one-year-old resident, she knew that visitors from other parts of city would go to the night-clubs . . . and dance to such jazz music as [could] be heard nowhere else, that region's major thoroughfares like Lenox and Seventh avenues were never deserted, while various skipp[ed] from one place of amusement to another.' Those crowds of primarily middle-class white voyeurs, fulfilling their own ideas about primitiveness and authenticity of black life, enjoyed and came to expect Harlem's 'hot' and 'barbaric' jazz, risque lyrics and 'junglelike' dancing of its cabaret floor shows, and all its other 'wicked' delights.^ As one black observer noted, after a visit to Harlem at night, partygoers believed that town never sle[pt] and that inhabitants . . . jazz[ed] through existence.' Hampton's everyday life, however, failed to coincide with these romandcized and essentialized stereotypes of black entertainment and urban life. A southern migrant, domestic worker, and occasional chorus