Racial, gendered and sexualized violence against black women in the Jim Crow South has long remained in the shadows while historians focused on the unequal justice system and the lynching of black men. In “Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans,” LaKisha Michelle Simmons makes the argument that the emotional, physical and sexual violence against black girls required silence and the story has been largely incomplete. On a micro level, she effectively recreates the bordered day-to-day, bodily experiences of black girls in New Orleans – a uniquely segregated city – and shows how the traumatic, sexualized violence of the Jim Crow South affected their coming of age. “Crescent City Girls” also illuminates how Jim Crow laws regulated the boundaries between whites and blacks, denying all blacks full citizenship while sanctioning white domination of Southern geographies.
Using the time frame of 1930 to 1954, when the civil rights movement started to shift the South’s segregated order, Simmons – an assistant professor of global gender studies at the University of Buffalo, SUNY – describes how black girls lived within the boundaries of a “double bind.” They faced not only racial and gendered violence but also constraining demands within the class-stratified black community to be respectable and pure in order to subvert oversexualized “racist narratives of black femininity” (p. 4). The central focus of the book is the ways in which black girls, defined as ages 9 to 20, negotiated internal and external boundaries – racialized and sexualized violence in Jim Crow New Orleans as well as the social constraints imposed by the black community. Simmons persuasively shows how these psychologically damaging restrictions influenced how black girls lived, their subjectivity or process of self-perception, how they navigated or “mapped” their segregated city, their bodily experiences and physical comportment, and how all of these complicated forces impacted their identity, sexuality, sense of acceptance and belonging – and their humanity.
By drilling down into the inner lives of black girls, Simmons had to rely on unusual scholarship to “fill in the silences,” including such sources as oral histories, interviews, African American gender history, girls’ studies, as well as poetry, romantic writings, the black and white press, social workers’ reports, school records, sociologist case studies and research, delinquency home records from such institutions as Convent of the Good Shepherd, and police records. She considers some of these sources flawed because the stories of marginalized people are “built from fractured and incomplete pieces” (p. 10). Despite these challenges, Simmons succeeds in pursuing her historical take on black girls, calling it a political project.
The period of adolescence is crucial to black girls’ psychological development, shaping the kinds of women they will become, contends Simmons. Just as the process of subjectivity is crucial to understanding black girls’ double bind, mental mapping is another important concept in revealing how Jim Crow geographies of exclusion led to self-segregation. There were “colored” spaces and “white” spaces in urban New Orleans. “During Jim Crow, mental maps provided ‘imaginative order’ to black girls’ worlds and helped them form a growing ‘awareness of racialized space’ ” (p. 27). Signs told black girls where they did and didn’t belong; they placed their bodies and their homes on mental maps, which defined their place in the city. They knew which neighborhoods and blocks would put them in greater danger. Simmons notes that in New Orleans, “black children moved about in a topography marked by color and thus had to figure out their ‘place’ in every space they entered” (p. 28). The field of cultural geography helped Simmons understand the racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse Jim Crow city, and she realized that even “the physical placement of buildings revealed black youths’ relationship to power” (p. 11). In the first chapter of the book, she gives readers a clear sense of how mental mapping confined black girls and limited their movement. And within their own community, Simmons notes, poor black girls faced rigid social restrictions because of class and neighborhood stratification – for example, uptown versus downtown children. In fact, the author brings rich detail to her description of different New Orleans neighborhoods – their histories, cultures, racial demographics and reputations.
Throughout the book, Simmons shows how terrorized black girls were by white men in Jim Crow New Orleans. While sex between white women and black men was forbidden, sex between white men and black women was tacitly tolerated, so black girls were especially vulnerable. Giving vivid examples of all levels of sexual abuse, from taunts, insults, street harassment, physical attacks, to rape and even murder, the author shows how fearful black girls were of random acts of violence and violations of their bodies.
She uses the infamous murder of a 14-year-old black girl to illustrate this point. Hattie McCray worked as a waitress only three blocks from her uptown home. On February 10, 1930, an off-duty police officer attempted to rape her, causing her to flee to the kitchen, where “an argument concerning the girl’s chastity ensued” (p. 93) and the officer shot and killed her in front of witnesses. Though the officer, to everyone’s surprise, was found guilty and sentenced to death by an all-white jury, he eventually became a free man some years later after several appeals. But this marked the first time in New Orleans history that a white man got such a verdict for killing a black girl. Though the black and white newspapers interpreted the crime differently, “certain things were clear: this was a sexualized murder, and Charles Guerand killed Hattie McCray because he was denied access to her body” (p. 93). Simmons suggests that the officer was infuriated because he assumed Hattie’s body would be available to him and “he acted on his sexual fantasy through violence” (p. 93). While the white press attempted to preserve the silence of white male violence against black women and girls (the Times-Picayune had “Threatened with Knife” in the headline, indicating that the officer acted in self-defense), Guerand’s conviction brought this kind of sexual violence out from the shadows. Varying reactions to the case in the black and white communities provided key examples of the prerogatives of racial supremacy and the vulnerability of black girls. The white press didn’t acknowledge that Hattie’s girlhood was denied the moment Guerand assumed she was sexually available (p. 97).
Relatedly, Simmons cites an intraracial murder case that illustrates how unprotected black girls were by Jim Crow law. A 16-year-old black girl, Dorothy Jackson, was physically abused by a father who often threatened to kill her. After she ran away from home, her dad killed a young woman with whom he thought his daughter was staying or hiding. Despite eye witnesses and plenty of evidence, Arnold Jackson was acquitted. The authorities then placed Dorothy in a home for wayward girls. Simmons persuasively argues that the white justice system didn’t protect black women and girls from abusive fathers or husbands, bodily violations and “meddling” (p. 56) from both white and black men.
Not as effective is Simmons’ final chapter on the pleasure culture of black girls. Though it sheds light on the notion of “respatialization,” or pushing back against the geography of Jim Crow and rewriting race and space, it appears to be overreaching in its attempt to show that the lives of black girls was not just a vale of tears. I understand that it was important for black girls to find safe spaces where they could be themselves, but I didn’t find her description of the writing culture of romance stories and the dance culture of the YWCA compelling or convincing. However, the separate black and white pleasure cultures of Mardi Gras offered a few surprises, because masking allowed black girls to create “make-believe worlds” in which they were regal, valued and majestic. Masking made way for a new relationship to their bodies and to space (p. 200). Still, racial violence often marred the Mardi Gras celebration.
White racial-sexual domination of space in Jim Crow New Orleans meant black girls remained vulnerable because they always at the bottom of the status hierarchy – below black men. “Crescent City Girls” meets its goal of uncovering the gendered violence of urban segregation and showing how black girls faced the pressure of random violence, abuse and rape while trying to adhere to black middle-class expectations of respectability and purity, how they created mental maps to help them find their way in a city without pity, and how they were able to mark spaces of pleasure. Though the structure of the chapters makes the book a bit repetitive, I would recommend it and say Simmons was successful in taking us into the world of black girls, helping us embody their fears, their struggles, their pain and their pleasures.
By Carol J. Kelly
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