In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior (10 page)

Within months, Luisa Sanchez’s premonition had come true: Elvera was pregnant, and the father of her unborn child was dancer Sammy Davis. Luisa Sanchez had never laid eyes on the man. To stave off some of the shame of being pregnant and unwed, Elvera eloped with the dancer. (It was not unusual for chorus girls to be spirited away for abortions while on the road, but Elvera’s Catholicism forbade any consideration of an abortion.) The two quickly married in Washington, D.C., in a bare-bones courthouse ceremony. Mastin allowed her to continue to dance as long as she could: she needed the money.

If there was a consistent theme among the Sanchez women, it was independence—and their ability to survive. They tiptoed across no streams, choosing to run and splash where others might have gingerly stepped.

Only when Elvera could no longer dance because of her pregnancy did she return home to Harlem, leaving her husband on the road.

She returned as Elvera Davis. And when she came back to Harlem in 1925, Harlem was still in the swooning grip of its cultural renaissance. A new book was arriving in bookstores called
The New Negro
. Published by Boni & Liveright—publishers of Sigmund Freud and T. S. Eliot—the book, which garnered immediate national attention, featured an array of Negro writers and essayists, among them Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Jessie Faucet, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Countee Cullen. It seemed nothing less than a gathering of the best Negro talent in the country. The book had its genesis in March of that year when the entire issue of
Survey Graphic
—an awkwardly titled sociology magazine—had been devoted to writings about race. The editor of the magazine, as well as the book, was Alain Locke. “
Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers, it is finding a new soul,” Locke wrote in the book’s foreword. “We have, as the heralding sign, an unusual outburst of creative expression. There is renewed race spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart. Justly then, we may speak of this book, embodying these ripening forces as culled from the first fruit of the Negro Renaissance.”

There was a feeling that Locke and his literary brethren had, at long last, offered the keys to unlock the pent-up genius of a people. The birthing of such a movement seemed an almost mystical convergence of raw talent, liberalized theater owners, poets, protesters, and gadflies. The sublime was as beautiful as the irreverent. It was Zora Neale Hurston—the young Negro writer from Florida who would cull much from Harlem—who coined the beguiling term “Niggerati.” DuBois, the social critic who had launched his own literary reputation with the 1903 publication of
The Souls of Black Folk
, had his own niche, editing the
Crisis
, the influential magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes were all working on book-length projects.

The New Negro movement, to be sure, had its white patrons, none more iconoclastic than Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten dressed beautifully, wrote novels, and contributed articles to
Vanity Fair
. A native Iowan, Van Vechten was both married and homosexual. He collected photos of Negro males in the nude and was rarely without his silver flask. His downtown apartment—adorned with eye-catching artwork—attracted the likes of Theodore Dreiser, Paul Robeson, Tallulah Bankhead, and George Gershwin. It was Van Vechten who brought Langston Hughes’s poetry to the attention of
Vanity Fair
editors, and it was Van Vechten who introduced many a Negro writer to downtown publishers. He allowed as to how his attraction to Negroes and their way of life had been “
almost an addiction.” One Van Vechten party was notable for a
much-talked-about outburst. Blues singer Bessie Smith was there. Generous amounts of alcohol had been consumed. Farina Marinoff, wife of Van Vechten, tried to kiss Smith as she was leaving. A simple, friendly kiss. “
Get the fuck away from me. I ain’t never heard of such shit!” Smith bellowed, twisting her body, making a fuss.

Harlem seemed a kind of loose and fevered narcotic. And everyone seemed to want a little piece of the place—to hear Ellington’s band, to see Ethel Waters, to read Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, to listen to big Coleman Hawkins blow his sax, to spy the wondrous chorus girls in all their beauty. “
Damn it man,” the white writer Sherwood Anderson wrote to H. L. Mencken of the mystique of Harlem, “if I could really get inside the niggers and write about them with some intelligence, I’d be willing to be hanged later and perhaps would be.”

Elvera Sanchez would have to wait to partake of Harlem’s glories now. She had a baby to deliver.

Pregnant women in Harlem went to Harlem General Hospital to have their babies. In the early 1920s the hospital, referred to as “the butcher shop,” had come under attack by Negroes for what many felt was mistreatment. It was often overcrowded. At times patients lay for hours on gurneys in hallways. After heated protest, the hospital hired its first Negro doctors in 1925.

It was at Harlem General Hospital on December 8, 1925, that twenty-year-old Elvera Davis gave birth to her first child, a son. She named him Sammy, after his father. Shortly after the birth, Elvera took her son home, where she took up temporary residence with her mother. There was something rather strange about the newborn child of Elvera and Sammy Davis: he had facial hair. No one knew what it meant. Those who saw the oddity of it were both bemused and perplexed. There were superstitious friends of the Sanchez family who believed the facial hair meant the newborn was destined to become a prophet.

They were young parents, and they were hoofers. The father was out on the road, earning a living. Thus their first child was suddenly webbed between their dreams and—for the moment at least—suspended in the shadows of those very dreams: a Jazz Age baby.

Elvera Davis’s sister, Julia, and their mother, Luisa, helped her during those early weeks of motherhood. But Elvera was not very keen on taking on the duties of a young mother. In fact, she itched to get back on the road. Will Mastin kept a spot in the revue for her, and, not long after the birth of her child, she went back out on the road. Her infant son was left with family friends in Brooklyn.

The Mastin vaudeville troupe kept moving. Mastin not only produced the shows—which meant, among other duties, he dispensed the pay and meal money—he acted in them. A production in 1927 was titled
Struttin’ Hannah
from Savannah
. In this particular production Elvera Sanchez appeared in the credits as “El Vera” Sanchez, a stylistic flourish having suddenly been added to the presentation of her name.
Struttin’ Hannah
—featuring a sixteen-member cast (among them a contortionist and banjoist) and an eight-member chorus—was about a couple bickering over a particular number to be played in the numbers racket. The action took place in both New Orleans and Harlem. There was chicanery, an arrest, and marital discord. There was, of course, a villain. He was played by Will Mastin.

Back in New York, Sammy, the baby, remained with friends of Elvera’s. The arrangement bothered Rosa Davis, the baby’s paternal grandmother. Rosa—who knew very little about her new daughter-in-law—worked as a cook for a white family in Brooklyn. A large and stout woman, she was also no-nonsense. The streets of New York could be tricky and dangerous, so Rosa Davis carried a small pistol with her wherever she went. “I never saw Rosa without the little gold-plated pistol in her pocket,” remembers Virginia Capehart, her friend. Her grandchild was now with strangers, and the more time passed—days and days, then weeks—the more pained she became concerning his whereabouts. So one day Rosa went to retrieve the child.

She spent a fretful amount of time knocking on the wrong doors. When she finally found the right apartment, she was aghast at what she saw. Little Sammy was on the floor. He was dirty. A dog jumped about. Rosa took the baby over to a sink, put her pistol on the countertop, warned that not a soul should interrupt her, and bathed the baby. Then she clothed him and took him home to Harlem with her.

Times were indeed hard for the North Carolina–born Rosa Davis. She was estranged from her husband and rarely mentioned the man. Now and then, friends of her dancer son would drop by to slip a little money to her. She hoarded her dollar bills and often struggled to make ends meet. But she stayed too busy to fret about financial woes. She sold moonshine on the side, at times strolling with the baby buggy—little Sammy inside—down the streets of Harlem with bottles of the moonshine noisily bouncing around beneath the child, where they were hidden.

Rosa hardly minded the presence of her grandchild. Matter of fact, she doted on him. There was a Victrola record player in her apartment. She would play records, and little Sammy, holding on to the bed, would try to catch a beat, to take a step. She would beam at the tiny child, his sticklike legs bending to the music’s syncopated rhythm. When Rosa had to run a quick errand and had no one to watch Sammy, she would simply lay him down on the floor, nail his gown to it, grab her keys, then rush out, hurrying back as fast as she could.

One of the few surviving pictures of Sammy Davis, Jr., before he was swept up into vaudeville. The smile seems so unrehearsed, so genuinely childlike. Yet, it also leaps at the camera
.
(
COURTESY STEVE BLAUNER
)

During her forays back into Harlem to see her son, Elvera sensed a coldness from her mother-in-law. They never established a rapport. Elvera believed it had something to do with the prickly and quietly explosive issue of skin color.

Although no one born had any choice in the matter, skin color was a rich commodity in Harlem, and in many other Negro enclaves in America. The lighter the skin on a particular Negro, it seemed, the less threatening that Negro was seen in society. Elvera and the showgirls she traveled with often carried
skin-lightening cream with them. During auditions, the eyes of the white nightclub owners seemed to land quickly upon lighter-skinned dancers. More often than not, it took a huge amount of poise to deal with the conundrum.

The arc of the dilemma could be traced back to slavery, when dark-skinned Negroes were, for the most part, resigned to field work, while light-skinned Negroes were given the “better” duties such as cook and maid on the plantation. (It all sprang, of course, from miscegenation, whites having had their fill of black women during slavery. Someone once asked President Warren Harding about rumors of black blood in his family: “
How do I know? Maybe one of my ancestors jumped the fence.”)

It was no coincidence that many of the chorus girls in Harlem—like Elvera Davis—were light-skinned. Advertisements appeared in Harlem newspapers—and in many other Negro publications across the country, such as the
Chicago Defender
, the
Pittsburgh Courier
, the
Baltimore Afro-American
—for skin ointments that promised to lighten one’s skin. The ads often appeared near the theatrical pages. Likewise, it hardly seemed coincidental that throughout the years of Cuban revolution, many Cuban officers were light, while the dark Cubans seemed to be mired in brutish frontline work.

Negroes kept arriving in Harlem, and the arrivals made Luisa Sanchez nervous and suspicious. She did not link art and Negro, poem and Negro, literary renaissance and Negro. Luisa Sanchez, daughter of Enrique Aguiar of the light-skinned ruling class of Cuba, had no affection for the dark-skinned American Negro. “My grandmother was the family beauty,” says her granddaughter Gloria Williams, “and Elvera was second.” Like the Cubans in her father’s native land, Luisa Sanchez had that
miedo al negro
, fear of the black. She had a name for the Negroes outside her Harlem doorsteps seen walking by. She called them “pickaninnies,” remembers Gloria. She uttered the epithet quite often. The attitude could not have helped but infect—in ways casual or otherwise—her two daughters, Elvera and Julia.

Julia Sanchez never married, but she had an affair that yielded Gloria, her only daughter. “My mother did not know he was married,” says Gloria of her father. Julia Sanchez’s lover was so light-skinned that there were those in Harlem who believed him to be white. “He looked white, but he hung out in Harlem,” explains Gloria. Luisa Sanchez hardly minded the man’s ever-so-light skin color. Elvera, however, had married Sammy Davis, an extremely dark-skinned man. “She was rebelling against her mother,” says Gloria.

Luisa Sanchez herself never remarried. “The first husband was traumatic enough,” believes Gloria. “She figured marriage wasn’t an easy institution.” Gloria Williams, decades later, trying to interpret the maternal decisions of her grandmother and mother, seemed at a loss for words: “Families are strange,” she would simply—or not so simply—utter.

Lorelei Fields, a grandniece to Sammy’s mother who knew her great-grandmother Luisa quite well, laments that the women in her family seemed to lack a kind of gentleness. “It didn’t start out as nurturing,” she says, “and that filtered down through generations.”