In the scene with Sassafrass and Mitch in their L.A. apartment, Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, which at times can become fantastic or unreal, grounds itself in historical figures. Sassafrass makes “macrame hangings” of “Malcolm…Fidel, Garvey, Archie Shepp, and Coltrane” and wants to share but is forced to hide the “sequin-and-feather hanging shaped like a vagina, for Josephine Baker” (Shange 69). The artistic and political statements of Archie Shepp and Josephine Baker in the 1960s provide information to give a reading of the repeated phrase “the slaves who are ourselves” (Shange 23).
Archie Shepp, a jazz saxophone player, made this artistic statement that was printed in a 1965 avant-garde music publication, CHANGE/1:
“It might seem strange to some to see the word jazz mentioned in context with such cold hard realities as society and economics; yet it is an undeniable fact that the very origins of the music itself and all its subsequent development was rooted in societal forms. The field holler, the spiritual, the blues, each served a definite function and grew out of very real, very painful experiences….For us, music is functional as well as aesthetic. The Artist presumes to judge life, to assess it for all men, to accept it, to reject it….We take our place beside those poets of the field. Only the nuances of language have changed. The same essential longing for dignity over despair is still with us” (Shepp).
Shepp’s connection between the music of slaves, to spirituals, blues, and black jazz gives a richer meaning to Uncle John’s refrain about “the slaves who are ourselves” (Shange 23). If Shepp’s art is “functional as well as aesthetic,” and by extension Mitch’s music is too, where does that leave Josephine Baker and Sassafrass’s ode to her?
Josephine Baker moved from St. Louis to Paris where she found enormous success as an artistic dancer. She is the reality of a black female artist in the limelight in the early to mid nineteenth-century. When Sassafrass creates her hanging for Josephine, Mitch derides it “because it wasn’t proper for a new Afrikan woman to make things of such a sexual nature” (Shange 69). Mitch here silences Sassafrass’s attempt to honor one of her heroines. Although Baker was the head of a Parisian artistic movement, Mitch denigrates this female art form that references “her hip-thrusting, jello-limbed act” because of it’s female-sexed attributes (Glover). Mitch implies that the erotic-hued success of Baker was not as honorable as the freedom in a sax solo.
When Josephine Baker returns to the US after years abroad, she is startled by Jim Crow laws. Baker was one of two women to speak at the March on Washington in 1963. About her return to the US, she says, “So then they thought they could smear me, and the best way to do that was to call me a communist. And you know, too, what that meant. Those were dreaded words in those days, and I want to tell you also that I was hounded by the government agencies in America, and there was never one ounce of proof that I was a communist. But they were mad. They were mad because I told the truth. And the truth was that all I wanted was a cup of coffee” (Baker). The coffee reference relates back to a prior moment in the speech where Baker says she had walked into kings and queen’s palaces abroad, but in the US, she “could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee” (Baker). From this piece of Baker’s speech, there are more similarities between Baker’s art and Shepp’s art than Mitch would like to believe.
“The Slaves who are ourselves” resonates with the Shepp statement because his jazz was similar to field hollers, and resonates with Baker because the US government tries to silence her by calling her a communist (which she was not) in a way that calls back to the rhetoric of slave masters who used language to name their slaves as subhuman beings. Both artists are born into a lineage of despair that leads to artistic achievement and the cry for equal treatment.
Question 1: In Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, music becomes a way for Indigo to access the “unreal,” dance allows Cypress to channel French ballet and movement’s grace, and Sassafrass learns to create material art with her hands thanks to the scholarship from their neighbor, Miz Fitzhugh. How does Shepp’s artistic statement provide an informed reading of Indigo’s otherworldly black musical performances? How does Baker’s political statement provide a reading of Cypress’s dance?
Question 2: Baker states the US was mad that she told the truth, and therefore tried to discredit her voice by calling her a communist. What plot points about sexual desire get silenced in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, why does Shange choose to silence them for the reader, and in what way might black sexual desire be carried through generations in a way similar to how the slave hollers find themselves rushing out of Archie Shepp’s horn?
Baker, Josephine. “(1963) Josephine Baker, ‘Speech at the March on Washington.” Black Past, 03 Nov. 2011, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1963-josephine-baker-speech-march-washington/. Remembering Josephine, Stephen Papich, New York: The Bobbs-Mererill Company, Inc., 1976, pp. 210-213. Accessed 09 Nov. 2020.
Glover, Kaiama L. “Postmodern Homegirl.” The New York Times, 03 June 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/books/review/Glover-t.html?action=click&auth=login-email&login=email&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer. Accessed 09 Nov. 2020.
Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
Shepp, Archie. “A Statement by Archie Shepp.” CHANGE/1, Fall/Winter 1965, http://www.detroitartistsworkshop.com/shepp-archie/. Detroit Artists Workshop, Accessed 09 Nov. 2020.