Highbrown Highbrow

BORN To BE--Taylor Gordon--Covici-Friede ($4). (Introduction by Carl Van Vechten; Foreword by Muriel Draper; Illustrations by Covarrubias).

Taylor Gordon, famed here and abroad for singing spirituals, needs no ghostwriter to tell his story for him. He tends to his own self-expression.

His grandfather was a black chief. His father was a black chef. At their deaths he was raised by his chocolate-brown mother who once slaved in Kentucky's blue grass. She taught small Taylor to knock wood. But one thing she did not teach him. . . .

In the '90s the Gordons were the only Negroes in White Sulphur Springs, Mont. At the Springs was a "sportin' house" Madame. Her name was Big Maude. Unlike her kind, she was not a fighter, could not beat policemen. She was genteel, of noble English descent (her story), and wise. She charged more for drinks than any of her competitors. The miners and farmers marveled at the way her four girls dressed. Big Maude asked Taylor Gordon to work for her. He agreed, ran errands for the girls, served drinks, wore brass buttons and blue coat, received good wages, liked it.

Taylor knew other whites. In a dive, he sold them opium at $1 a paper. Another place was a bowling-alley. When one bowler saw him bunching the pins for the next man, Taylor had to leave through a window. Life was not all work. The white boys had a game "Stray Goose." One boy ran, until caught and pummeled. Taylor helped. When he was 16 he put on a cowboy's costume and strutted to a dance. The girls were nicer than Big Maude's. He began to dream and want money. He told his mother what he had heard of Wall Street. She looked grim, so he ran away to Minneapolis.

Ejected from a restaurant, he soon found out what his mother never taught him, that if you were a nigger you were degraded. The thing to do was find a menial job. You could be a "sweetback" (Negro gigolo). Taylor was not, but he was chauffeur, porter, valet. Later he toured with Circusman Ringling. But he was not satisfied. Something new was growing in him now--he wanted to sing the woes of his race. Like many a Negro he felt a queerly mixed hatred and love of his people.

Will Marion Cook, the Negro Schubert, is fiery, erratic, race-proud. Hearing young Taylor, ambitious, hang on a high note, he kicked him out of Manhattan's famed Clef Club (negro musical organization), shouting: "No can can be a niggah if he sings my music wrong!"

Rosamund Johnson was next, arranger of The Book of American Negro Spirituals, composer on the African five-tone scale, whose voice is like a diapason. Taylor Gordon's is like molasses and a clear bell. They sang together. He trained Taylor.

One night the singer met a novelist, pink-cheeked Carl Van Vechten. He now calls him "the Abraham Lincoln of Negro Art." He met and admired others: Muriel Draper partygoing in a window curtain; Colyumist Heywood Broun lying shirt-sleeved beside his bathtub of cocktails, to receive intelligentsia; Lady Oxford asking Gordon to Black Bottom after singing for royalty. He sang all over the U. S., heard deafening and perplexing applause. Now 36, he muses: "Ho! Ho! ... I wonder what I was born to be?"

The Significance. Author Gordon's story is not typical, as would be the story of a black Southerner consciously striving Northward toward freedom. As a Westerner, blind at first to the burden of his own color, Author Gordon dreamed of the East where he would be a brown, pagan tycoon. He won the East and more as songster, not tycoon. Still pagan, he says: "There are only two things I worship in life, a dollar bill and a pretty girl."

Born to Be's illustrator, young Mexican Miguel de Covarrubias, chiefly known in the U. S. for his drawings in Vanity Fair, monthly smartchart, provides splendiferous and glaring drawings, appropriate to the vibrant story, exhibiting his amazing knack for racial characteristics.