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By Ruth Feldstein

In February, fans learned that Diahann Carroll had withdrawn from A Raisin in the Sun. The most recent revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning 1959 drama opened in April, and is now nominated for five Tony awards. Carroll relinquished her role as Lena Younger, the widowed matriarch in an African-American family living on the South Side of Chicago, due to the “demands of the vigorous rehearsal schedule and the subsequent eight-performances-a-week playing schedule,” according to a spokesperson for Raisin. The 78-year-old Carroll’s choice is easy to understand, but it also invites the question — what kind of Lena Younger might Carroll have been? How would an actress long known for her elegance and haute couture wardrobe have shed the trappings of high fashion to take on the part of a working class black mother who wants to use her dead husband’s insurance money to buy a home and improve the life of her family?

Last August, when the news broke that Carroll and Denzel Washington would have lead roles in this version of Raisin—with Carroll as mother to Washington’s Walter Lee Younger—much was made of their combined star power and the iconic Carroll’s return to Broadway for the first time in 30 years (as well as Washington’s age; the 59-year old portrays a much younger man, though the character has “aged” in this version). In some ways, though, it’s hard to know why the producers looked to Carroll in the first place. Carroll is older than most actresses who have played Lena Younger. Even more, ever since a still-teenage Carol Diahann Johnson changed her name to Diahann Carroll and left the home of her middle class parents, she has been known as a “chic chanteuse.” The link between Carroll and glamour became entrenched as her career ascended: when she sang at the Persian Room or the Plaza Hotel in the late 1950s, in her role as a high class and well-dressed model in the Broadway show No Strings in 1962 (for which she earned a Tony award), and when she portrayed a respectable, and well-dressed school teacher who travels to Paris with her white friend in the film Paris Blues in 1964 (alongside costars Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, and Joanne Woodward). But the singer and actress soared to national prominence with Julia, a television series that ran from 1968-1971. Here Carroll was cast as the well-dressed middle class nurse and widowed mother of a young boy (her husband was killed in Vietnam). Julia was one of the first television series in which a black woman had a starring role and was not a maid or domestic. The show was an opportunity for Carroll to gain unprecedented exposure on a number-one ranking series — one that was “slightly controversial” she said, because it integrated the living rooms of white audiences through television, but was not controversial enough to “interfere with the ratings.”

If Julia cemented Carroll’s reputation as a barrier-breaking international celebrity, it also in some senses profoundly limited her career. Indeed, the first time Carroll played against type after Julia, her efforts had mixed results. In 1974, she starred in Claudine. The film was set in Harlem, and Carroll portrayed the 36-year-old single mother of six on welfare who struggles to combine motherhood and romance (with James Earl Jones, as garbage man Rupert Marshall). Claudine was notable for its critique of a welfare system that policed working class black women, and its portrayal of a single black mother who loves and cares for her children even if she also curses and beats her daughter in one scene. More remarkably, for the time, the film showed that a poor black unmarried woman could be sexually active and a good mother. With its largely African American cast and urban landscape, and with a contemporary soundtrack featuring Gladys Knight and the Pips, Claudine stood out as a rare alternative to the more violent and (mostly) male-centered blaxploitation films that were popular in the early 1970s. A critic in the Chicago Defender applauded it as a film that could “uplift” those who had “been ignored on film until now, the ADC mother” (ADC was the acronym for Aid to Dependent Children, and shorthand for welfare in that era). Carroll’s performance as Claudine earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in a leading role—only the fourth time a black woman had ever been nominated in that category.

But fans and critics were divided in their response to Carroll, precisely because the role was such a departure. Some applauded her for being willing and able to take on the role of Claudine. (She inherited the part from actress Diana Sands, ill with cancer in the 1970s but who had starred in the original production of Raisin in 1959, another link between Claudine and Raisin.) A “deglamorized Diahann Carroll is surprisingly effective as a 36-year old city wise and world weary mother who battles welfare department bureaucracy,” wrote one reviewer. Many more came to the opposite conclusion, asserting that Carroll did not have the life experiences to represent working class black women and could not tell their stories with any degree of authenticity. “Even without makeup, she still looks and acts like Julia,” wrote one; Time attacked the star for a “slumming expedition by a woman best known for playing the upwardly mobile Julia on TV.” With her family’s middle class background and her long association with well-dressed and glamorous heroines, Carroll simply could not “presume to speak for all black women.” The Oscar nomination was a significant milestone, but it did not open many doors thereafter; Carroll later said that she felt that her career floundered after Claudine.

Certainly, the question of who gets to tell black women’s stories is no less fraught in 2014 than it was in 1974—as critiques of the film The Help (2011) for hijacking black women’s voices, protests that actress Zoe Saldana is not the right artist to portray singer Nina Simone in a forthcoming biopic, and more recent debates about Beyoncé all begin to suggest. For decades, Diahann Carroll has been at the center of these debates—from her role as a model in an interracial romance in the Broadway play No Strings, to her role as Dominque Deveraux on the nighttime soap opera Dynasty in the 1980s– the “first black bitch on television” as Carroll herself put it. Would Carroll have encountered the same resistance today that she did forty years earlier? Would she have been able to navigate that chasm between her off-stage aura of glamour and an on-stage role of a weary yet strong working class woman who dreams about owning a home more easily in 2014 than she did in 1974? And would media-savvy audiences today, tuned into the ways that any public person is always performing some version of him or herself, have been more open to Carroll and what she could have brought to Lena with her decades of stardom than they were to the former “Julia” when she transformed into the working class Claudine? I respect Carroll’s choice to withdraw from Raisin, and the splendid Latanya Richardson Jackson has infused the part of Lena Younger with a humanity and dignity. But with the Tony awards season underway and with Carroll’s under-rated but sensitive and subversive portrayal of a poor black woman in the film Claudine in mind, I also can’t help but regret what we’ve all missed out on.

Ruth Feldstein is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of How it Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement.

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I promised you, when I began my month of poetry posts, that I'd be moving from poem to poem, and that the poems would somehow be interrelated. And I grant you that the relationship between T.S. Eliot and Lewis Carroll is tenuous, and that the connection between "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Lobster Quadrille" is not immediately apparent. But allow me to explain myself. See, when I was looking at "Prufrock" again, trying to sort out what lines or themes really spoke to me, a few things popped out. Not the usual favorites ("the mermaids singing, each to each", the yellow fog in its cat-like state, or "I grow old . . . I grow old . . . /I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled"), but the oft-repeated line, "Let us go then, you and I". And I got to thinking about that line, and suddenly, in my head, popped the chorus of "The Lobster Quadrille", which sums up much of what poor Prufrock is going on about: "Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?" Et voilà.

The Lobster Quadrille
by Lewis Carroll

"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail.
"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance!
They are waiting on the shingle - will you come and join the dance?
    Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
    Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?

"You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!"
But the snail replied "Too far, too far!" and gave a look askance -
Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.
  Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.
  Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.

"What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied.
"There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
The further off from England the nearer is to France -
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
  Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
  Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?"


I promise you faithfully that I did not re-read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland all that many times, yet the poems and songs from it (and from Through the Looking Glass) turn up again and again. I am convinced that this is because Carroll is such a master when it comes to wordplay and to metre. His poems tend to stick the way music sticks, in part because of his clever use of repetition, rhythm and rhyme.

As for "The Lobster Quadrille", some say it's a parody of "The Spider and the Fly" by Mary Howitt, which begins "'Will you come into my parlor?' said the spider to the fly." It's not actually a parody, although it borrows the metre, and the first lines are related. Why? There was a well-known tune at the time for "The Spider and the Fly", and it was a cue to folks who knew the tune to sing "The Lobster Quadrille" to the same tune, which would have made the Quadrille catchier still. (You can find a version of "The Spider and the Fly" sung by Robin Hendrix at various internet sources, and can hear snippets of what that song sounded like.)

The lines of the stanzas for the verse are written in fourteeners (although in the first stanza, there's an additional beat in the first two lines), each line having four stressed syllables (which would fall on the beat in 4/4 or "common" time, and each line beginning with a pickup of either an 8th note (1 beat) or 2 16th notes (2 syllables)). The poem is exceptionally musical, and is written in rhymed couplets. Each verse includes a chorus, with a variant of the chorus for the middle stanza.

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First the poem, then some chat.

Jabberwocky
by Lewis Carroll

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I did not learn this poem as a child, which is a shame. Also, a bit of a shock, since as an adult I learned that it is one of my mother's all-time favorite poems. I never even knew she had favorite poems!

As I was looking through my Annotated Alice, I spied this poem. I was sure I'd posted it before, but I was wrong. I've posted a review of a picture book edition illustrated by Christopher Myers, and I've posted about nonsense poems before, but I've never posted the text. And 2009 seems like a good time to remedy that situation.

Form and function

The poem opens and closes with the same stanza: what starts as an introduction forms almost a benediction at the end. Each stanza is cross-rhymed (ABAB). The first three lines of each stanza have 8 syllables (4 roughly iambic feet), and the fourth line has 6 (3 feet). The poem was intended by its author to be a condemnation/satire of pretentious poetry, a poke at literary critics, and a sort of warning along the lines of "how not to write a poem", but it quickly earned its own reputation, and is one of the best-known and widely-referenced poems in the English language (to the extent that all those portmanteau and nonsense words count as English).

Why this poem rocks for kids

During school visits where I've come in to teach kids about poetry, I frequently open my presentation by reciting (nay, performing) this poem from memory. I do this for several reasons: 1) it's fun; 2) I love this poem; 3) nothing grabs kids' attention more quickly than launching into something that makes them pause long enough to say (or think) "what the hell?", because when they pause, they fall silent and start listening and paying attention, trying to sort things out - it's so much more fun (and interesting) than opening with "now boys and girls, please quiet down so I can lecture you"; and 4) this poem makes kids feel really smart.

But wait, Kelly, you say - what's with that last one? Didn't you just acknowledge how confusing and strange this poem is? You betcha - and yet, if you sit and listen to it all the way through, you can sort out the story. I have confidence in you, you see, because kids as young as first grade have sorted this one out for me. Now, not all first and second graders get it all the way right, but as a whole, a class of kids will totally get this poem, which has lots of action (some of it mildly horrifying, which is better still). And they adore the wordplay in it. In some cases, the younger kids are better with the portmanteau words and nonsense words in the poem than older kids or grownups are. My theory is that this is so because there are just so many, many words that they don't yet know the meaning of that they don't spend as much time thinking "hey! that's not a real word!" Also? Because I actually do perform the poem as opposed to simply reciting it, I incorporate "standing and thinking" poses and swashbuckling and head-carrying actions into what I'm doing, so the visual cues probably help, too.

While I do not have a large cast, and I generally pantomime carrying a severed head, this skit from The Muppet Show does a pretty good job at reflecting the actions described in the poem:

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Let me open this review by opining, although I've never met him, that Christopher Myers must have balls of steel. Only such an explanation is possible for his clever audacity in reimagining Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, "Jabberwocky"*, as being set in a concrete playground, where the battle involving a vorpal blade is rendered as a fierce, stylized game of one-on-one between mismatched ballers.

If you don't know of what I am speaking, check out the cover, which features "the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame":

For those of you who need a refresher in the Jabberwocky* text, I recommend you check out the text online. Longtime readers know I'm a Carroll fan, and that I've posted about nonsense words before.

Now, I should add that Christopher Myers has not monkeyed with Carroll's text, but has merely moved its venue. Check out this splendid spread, for instance, which shows part of the battle in the heart of the poem ("One, two! One, two! and through and through,/the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!/He left it dead, then with its head/he went galumphing back"):



But that is not to say that Christopher Myers didn't add some text to the book. Because at the end of the book, he added some text, which may be my very favorite part of the book, meaning absolutely no slight at all towards his poster-like, primary-based, primal pictures. (Zounds! Alliteration!) Myers added an endnote, which I only wish I could reprint in its entirety, in which he explains how he came to set the battle on a basketball court. He explains how he met with lots of members of the Lewis Carroll Society, and examined Charles Lutwide Dodgson's (aka Carroll's) original diaries, where he found the Mesoamerican word 'ollamalitzli' scribbled in the margins. (Those of you who've been to Chichen Itza know what ollamalitzli is — it's the field sport in which teams try to get a ball through a stone circle mounted high on the walls while preventing the other team from scoring; captain of the winning team gets decapitated to honor the gods.)

I loved this note for how well-written it was and how well-researched it sounded. And really, since Dodgson was involved with the folks who created the Oxford English Dictionary, it didn't seem to me to be beyond the pale that a word like ollamalitzli would appeal to him, had he ever heard it. But the fact is that he may not have. In fact, a wee bit of controversy about the endnote broke out in the New York Times, of all places, after the extremely talented J. Patrick Lewis reviewed the book, and discussed the endnote. Turns out that Myers was just joshing, in a smart-ass way that Carroll would have enjoyed.

The first response printed in the December 2, 2007 issue came from the communications director for the Lewis Carroll Society, who tersely stated that there was no such word in the margins, and then opined that pretending to know what the poem was "about" was naughty (more or less— you can judge for yourself by reading the response here). The LCS response is followed by a letter from Christopher Myers, who has won my undying adoration for the content of his letter, which I've quoted in its entirety below:

To the Editor:

In the author's note of my illustrated version of "Jabberwocky," I suggested that Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was undoubtedly familiar with an Aztec ritual sport called ollamalitzli, a sort of proto-basketball. I wrote the author's note in a particularly nonsensical mood, in keeping with the spirit of whimsy found both in Carroll's original poem and in his varied and inconsistent explanations thereof. I thanked for their assistance several fictional members of fictional divisions of the Lewis Carroll Society, including the L.C.S.'s of Mogadishu, Kashmir and Bed-Stuy, again in the spirit of all things droll.

Since the publication of my version of "Jabberwocky" and the subsequent review and praise published by yourselves (thank you very much), a number of strange events have occurred. My neighbors on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn have reported a man in a top hat snooping around my building. Three men with sideburns and a woman with a parasol asked after me at my corner bodega. I suspect that these nefarious Victorians may be emissaries of the Lewis Carroll Society seeking to confront me. While I delight in Carrollian visions of fancy, I am dismayed by the darker side of Victorian life.

Surely the gracious, learned and well-humored members of the Lewis Carroll Society understand the spirit we all appreciate so much, which I have tried to embrace in the book. However, I wish to note, in the public eye, my suspicions regarding zealous Victorians in case some ghastly fate should befall me and I am found trussed up like something out of "The Mikado."

Many thanks to those who have appreciated the book.

Other reasons to love Christopher Myers, besides his illustrations for Jabberwocky and other books, such as the lovely Jazz, written by his father, Walter Dean Myers (who said in LA that he was forced to use Christopher as an illustrator because Walter was "sleeping with his (Chris's) mother") include this interview at Reading Rockets, which you can read or even watch online. My favorite part? "Reading is not like going to Hawaii", for reasons which will become obvious if you take a few minutes to read it.

All of this has been a rather large digression. Myers's illustrated version of Jabberwocky is decidedly a new spin on a poem which generations of kids have loved. His illustrations bring this poem to the attention of a new generation and/or make readers think about this poem in a different way, which is all fine by me. But it sure took some cojones to do it.

*Jabberwocky is from Carroll's second Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

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