By Constance Garcia-Barrio
“Wild Women and the Blues,” an innovative historical novel by Denny Bryce, intertwines the hazardous life of scrappy, fetching, olive-skinned dancer Honoree Dalcour in 1920s Chicago and the story of Sawyer Hayes, a media studies grad student in 2015. Sawyer has discovered a film clip in his grandmother’s mementos that leads him to the Bronzeville Senior Living Facility where Honoree, now a centenarian, lives.
The clip shows a dazzling young Honoree with Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), a Black cinematographer who made films showing African Americans’ lives with respect and realism, including the injustices they endured.
The documentary Sawyer wants to make centers on the footage he has unearthed. It will fulfill a requirement for his doctorate and could become a notable contribution to cinematography. However, the critical interviews he needs with Honoree threaten to slip through his fingers. For Honoree, 110 and bedridden, time has almost run out, while Sawyer’s shaky finances could also shatter his plans.
Sawyer gets a frigid reception from Honoree’s nurse Lula Kent on his early visits. Lula assumes that Sawyer is a news vampire, out to suck sound bites and images from Honoree.
“One of those obnoxious people from the networks who visit once a year to gawk,” Lula says in the story. Honoree, too, stonewalls Sawyer at first when he shows her a few old photographs.
“In this photo, you are with Oscar Micheaux, the legendary Black filmmaker, and in another … you’re with Louis Armstrong, the world’s greatest trumpeter,” [Sawyer says]. Honoree rocks back against the pillows, eyeing me with a piercing glare.
When Sawyer convinces her that he genuinely values her life story, Honoree begins to share its details.
The daughter of sharecroppers, in 1925, Honoree lives in a one-room flat with a kitchenette, a cot, no bathroom, and no heat. She aims to wrest a more comfortable life from Roaring Twenties Chicago through her spectacular dancing and elegant dressmaking. Just as she begins that climb, she witnesses a murder, which could put her own life in jeopardy.
Tall, handsome Ezekial Bailey, Honoree’s old flame, turns up and tries to protect her. Their love story threads throughout the book, leading to a surprising ending.
The novel evokes the Black Belt neighbor on Chicago’s South Side, where African Americans fleeing segregation and lynchings in the South lived from the turn of the twentieth century to World War II.
The smell of its speakeasies — illegal bars popular during the Prohibition era (1920- 1933) seems to rise from the page: “The Friday night patrons were already zozzled. Neighborhood flappers and floozies packed the joint, laughing and singing and boozing, smoking and sweating.”
Another scene shows that the economy, but not human behavior, has changed. “Giggly chorus girls … [barreled] towards the men lining up to give them a dime to have the girls sit in their laps.”
This scrupulously researched book reflects Chicago’s flourishing Black culture. Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) makes a cameo appearance, as does jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader Lillian Hardin Armstrong (1898-1971), the famed trumpeter’s wife from 1925 to 1931. She orders elaborate gowns from Honoree, who, in turn, gains entrée to better dancing gigs.
Crazy Pete, another minor character hangs around bars and recites poetry by Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906) and Langston Hughes (1901-1967).
The novel also paints the city’s seamy side. The shadow of Al Capone (1899 -1947), of the Chicago Mafia, looms in the background. One of his men is determined to have a fling with Honoree. In addition, Ezekiel, Honoree’s boyfriend, has a hand in the policy game, once a popular form of illegal gambling in Chicago’s Black community.
There is also mention of the Red Summer of 1919, when race riots erupted nationwide, including one in Chicago, destroying Black lives and property.
The story raises issues like colorism among African-heritage Chicagoans. Honoree tells another newly hired showgirl, “…your nose is too broad and you’re two shades too dark” [to succeed as a dancer]. A class divide separates Black newcomers from those who arrived before Emancipation, many of whom belong to “the college [educated] Negro royalty.”
Spicy dialogue adds to the story’s fast pace. A frightened girl is “… shaking like a skinned cat in winter.” Another woman declares that she has “bigger chickens to fry than to get into a bitch brawl with a has-been who never was.”
Above all, the novel zips along with the dual timeline, alternating between Sawyer and Honoree. Sawyer’s viewpoint has an immediacy as he tells his story in first person in the present. Honoree’s wild years, told in the past tense, have a momentum of their own as she begins telling secrets. Tension continues to build as she grows weaker. The book has a satisfying epilogue that ties up loose ends.
“Wild Women and the Blues” brings to mind the life of Alice Barker (1912-2016), a dancer born in Chicago who moved to New York City, a bold step for a young woman in the 1920s. Pretty and talented, Baker became a well-known dancer during the Harlem Renaissance at nightspots like the flashy Zanzibar and the exclusive Cotton Club. A YouTube video shows Barker as a centenarian and her response to footage of herself as a young hoofer, much as happens with Honoree and Sawyer. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUFGzBRWXTI )
In “Wild Women and the Blues,” Bryce has written a multi-layered story packed with history, violence, a long-running love story, and a daring woman, a story to warm one’s winter nights. (Kensington Publishing, 2021)
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