Bricktop

by James Haskins

Hers is the candid, high-spirited story of a scrappy redhead colored girl from West Virginia and Chicago who combined her unerring eye for talent and chich with a uniquely American brashness and an eminently European sophistication to become the toast of two continents.

Genres: Biography, Music, Memoir, France, African American

Paperback

First published August 1, 1983

About the author

Haskins, James (1941–2005), author of nonfiction books for juveniles and adults, biographer, educator, critic, editor, and educational consultant. Born into a large family in a racially segregated middle-class section of Demopolis, Alabama, where he was not allowed to visit the town's public library, James S. Haskins was deeply affected by the swirl of events related to the mid-century civil rights movement. He received his bachelor's degree in history at Alabama State College, but limited career opportunities in the South in the early 1960s led him to seek employment in New York City. Two years of selling newspaper advertisements and working as a Wall Street stockbroker brought him to the realization that he was better suited for a career in education and thus he applied for a position in the New York City public school system. After teaching music at several locations, he found a job teaching a special education class at P.S. 92. Obsessed with the plight of his inner-city pupils, he was glad to discuss their problems with anyone who would listen, including a social worker who encouraged him to write his thoughts and experiences in a diary. This resulted in the publication of his first book, Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher (1969), which was widely acclaimed. This initial success attracted the attention of major publishers who approached him to write books for children and adolescents.

An admitted need to reconcile social disparities and a desire to interpret events to young people and to motivate them to read and be influenced by accomplished individuals—particularly deprived youth whom he felt had far too few role models to read about—led him to author more than one hundred books on a diverse array of topics. Written for a general audience of juveniles, his titles include The War and the Protest: Viet Nam (1971), Religions (1973), Jobs in Business and Office (1974), The Consumer Movement (1975), Your Rights, Past and Present: A Guide for Young People (1975), Teen-age Alcoholism (1976), The Long Struggle: The Story of American Labor (1976), Who Are the Handicapped (1978), Gambling—Who Really Wins (1978), Werewolves (1981), and The New Americans: Cuban Boat People (1982).

Haskins launched his college teaching career in 1970 and continued lecturing on psychology, folklore, children's and young adult literature, and urban education at schools in New York and Indiana before landing a full-time professorship in the English department at the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1977. That same year he authored The Cotton Club, a pictorial and social history of the notorious Harlem night club, which seven years later was transformed into a motion picture of the same name directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Among his books intended for adults or college-level readers are The Psychology of Black Language (1973) with Dr. Hugh Butts; Black Manifesto for Education (1973), which he edited; Snow Sculpture and Ice Carving (1974); Scott Joplin: The Man Who Made Rag-time (1978); Voodoo and Hoodoo: Their Tradition and Craft as Revealed by Actual Practitioners (1978); Richard Pryor, A Man and His Madness (1984); and Mabel Mercer: A Life (1988). He has contributed numerous critical essays and reviews to periodicals. Still, he is best known for his biographies, tailored for elementary and high school students. Most of these recount the triumphs of well-known contemporary African Americans, with whom many young people readily identify. The long list of persons he has profiled (often using the pen name Jim Haskins) include Colin Powell, Barbara Jordon, Thurgood Marshall, Sugar Ray Leonard, Magic Johnson, Diana Ross, Katherine Dunham, Guion Bluford, Andrew Young, Bill Cosby, Kareem Adbul-Jabbar, Shirley Chisholm, Lena Horne, and Rosa Parks. Biographies of prominent individuals who are not African American include Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, Shirley Temple Black, Corazón Aquino, Winnie Mandela, and Christopher Columbus.

Reviews

[Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere)]

Her wikipedia, and a book review:

"Born Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith in a small town in West Virginia, Bricktop moved to Chicago as a little girl. She recalls her early days peeking under saloon doors and longing to be able to sing in the backrooms; going on the road at sixteen (it was while playing a saloon in Harlem that she was dubbed "Bricktop" because of her red hair); working for heavyweight champion Jack Johnson at the Caf‚ Champ in Chicago; and the offer to go to Paris, where she arrived in 1924 at LeGrand Duc, "a room so tiny it felt crowed with six pairs of elbows leaning on the bar." Early one morning Cole Porter heard her sing one of his songs and began bringing his friends to hear Bricktop. Soon she was the queen of the nightclub scene of Paris.

Bricktop recounts her remarkable life the 20s and 30s when everybody who was anybody went to Bricktop's; getting out of Paris just before the Germans came in (with the help of Lady Mendl and the Duchess of Windsor)' her unsuccessful attempts to recreate Bricktop's in New York; her years in Mexico City; her conversion to Catholicism; and Bricktop's in Rome where she watched the marriage of Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner break up and unwittingly presided over the first appearances together in public of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. From Sophie Tucker to Jascha Heifetz, from Jelly Roll Morton to Jimmy Walker, from Tallulah Bankhead, Gloria Swanson and Shirley MacLaine to Paul Robeson and Edward G. Robinson, her story is filled with anecdotes about the people she knew and her outspoken opinions of them all, be it F. Scott Fitzgerald ("It was impossible not to like him. He was a little boy in a man's body. He hadn't grown up and he didn't intend to."), Ernest Hemingway ("I never took to him. He just wanted to bring people down.") or Martin Luther King, Jr. ("He was one of the most calm, collected together persons I have ever met in my life.""

[Jane]

I had only gotten started on this book when I had to return it. James Haskins is a recent discovery that i should have discovered long ago! An Alabama native transplanted to Harlem, he has published over 150 works of nonfiction on mostly "black" and social justice topics, mostly for children and young adults. The author line should read "By Bricktop as told to James Haskins."

Bricktop is one of many African-Americans who found her personal liberation in Europe while Jim Crow still reigned in the U.S. She was famous as a singer and nightclub owner. When Martin Luther King was in Europe to receive his Nobel Peace Peace Prize, he went out of his way to meet Bricktop, who surprised him by cooking black-eyed peas in his honor.

Bricktop contains themes and subject matter that make it more appropriate for an adult audience, but most Haskins books target the youth-through-young-adult audience. As one of his colleagues said, Haskins "created a canon that is a resource for anyone studying black history." Anyone of any age can enjoy and learn from the work of James Haskins. He may be Alabama's most prolific author. Jane DeNeefe

[Lillipeg]

Ok, Nickie, I felt motivated to finish for you. It's an enjoyable story--she had a very interesting life. (Lately, I've been interested in the women who were running businesses or providing part of the cultural attractions of 20's Paris, but who are not as well known as the Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's.) What I find I'm missing, though it can't be expected with an autobiography, is the context and analysis you'd get with a well-researched biography. Also, she doesn't provide any gossip to speak of. She was great friends with Cole Porter but never mentions he was gay, which we all know, and she must have known, but she keeps all the juicy tidbits to herself.