Jessica is a rising senior interning with Hollaback! this summer.
I was born in the era in which some of the greatest jazz singers passed away. This isn’t some grand coincidence since each generation is birthed in the ashes of another. However, New York is fast approaching and with off rhythm beats of excitement and trepidation, this thought hasn’t left my mind. The legacies of these women are embedded in the very essence of New York City because under the bright lights of the famed city that never sleeps, these women found their fame and most importantly, their voices in these hideaway, smoke-filled little bars and clubs. I thought about going to these places, to see where Ella Fitzgerald learned her scatting ways or where Billie Holiday first sang to a hushed crowd the haunting lyrics of “Strange Fruit”, but the overwhelming thought that plagued my mind was that these places didn’t exist anymore. They had been converted into restaurants and shops, and that the history that was made there existed only in somebody else’s memory.
During one of my history classes, a fellow student said that our environment is a “museum of forgetting,” that we pass by buildings and streets not knowing their historical significance while at the same time passing by memorials and statues of commemoration, celebrating a legacy that we don’t always know the whole history behind. I’m from Texas, and after the much-lauded slogan of ‘Everything is Bigger in Texas,’ the slogan we’ve embraced in much Texas spirited pride is ‘Remember the Alamo,’ but what exactly are we remembering with this expression? That Mexico invited American settlers to colonize Texas, and when Mexico in turn told them that they couldn’t own slaves, they went to war against Mexico in order to maintain this supposed right? Yet, this fact is usually brushed aside, and we tend to focus on the bravery of the men who fought so valiantly against the Mexican Army, knowing full well that they were going to lose. But what does a romanticized version of the past say about our present, and more importantly, how does it mold our future?
Dr. Maya Angelou passed away a few days ago, and while most people are celebrating her life as a writer, a professor, an activist, most people are ignoring the fact that she was also a prostitute and a young mother trying to claw her way out of poverty. While I understand that in death the dead are always perceived in a pristine light, it’s in this remembrance that we tend to romanticized the legacy of the dead, without taking a close inspection at the hardships that made the person who they were to the world. They’re no longer just humans but idols, and for most of them, I don’t think that’s what they wanted.
As I prepare to go to New York, I still want to try to find these clubs where Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughan, and others made a name for themselves singing jazz, but I also want to scratch beneath the surface, to understand what the fame they found did for them and for women, and how they helped shape the trajectory of American music. But this little project is focusing on just a slice of the legacy of New York City, and while I’ll experience the more idealized version of New York of Broadway signs and a proud Statue of Liberty, I want to be conscious of the workers who clean up after shows and what the structures that represent New York actually represent. I want to see underneath the legacy of New York and see the everydayness of it, the things people don’t usually see because like Holliday once sang, “New York, why does it seem so inviting?”
