Africa. The Longest Leap: African Dance in American. Slavery didn’t come from an academic press but from Bayard Publishing. That was a bit of a surprise: maybe Ritual Dance Among the Bantu had sold better than you’d expect. Maybe Ballantine had lived on her royalties. Or perhaps Calvin Bayard had known her personally and wanted to support her.
I stared at the Bayard logo on the title page, the jagged outline of a lion, as if it could tell me something, but finally turned to the book itself. There were photographs of masks, photographs of shyly smiling African girls demonstrating dance steps, shyly smiling African-American girls demonstrating what were supposed to be similar steps-I couldn’t tell from the pictures. I read paragraphs here and there about where Ballantine had been, what she had seen, how it compared with the dances she observed in the American South. She wrote fiercely about the patronizing attitude of white America to black dance.
They ignore the history of civilizations far older than theirs, African civilizations which each step and ritual encode. In their eyes, we Africans exist shamelessly in the body, and our dances are thought to be only a sign of our mindlessness, leaving the mind itself to the high civilizations that think up atom bombs and gas chambers.
A yellowed article from the Daily Defender, dated from 1977, gave a few biographical facts. Ballantine had been born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1911, but her family had moved to Chicago when she was six. She had attended Howard University, where she studied anthropology and dance. She’d gone to Columbia when Franz Boas was welcoming black students there, and achieved a master’s degree in anthropology before returning to Chicago, where she taught dance, performed dance, studied dance. In the Defender’s photograph, she was shown standing regally in front of a wall of African masks, wearing a dancer’s leotard and an African-print skirt.
The reporter had been more interested in her dance than in her academic career. He burbled in print over her energy-there she was, sixtysix, still dancing four hours a day, still teaching children in her Bronzeville home. He hadn’t asked how she’d spent the years from 1937 to 1977 except to discuss her trips to Africa-besides the two I’d already read about, she’d lived in Gabon for three years following its independence. The reporter did ask whether she felt any bitterness toward her treatment in the late fifties, and she had said that bitterness only wasted one’s energy.
I skimmed the rest of the papers, hoping for a diary or something personal, but there wasn’t much else here. A letter from the University of Chicago provost, dated October 1957, coldly stating that they would not need her services after the end of the fall quarter, but there was nothing from her to the university. Her contract with Bayard, a one-page document offering her seven hundred dollars. Not the advance of a commercially successful writer, after all.
Calvin Bayard’s bold thick signature stood out against the faded paper, making him seem vividly present in the room. It seemed odd for a commercial press to publish a book with such an academic title. Had he and Kylie Ballantine been friends, or even lovers? Bayard had published her, they lived in the same town-if you thought the Gold Coast and Bronzeville were the same town. If Bayard had known Ballantine personally, that could easily explain why Marc had gone to New Solway on Sunday evening-to see what Calvin Bayard remembered of her.
I stacked everything in a tidy pile to return to the archivist. Gideon Reed was talking earnestly to a teenage boy, showing him something in a fat reference book.
When I handed him the stack of Ballantine documents, Reed gave me a kind smile. “Did you find anything useful?”
“Nothing that shed direct light on what might have taken Marcus Whitby out to New Solway. It’s a bit of a stretch, but The Longest Leap was published by Calvin Bayard. He lives out there, so I’m going to drive out, see if Whitby tried to talk to him about Kylie Ballantine. Did Whitby ever mention Bayard?”
Reed shook his head. “It’s not like I saw him that often. I’m sure he did a lot of research I never knew anything about-and of course he worked full time, he had a lot of other stories to cover.”
“I read Ms. Ballantine’s interview in the Defender. Do you know what happened to her in the fifties? The reporter asked if she were bitter-was that because of the U of C firing her?”
The archivist turned reflexively to the article, but didn’t look at it. “Mr. Whitby was guessing she’d been blacklisted, but I don’t think he’d found any evidence to confirm that. She was never called to testify before Congress, and except for that one letter, I’m sure you saw the one she wrote when she was so angry about Congress canceling the Theater Project, she never discussed Communism.”
“What about something called `the Committee’? You know the one I mean? Could that have been considered a subversive group?”
He flipped through the plastic sleeves until he found the references, but he couldn’t shed any light on them. “I know Mr. Whitby wrote for her file under the Freedom of Information Act, but it’s like so many of those files: most of what you want to know is inked out so you can’t read it. Since September 11, they’ve made it harder to find out what records they’re keeping on the citizens. It’s kind of frustrating, our own government spying on us, then not letting us see what they claim we’ve been up to.”
When I asked if there were other Ballantine papers anywhere-a diary, or financial records, Reed shook his head again. “If there are, they’re not in a public archive. Her estate didn’t amount to much, and even though she was highly respected in the black community, no one had the kind of
money to do preservation or restoration in her home-it had to be sold to pay her debts. If there was some kind of trove of documents, I’m thinking they’re in the CID landfill by now.”
Reed paused to answer a question from a woman who’d been waiting for several minutes, then turned back to me. “Mr. Whitby did go through her old house. After she died, the bank or whoever bought it cut it into a bunch of little apartments, but Mr. Whitby hoped something might have been left in a basement or crawl space.”
“Did he find anything?”
Reed slowly shook his head. “That may have been why he called me, maybe a week or ten days ago. I wasn’t in and he left a message for me. I never did reach him when I tried calling back, but that could have been it-he knew I shared his interest in Kylie. If he’d found some papers, well, he would have wanted to show them to me.”
Another patron was trying to get the archivist’s attention. I turned to leave, feeling frustrated at how little information I was able to collect.
As I walked away from his desk, Reed called out to me, “Let me know what you find out about Mr. Whitby. If you get to the truth, it may not make the evening news, you know”
A sad commentary. Kylie Ballantine’s life should have been seen on stage, under spotlights, but she’d died in the wings, and now Gideon Reed was afraid her lone champion was going to vanish into the same shadows.
I imagined melodramatic statements I might make, picturing myself as Annie Oakley riding to the rescue of both Ballantine and Marcus Whitby. Maybe I was just Lassie the dog, though, barking around frantically for help.
“Timmy’s in the well,” I said aloud as I unlocked my car. A woman with a couple of toddlers passed me just then, but she barely spared me a glance: people saying odd things to themselves are commonplace at the public library, after all.
CHAPTER 18
I’m going out to New Solway,” I told Amy Blount when I reached her on her cell phone. “I didn’t find anything definite in the Ballantine papers, but there’s a possibility that Marc tried seeing Calvin Bayard, who published one of Ballantine’s books. I want to talk to Mr. Bayard, if I can get in-his wife has a shark-filled moat dug around him. Did you find out anything?”
“Like you, nothing definite. The woman who lives on Marc’s south side thinks she saw lights at three yesterday morning-she’s got a newborn who woke her up around then, and she was rocking by the window, but she wasn’t really paying attention. She couldn’t be a hundred percent sure it was Sunday-she’s up most nights and she’s pretty sleep deprived. And anyway, she didn’t look at the front walk, so she wouldn’t know if it was Marc or an intruder. The old man across the street, he save Marc bring a woman home with him once or twice, but no one had spent the night here for several months, as far as the local gossip columns know.”
