Can’t Stand Still: Taylor Gordon and the Harlem Renaissance

INTRODUCTION

LORD, I CAN’T STAN’ STILL

Stan’ still Jordan

Stan’ still Jordan

Stan’ still Jordan

Lord, I can’t stan’ still.

—Stan’ Still Jordan, The Book of American Negro Spirituals¹

When he stepped onto the Garrick Theatre stage in New York City on the night of November 15, 1925, Taylor Gordon created a sensation that catapulted him to international fame. Standing motionless, with his eyes closed, his fingers interlaced before him, Taylor sang African American spirituals, slave songs, sorrow songs, his voice alternating between tenor and falsetto, sometimes dropping to baritone, the songs themselves punctuated by impromptu shouts, hollers, barks, and yells. Especially when singing falsetto, Taylor deliberately slurred one word into another, transforming the songs into an otherworldly wail that for many listeners seemed the very sound of a soul lost to slavery; and Taylor’s demeanor, motionless, eyes closed, contributed to the illusion that he was merely a medium through which these lost souls at last could speak and lament their fates. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in the NAACP journal Crisis, No one who has heard Johnson and Gordon sing ‘Stand Still Jordan!’ can ever forget its spell.²

At the piano was J. Rosamond Johnson, brother to author and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson. The Johnson brothers had collaborated on the just published The Book of American Negro Spirituals, with Rosamond arranging them for piano and voice, and James Weldon adding a well-received introduction and working with Rosamond on the lyrics. Rosamond was a vaudeville headliner, a songwriter with hundreds of popular songs to his credit, and an accomplished pianist, performer, and singer. In performance, he would add his bass counterpoint to Taylor’s tenor, sometimes switching to take the lead on the second verse, always adding harmonies with the piano, and sometimes suggesting the shouts and cries that would accompany a spiritual being sung in a congregational setting by adding unexpected arpeggios or otherwise using the keys of the piano to suggest the voices of a choir or a congregation. With Taylor’s remarkable singing range (from baritone to a falsetto in alto) and Rosamond’s bass voice and his creative piano technique, they brought to the recital hall tradition of pianist and soloist the experience of congregational singing. Concert audiences had neither seen nor heard anything quite like it.

Although classically trained himself, Taylor adapted a singing style that departed from his training and from a contemporary emphasis on performing spirituals through the conventions of European classical music. For audiences used to hearing spirituals performed in European concert style, the lyrics carefully enunciated in standardized English, the R’s distinctively trilled, the consonants sharply clipped, the vowels carefully rounded and focused, Taylor’s return to vernacular English, as well as his improvisational and disruptive singing style, was a radical departure, a fresh take on spirituals singing that bridged the gap between talented classical performers such as African American vocalist Roland Hayes and the original untrained voices that were the folk sources of the music. Many considered Taylor’s approach more authentic and closer to the original form of the spirituals than that of Hayes, and, beginning with his 1925 New York City debut, audiences responded enthusiastically to this new style of spirituals singing.

Emmanuel Taylor Gordon was born in 1893, in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, a small, predominately white community east of Helena. Mannie (as he was known around the Springs) was the last of five surviving children born to John Francis and Mary Anna Goodall Gordon (a sixth Gordon child, Arthur, died in infancy). His mother and father met in Cairo, Illinois, where they married in 1879, and where their first child Robert James Gordon was born in 1881. Offered a job as a chef by a gold-mining company, John moved the family to one of the company’s operations in Fort Benton, Montana. When the company closed that operation, John and Annie decided to stay in Montana, because, as Taylor writes in his 1929 autobiography Born to Be, they liked the free open country (4).³ The only Gordon sister, Rose Beatrice, was born in 1883 in Barker, Montana. After some time spent moving camp to camp, the family settled in White Sulphur Springs, where John Francis Gordon Jr. was born in 1885, followed by brothers George Washington Gordon in 1888 and Taylor in 1893.

In Born to Be, Gordon writes of White Sulphur Springs that If God ever did spend any time here on earth, that must of have been His hang-out, for every little thing that’s natural and beautiful to live with is around White Sulphur (4). Despite his affection for White Sulphur Springs and for Montana’s natural beauty, Taylor developed an itch to travel and an interest in the technologies of locomotion, older (trains) and newer (automobiles). In 1910, Taylor met Ringling Brothers circus impresario John Ringling, who came to White Sulphur Springs as an investor in the Smith River Developing Company. That connection eventually resulted in Taylor working as the personal porter on Ringling’s private railway car and traveling with the circus. In 1916, he met Will Marion Cook, who encouraged him to concentrate on music. After a period of time under Cook’s mentorship, he studied at the Colored Music School Settlement in New York City (directed, at the time, by his future performing partner J. Rosamond Johnson). He joined Johnson’s quintet, the Inimitable Five, in 1919, and began a career in vaudeville that continued until Johnson and Gordon emerged in 1925 as concert performers specializing in spirituals.

By the time of the publication of Born to Be in the fall of 1929, Taylor had become an internationally famous singer, his concerts with Johnson creating sensations wherever they played. The Johnson-Gordon spirituals concerts catapulted the duo to celebrity status during a time in America when, as Langston Hughes famously put it, the Negro was in vogue.⁴ And few singers were more in vogue than Taylor Gordon, who was often mentioned as a rival (if not the superior spirituals performer) to the era’s two other preeminent male vocalists, Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson. In fact, Taylor, who combined the classical vocal training that was Hayes’s strength with a folk style that conveyed the authenticity of Robeson’s naturally impressive but untrained baritone, represented the apogee of spirituals performance for many listeners.

In the artistic ferment and intense social interaction that marked the Harlem Renaissance at its height, Taylor was in his element. The parties he hosted were newsworthy events, attended by New York socialites, artists, writers, musicians, and performers. In Langston Hughes’s memoir The Big Sea, he chooses one of Taylor’s parties as an exemplar of the Harlem party scene, quoting this description of the event from Geraldyn Dismond’s report in the Inter-State Tattler:

What a crowd! All classes and colors met face to face, ultra aristocrats, Bourgeois, Communists, Park Avenuers galore, bookers, publishers, Broadway celebs, and Harlemites give each other the once over. The social revolution was on. And yes, Lady Nancy Cunard was there all in black (she would) with 12 of her grand bracelets…. And was the entertainment on the up and up! Into swell dance music was injected African drums that played havoc with blood pressure. Jimmy Daniels sang his gigolo hits. Gus Simons, the Harlem crooner, made the River Stay Away From His Door and Taylor himself brought out everything from Hot Dog to Bravo when he made high C.⁵

Published under the headline Taylor Gordon High Hats the Rent Man, Dismond’s report on Taylor’s June 1932 party held at the Witoka club had her digging out her best adjectives to describe the ritzy rent rag, finally just exclaiming, Whoopee, dearie! Up and downtown, Dismond concludes, they are still raving about what a party it was.⁶

When not hosting his own parties, Taylor was a fixture at the parties of others. In her Social Snapshots column, Dismond reports on a trip out of Harlem, our old stomping ground, to the Hotel de Artiste to go bohemian with Larry Harris and his hostess for the evening, Miss Kamerer, a charming French lady who paints cleverly, and whose butler passed around tall glasses of scotch while they listened to "Taylor Gordon’s Pagliacci, delivered, with Taylor’s usual flair for the dramatic, from the balcony of Miss Kamerer’s duplex.⁷ A close acquaintance of Carl Van Vechten, one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most active white proponents and benefactors, Taylor frequently attended and often performed at Van Vechten’s parties, which, as Hughes notes, were the only New York parties hosted by a white man that were reported as a matter of course in the black newspapers.⁸ Van Vechten was a controversial figure during and after the period of the Renaissance, disdained by many whites for his interest in African Americans and black life and culture, a source of anger for many African Americans who felt he exploited and misrepresented black life in Harlem. However, as Emily Bernard observes, Van Vechten and his wife Fania Marinoff created an interracial world at their home on West 55th Street, which Walter White dubbed the midtown office of the NAACP."⁹ In a time of segregation, Van Vechten hosted racially mixed parties that were also social experiments in integration. Taylor was an integral part of a Van Vechten social circle that included both white and African American artists, writers, poets, singers, dancers, performers: James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Zora Neale Hurston, Heywood Broun, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Edna Thomas, Muriel Draper, Nora Holt, Theodore Dreiser, etc.

Taylor was also a central figure at A’Lelia Walker’s limestone mansion on 136th Street in Harlem, which became the location of the Dark Tower, the literary salon operated by the heiress to the empire created by Madam Walker’s hair and cosmetics products. Walker was a fan and patron of Taylor, allowing him to live rent-free at the 136th Street mansion in exchange for his occasionally hosting or performing at her gatherings. Living at the Dark Tower placed Taylor in the midst of one of the important gathering places for the writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a place where black poets and black numbers bankers mingled freely with black and white celebrities, business people, and commercial bankers.¹⁰ A New York partygoer in the late 1920s might have had a hard time going to a party and not encountering Taylor Gordon.

From that apogee, from that place in the center of furious social activity, Taylor’s fall was not so much fast and furious as slow and steady, a descent into poverty and eventually into madness that began in the 1930s. That fall didn’t begin to reach its nadir until he was committed to a mental institution for the first time in 1947. Taylor’s career as a soloist essentially died in 1934. After 1935 his primary sources of income were as an inventor of toys (at which he had some success), doing odd jobs, picking up occasional factory and manual-labor jobs, and borrowing money from his friends, a practice (especially when combined with spotty repayment) that contributed to his increasing isolation as the decade proceeded.

As Taylor disappeared from the public eye in the 1930s, he also disappeared from retrospective accounts of the 1920s, his historical presence as a significant Harlem Renaissance figure misrepresented, distorted, and erased from the written record over the next seventy to eighty years. David Levering Lewis, in his influential history of the period, When Harlem Was in Vogue, misrepresents the impact of Taylor’s singing career by collapsing a period of fame that stretched from 1925 to 1934 into a single year and by dismissing Taylor’s singing talent: Taylor Gordon was supposed to be a singer, and he did sing. He and Rosamond Johnson made a concert tour of America and Europe together in 1927. But it was much less Gordon’s voice than his roguish personality that captivated white admirers. According to Lewis, Taylor was one of Harlem’s exhibitionists, a very dark decadent who was spontaneous and amoral, a caricature of Taylor that paints him as a kind of minstrel figure whose fame rested not on his skills as a singer but on his amusing antics designed to appeal to white audiences. Although he did sing, Lewis writes, you would hardly know it from his sketch of Gordon, which devotes only two sentences to Taylor’s singing career and the rest of a long paragraph to his roguish personality, even suggesting that Gordon was one of the Afro-Americans popular in the 1920s who might have been invented by Van Vechten.¹¹ Not a real person at all in this accounting, but the embodiment of a black man as conceived in the white imagination, Taylor’s actual personality and unique individual existence disappears beneath the caricature.

That process of misrepresentation and erasure begins shortly after the decade of the twenties comes to an end. With the notable exception of Langston Hughes, few historians or memoirists accord Taylor more than a paragraph or a footnote.¹² Carl Van Vechten’s daybooks, kept meticulously from 1922–30, and written during the moment, provide an important corrective to these later accounts. By cross-referencing those accounts of the 1920s with Van Vechten’s daybooks, we can better see Taylor’s presence at events from which he has been left out. For example, Emily Clark, as part of a profile of Van Vechten in her memoir Innocence Abroad (1931), describes a Van Vechten party:

Taylor Gordon with friends in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, in the 1890s. Left to right: George Bing, Grover Danzer, Roy Spencer, John Anderson, Bryan Anderson, Mannie (Taylor) Gordon. Used by permission of the Montana Historical Society Research Center.

A June evening in Carl’s apartment is especially vivid to me now, with George Gershwin at the piano playing and singing bits from his current musical show to a crowd of people, among whom Theodore Dreiser sat, heavy and brooding, the direct antithesis, almost a contradiction, of all that Gershwin means. And Elinor Wylie sat, aloof and lovely, a contradiction and denial of all that both Dreiser and Gershwin mean. Later some woman danced, and later still Paul Robeson sang. Last of all, James Weldon Johnson recited his Go Down, Death. And Carl hovered about in doorways, his face, as always on such evenings, benevolent and shining…. The gold-fish is swimming happily and unconsciously in his own proper element. Everyone is at peace. And these people are gaily giving their best work for nothing; or, rather, for Carl.¹³

The description of this party (which took place on June 2, 1926) as it appears in the daybooks differs in a few places. Van Vechten does not describe himself in his own diary, and his daybook provides only a rough sketch, mostly a list of names. He identifies the dancing woman as Stella Block, and he has James Weldon Johnson reciting The Creation rather than Go Down, Death (both are sections of Johnson’s long poem God’s Trombones). Most significantly, he notes that, among the performers, Taylor Gordon & Rosamond Johnson sang, and neither is mentioned in Clark’s account.¹⁴ Of course, Clark is providing the flavor of the party for her readers rather than a complete account, and Van Vechten lists several others in addition to Johnson and Gordon that do not make it into Clark’s description. Significantly, though, Clark differs from Van Vechten in adding guests Paul Robeson and Elinor Wylie to her description of the party.

Taylor Gordon, portrait, July 17, 1918. Used by permission of the Montana Historical Society Research Center.

What is striking is how quickly Taylor Gordon’s star has faded by the publication date of Clark’s memoir. In 1926, Clark was a Johnson and Gordon fan. Van Vechten introduced her to the duo, she attended several of their concerts, and she joined them on more than one occasion at after-concert parties.¹⁵ However, within four or five years of this June 2 party, Clark has either forgotten that Gordon and Johnson performed or concluded that their presence was not important enough to include in her description. Bruce Kellner, the editor of The Splendid Drunken Twenties, in a note to this entry, implies that Van Vechten forgot to include Paul Robeson on his list of guests, which is certainly possible. However, as a collector of celebrities, and a dedicated chronicler of the famous people he encountered, it seems unlikely that Van Vechten would forget to note the presence of Robeson. Another possibility—in fact, a probability—is that Robeson was not there at all, and that Clark is conjoining this party with another event at which she indeed heard Robeson sing. Van Vechten’s entry for the next day, June 3, notes the presence at his house of Clark and also notes Paul Robeson comes in & sings.¹⁶ It seems likely that Clark substituted that performance for the Gordon and Johnson performance that she heard on the date of the party described in her memoir. More to the point, I want to suggest that Clark’s replacing in her narrative of the Gordon and Johnson performance with one by Robeson is symptomatic of the larger trend of narrating the story of the Harlem Renaissance.¹⁷

J. Rosamond Johnson (seated at piano) and Taylor Gordon, publicity photo (ca. 1925–27). Used by permission of the Montana Historical Society Research Center.

The influence of Clark’s description is also visible in the work of contemporary scholars. In his introduction to the popular anthology The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, editor David Levering Lewis paraphrases Clark’s description of a Van Vechten party ([guests would] listen to Robeson sing or Jim Johnson recite from ‘God’s Trombones’ or George Gershwin play the piano), repeating both Clark’s elision of Taylor Gordon and her replacement thereof with the presence of Paul Robeson from this paradigmatic event.¹⁸ Scholarly disinterest and neglect has resulted in the failure to check the accuracy of such accounts and has thus contributed to the erasure of Taylor Gordon from an historical moment at which he was very much present—and even in the spotlight—on stage and off.

Taylor Gordon and Rose Gordon, September 4, 1964, in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, dressed for Montana’s Centennial celebration. Used by permission of the Montana Historical Society Research Center.

Taylor’s descent into madness—and the strange behavior that accompanied that descent—also contributed to his disappearance from history. His behavior became so troubling that many of his friends in New York wanted to forget him. Preceding his first institutionalization in 1947, Taylor became obsessed with John Steinbeck, claiming that The Grapes of Wrath was plagiarized from his own unpublished manuscript, Daonda (written in 1935). When multiple attempts at lawsuits against Steinbeck failed, Taylor spent several weeks in 1942 picketing on the sidewalk outside Viking Press (with a four-foot square sign that accused Steinbeck of stealing his manuscript). Taylor was transformed from a person who, according to one letter writer, had the reputation of knowing more people than any individual in New York City into an increasingly alienated and lonely individual who eventually broke down under the accumulated stresses of his existence.¹⁹ The escalation of his odd behavior, delusions, and paranoia after World War II (and after he lost his job in a wartime factory) probably necessitated his institutionalization. His recovery from what he calls in a short autobiographical narrative 16 months Imprisoned in a Madhouse was unfortunately temporary, and in 1952 he was committed again, this time for a period of seven years.²⁰ In 1959 he was released to the care of his sister Rose and spent the rest of his life back in his hometown, where he died in 1971.

I first encountered Taylor Gordon through his autobiography Born to Be, drawn to it because of my interest in African American experience in the American West, as Taylor’s description of his childhood in White Sulphur Springs is one of the most evocative and detailed literary accounts of the African American West. However, my emphasis in Can’t Stand Still: Taylor Gordon and the Harlem Renaissance is primarily on those parts of his history that are absent or more sketchily drawn in Born to Be. My approach is that of a literary and cultural historian rather than a musicologist, and while I do discuss Taylor as a vocalist (based mostly on contemporaneous accounts and partially on the—very few—extant recordings of his singing), my focus is on Taylor’s personal history and on his cultural importance to our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance.

The central section of Can’t Stand Still extensively documents the period of fame Taylor enjoyed from 1925–34. My argument in this section of the book is that during the height of his celebrity, Taylor Gordon was one of the most significant African American male vocalists of his era. In a time when the world of classical music was largely closed to black performers, Johnson and Gordon established themselves as premiere concert hall performers by adapting black folk music to the classical format of pianist and vocalist. Although history remembers singer Paul Robeson and pianist Lawrence Brown better than Johnson and Gordon, Taylor and Rosamond’s Carnegie Hall concert in 1927 preceded Robeson and Brown’s debut at the storied hall by over a year. Likewise, it was Johnson and Gordon, not Robeson and Brown, who performed the first spirituals concerts in Paris and London later in 1927. The Carnegie Hall concert kicked off a tour that took Johnson and Gordon on a remarkable journey through the United States: into the American South (Kentucky, South Carolina, Alabama), all the way west to California, on up the West Coast, and back through Colorado, Montana, Minnesota, and many other western and midwestern states. No other musical artists of the era compare to what Johnson and Gordon accomplished—black performers singing African American folk songs in a setting usually reserved for white performers and for European classical music—during the remarkable period of touring activity that began at the Garrick Theatre in 1925 and carried the two all around the United States and landed them in Europe in 1927. Through detailed documentation of Taylor’s performance career, through newspaper articles and reviews, through letters and other archival material, Can’t Stand Still demonstrates the scope of Johnson and Gordon’s cultural impact.

The emphasis in Can’t Stand Still is on what has heretofore been largely untold: a detailed accounting of Taylor’s musical education, his career as a vaudeville performer, the remarkable performance history of Johnson and Gordon, Taylor’s status as an in-demand celebrity (especially in New York) as both singer and author, his time as a radio star, and, finally, his descent into madness and into mental institutions.²¹ Without the story of Taylor Gordon, the history of the Harlem Renaissance loses some of its flavor and complexity. And Taylor’s story—of working in the White Sulphur Springs brothels as an errand boy as a child, of traveling the country in John Ringling’s private railway car, of performing on vaudeville stages from New York to Vancouver to Los Angeles, of performing for royalty in England, of becoming a celebrated author, and even of his long period of mental illness (his obsession with John Steinbeck, his bizarre delusions)—makes him one of the more fascinating figures of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 1

GROWING UP IN WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, MONTANA (1893–1910)

When Taylor Gordon returned to reside in White Sulphur Springs in 1959, the Meagher County News welcomed his arrival by reminding readers, To the old timers and to his sister Rose he is ‘Manny’ Gordon, the mischievous youngster who used to mimic the incoming train’s whistle so well nobody knew for sure whether the train was in or not.¹ A mischievous youngster indeed, Mannie made an unforgettable impression on the townspeople of his childhood, and not just through his skills at mimicry. And White Sulphur Springs made an unforgettable impression on Taylor. Even though he left the town behind before his eighteenth birthday, White Sulphur Springs, Montana, was always home to Taylor. The first quarter of his autobiography is devoted to stories of White Sulphur. In describing the White Sulphur Springs of Taylor’s childhood, I want to be particularly attentive to the way Taylor portrays the town, for that portrayal—at times realistic, at times nostalgic, and at other times not exactly accurate—serves multiple purposes in Born to Be.

Taylor’s insistence that he never encountered racial prejudice as a child is an element of his portrayal of the Springs that might raise a few skeptical eyebrows. However, there seems to be some truth to that picture of White Sulphur Springs. At least, the Gordon family found acceptance there. They made lives for themselves in the Springs, and they forged interracial relationships that helped them survive through hard times, and which even helped them thrive. Among the friends they made were Robert Sutherlin, editor of one of the town’s newspapers, the Rocky Mountain Husbandman. Perhaps as a result of the friendship, the Gordon family in general was a visible presence in the Springs, especially the Gordon children, whose activities growing up were reported frequently in the White Sulphur Springs newspapers—from the family’s arrival in 1883 through Taylor’s departure in 1910.

All the Gordon family members were musically inclined, and their integration with the White Sulphur community was aided by those abilities. Trained at the Boston Conservatory of Music, Eleanor Armstrong Brewer, who married town founder James Brewer shortly after her arrival in the Springs as a teacher in the school system, served as a mentor and teacher for Robert, Rose, and George, accompanying Robert’s violin playing on piano, instructing Rose in piano for nearly twenty years, and featuring George as a singer in several of the many productions that she staged at the Auditorium—the town’s giant, drafty, and unfinished performance space. Rose found work—and access to the Brewers’ library—taking care of the Brewer children, Grayce and Ruth. That friendship with one of the town’s prominent white citizens no doubt encouraged the town’s acceptance of the Gordons.

In addition to the musical education provided by Brewer, the Gordon children inherited musical talent from both their mother and their father. Taylor remembered distinctively the quality of his mother’s singing: "She used to tell me about the camp meetings in which she was one of the lead singers. My Gawd! what a voice she had! She was always singing while doing her work. On a summer’s evening you could easily hear her singing a half mile off, voice just rising and falling, keeping time over a wash tub with the up and down movement of her body (5). Annie Gordon passed down her memories of slavery to her children, but she also passed down a singular heritage of African American music to them, a direct connection to the source of the sorrow songs" that Taylor would help revive in the 1920s.

According to Taylor, his father John Gordon was tall and straight with large eyes and pearly teeth that made his smooth black skin seem much darker than he really was (3). John claimed Zulu ancestry. His father migrated to England as a young man and was employed as a servant by a Scottish family who brought him along with them to the United States. Much of his story is unclear. He was likely born around 1851, his place of birth listed in various records at various times as Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, and even the Northwest Territories.² Taylor writes, Somehow, after the Civil War, Grandfather and Father landed in Ohio, and, at that point, John attended Wilberforce University and trained to be a chef (4). And we do know that John Gordon had a talent for cooking. I still remember, Rose Gordon writes, the good food he used to cook for Mamma.³

His abilities as a chef supported his family and earned him a series of jobs that drew him further and further north and west, from Cairo, Illinois, to a gold-mining camp in Fort Benton, Montana Territory, followed by a similar job in a silver-mining camp in Barker, where he was joined by his wife Annie in 1881 (who had traveled up the Missouri River with son Robert to join him). Rose Gordon was born in Barker in 1883. After going from camp to camp and town to town, Taylor writes, they finally wandered into White Sulphur Springs, Montana, where he became the head chef at the Higgins House, the leading hotel in what had become a thriving resort town (4).

The position at the Higgins House paid well enough that the Gordons were able to purchase a house soon after their arrival. The Deed and Warranty for Lot Number 7 in Block 29 in the town of White Sulphur Springs Meagher County Montana Territory registers the sale of the property from R. S. Price to John Gordon on September 19, 1885, for the sum of $350.⁴ That property would provide a home for Rose Gordon for the rest of her life. One of the Gordons, Anna, Robert, or Rose, would reside in the house more or less continually until Rose’s death in 1968, and Taylor would continue to live in the house until his own death in 1971. Whatever else their father may have provided for them, his purchase of Lot Number 7 established an enduring stability for the family that lasted nearly a century beyond John’s death. So important was the property on Lot Number 7 that Taylor refers to it in the opening sentence of Born to Be: The first thing I can remember is my home (3). For the Gordon children, the house—the home—purchased by their father was the foundation on which their identities were built.

By 1890, according to census reports, Meagher County (of which White Sulphur Springs was a part) had a growing population of 4,668, that growth sparked by the area mining boom. From 1885 to 1910, the Springs was a vibrant and growing community, and one that offered a combination of civilized comfort (fine dining, resort hotels associated with the springs itself) and frontier wildness—especially in terms of the less civilized boomtown activities available. In Born to Be, Taylor is less interested in the fine dining and more attentive to documenting the town’s menu of vice. By the turn of the century, White Sulphur Springs offered eight saloons, Taylor observes in Born to Be, and each saloon had a gambling room (11). Additionally, most every business place but the Postoffice had slot machines (11). And just below the Gordons’ house, on the east end of Main Street, south side, back of a twelve foot board fence, which Irkson had built because one of the girls called him one day as he passed riding his bicycle, were the town’s brothels (10). Both Taylor and his brother George did odd jobs for the town’s sex workers, carrying messages for them, or supplying them with drinking water. Working as a page at Big Maude’s Palace of Joy (and wearing a blue suit with brass buttons supplied by Big Maude), Taylor had the chance to observe many of the town’s elite (I won’t call their names) who came to visit Maude’s—or the Brown House, or the Blue House, or the Cabins, or Bennett’s, or one of the other brothels (21). When the women needed assistance, Taylor writes, "all they had to do was raise a window or step outside the back door and holler, ‘You, Man-n-n-n-neee,’ or ‘Geor-r-r-geeee’" (13).

In Born to Be, Taylor makes almost no mention of other African Americans living in the Springs—although there was certainly a visible black community, at least from 1880 to 1900. Civil War veteran Joseph Meeks, a neighbor of the Gordons in the Springs, joined the 54th Regiment Massachusetts Infantry (Colored), a segregated regiment of African American soldiers, on May 12, 1863. A twenty-year-old single man, a shoemaker by profession, he was recruited out of Springfield, Ohio, and served with the 54th until mustering out on August 20, 1865, after the war’s conclusion.⁵ After journeying together with his brother Charles to Montana territory, Joseph stayed in Montana, settling with his wife in White Sulphur Springs, while Charles followed the mining frontier westward.⁶ Irvin Smith, a former slave, settled in White Sulphur Springs in 1880, where he owned and operated a blacksmith business for twenty years. For Rose and Robert Gordon, there would have been a vibrant black community throughout much of their childhoods. However, by the time Taylor turned eight in 1901, that community had started to fade.

The African American population of White Sulphur Springs followed more general trends of black western migration. Between 1870 and 1910 the black population in the mountain states and western coastal states increased significantly.⁷ In Montana, the African American population rose from 346 in 1880 to 1,490 in 1890 to 1,523 in 1900.⁸ Even as early as 1870, the census reveals that Montana already had a black population of 183 (out of a total Montana population of just more than 20,000).⁹ The demographics of this earliest group of black pioneers mirrored that of the territory’s white population of the period: Men living without women or children made up the majority of the population and mostly lived in areas tied to transportation or mining.¹⁰ The majority of the African American population in 1870 was located in Helena (43 percent), but groups of African Americans could be found in towns statewide: Virginia City (10.4 percent), Fort Benton (8.9 percent), and Bozeman (7.8 percent).

As early as 1880, the census lists around a dozen African Americans living in Meagher County, including residents in Belt City (Millie Ringold and her boarder Frank Marion; her neighbor Joseph Meek) and in White Sulphur Springs (Irvin and Carrie Smith, and their boarder Andrew Heart). By 1900 Meagher County recorded an African American population of thirty, a number that remained stable at least through the 1910 census, but declined steadily thereafter. However, between 1900 and 1910, the African American population of Meagher shifted from one end of the county to the other, from White Sulphur Springs to Harlowton. Of the thirty African Americans in Meagher County, only the Gordons and the Meeks remained in the Springs at the time of the 1910 census. Political changes in Montana’s relationship to its African American citizens (such as a bill prohibiting interracial marriages introduced in the state legislature in 1907 and passed in 1909) may have contributed to Montana’s declining African American population.¹¹ Although the entire Gordon family was living in White Sulphur at the time of the 1910 census, that is the last time all the members of the family would be living in one place. John Francis Jr. had had enough of the Montana winters, and would soon depart for Seattle—never to return to the Springs, not even for a visit. George would stay in Montana but would move to Bozeman in 1919 and live and work there for the rest of his life. By 1950 only two African Americans (Rose and her brother Robert) were recorded as living in Meagher County.

However, in the years that the Gordon children were growing up, White Sulphur Springs and the surrounding towns had a significant number of African American citizens, who seem to have been fairly well integrated into the economic and social life of Meagher County. In contrast to the anti-black violence and Jim Crow laws that existed elsewhere in the nation during this period, we see little indication of violent attacks against Meagher County’s African American residents or explicit segregation.¹²

John Gordon eventually left the position at the Higgins House to return to mining camp cooking. Shortly before Taylor was born, John decided to follow the gold rush to Alaska. He never actually made it to the gold fields. Rather, he found a job