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A review by mer_lovestoread2023
American Cocktail: A "Colored Girl" in the World by Anita Reynolds
adventurous
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Anita Reynolds might have been lost to history were it not for the assiduous research of George Hutchinson, also known for his wonderful biography of Nella Larsen. Hutchinson found a reference to Reynolds in Larsen's correspondence, and then tracked down the draft of her memoir in the Howard University Library. Reynolds is a fascinating figure, an "American Cocktail" of identities raised in a middle-class black family in LA; a social butterfly who enjoyed her light-skin privilege yet never hid her blackness when asked (you should hear her when she's asked how she got so tan); a cosmopolitan traveler who lived in Europe and North Africa, who hung out with white modernists and Harlem Renaissance cultural elites; and a woman not afraid to discuss--and act upon--her own erotic urges. This description shouldn't mask her radicalism; when confronted with tales of discrimination in her home country, Reynolds wants to get a gun.
This is a deliciously name-droppy story--there's almost no one Reynolds didn't know. Reynolds was fearless as well as fun, though; when the invasion of France rolled around Reynolds devoted herself to nursing and helping refugees make their escape across the border. Reynolds ultimately became a clinical psychologist and taught in the US Virgin Islands, where she lived the rest of her live after her early twentieth-century adventures. Her memoir, exquisitely researched and annotated by Hutchinson, with a preface by legal scholar Patricia Williams, complicates our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and of modernism.
This is a deliciously name-droppy story--there's almost no one Reynolds didn't know. Reynolds was fearless as well as fun, though; when the invasion of France rolled around Reynolds devoted herself to nursing and helping refugees make their escape across the border. Reynolds ultimately became a clinical psychologist and taught in the US Virgin Islands, where she lived the rest of her live after her early twentieth-century adventures. Her memoir, exquisitely researched and annotated by Hutchinson, with a preface by legal scholar Patricia Williams, complicates our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and of modernism.