On a wintry Monday evening in January 1934, big-time businessman Sidney Cohen and his friend Morris Sussman gathered a group of nine Black journalists from New York and from out of town. Cohen and Sussman, both white, wanted the writers’ input on what the Harlem “community needed,” because four days later, the pair would make a historic business move.
Although they didn’t know it yet, their new venture, which promised a “revolutionary step in the presentation of stage shows,” would transform the world of entertainment for decades to come. On Friday, January 26, 1934, they would open the doors to one of the first vaudeville halls in New York City to spotlight Black performers and welcome Black audiences — the Apollo Theater.
Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose.
It is not an upbeat view of higher education, but despite the fact that the story is fictional, the way it looks at more mundane parts of day-to-day life at the kind of school so many people actually attend but rarely read about makes it feel true — true in a way a thousand reported stories about inviting and uninviting campus speakers to the same tiny handful of places strangely can't.
That is the enduring thrill of creative nonfiction — tiptoeing along the border between art and fact. It requires turning a critical eye on your own ambition, your care for others, the literal truth of what happened and the style with which you might express how it felt, as well as the question of whose story is being told and who has the right to tell it.
A definitive biography of this woman who lived until 96 and spoke in epigrams, undulations and billowing fabric might be impossible to contain between one set of covers, but “Errand Into the Maze” is a distinguished biography: its description rich, its author’s rigor unquestionable.