physically and (which amounts to the same thing) historically. The air inside the Pullmans was fragrant with smoke, everyone knew their place, and the help spoke Help language. The imaginative concept that had brought forth the text and its art was that not just inside but outside black boundaries, the universe is white.
As white as white flesh sprouting from a brown juice.
—
Life magazine, September 6, 1937, page 116. Life digital archive, New York Public Library.
1. In 1909, the heroine of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna sneaks away to her bedroom. In the orchestra, a flute figure ascends. Then the secret that Susanna keeps from her husband reveals itself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV6oxGdJuVs
2. In 1914, shortly before the Great War begins, a premonitory piece of literature asks men to consider how comforting it would be, under the circumstances, to suck and suck and suck, “natural like.”
3. Theory explains the gender differential.
Source of the tobacco advertisement: Cosmopolitan, May 1914, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jon_williamson/9244846710/lightbox/