Florence’s Place: Host(ess)ing Revolution in Interwar Black Paris

On january 3, 1932, the performer florence emery jones died of heart failure in her Manhattan apartment.1 She was thirty-nine years old. Her death certificate declared that she was an “actress” and that she had been a resident of New York City for twenty-five years.2 It mentions nothing of the fact that she had spent most of the 1920s in Paris, nor that she was once celebrated as one of the most glamorous entertainers of the Parisian nightclub scene. This same Florence who died in a New York tenement once strolled between champagne-laden tables in a Parisian nightclub that bore her name, crooning sweetly; this same Florence once coerced a British prince into dancing the black bottom; this same Florence was, according to Langston Hughes, the first person of color he ever saw “deliberately and openly snubbing white people.”3 Florence walked a delicate balance between white admiration and white hatred, as evidenced by her interactions with Ernest Hemingway, a frequent visitor to her establishments. Hemingway describes her as “a typical Negro dancer, jolly, funny, and wonderful on her feet.”4 That is, until she “acquired an English accent and a languid manner” as a result of dancing with European nobility, and for Hemingway, “another of the really amusing after-midnight places was ruined by prosperity.”5 Hemingway’s characterization of Florence has multiple racist overtones: the assumption that she is solely a dancer, the idea that a black woman’s usefulness is only insofar as she provides him with amusement, and the derision of any black affect other than servile jolliness as a ridiculous putting on of airs. However, what is most remarkable about the themes brought up by Hemingway is the way they were used by other black expatriates of the time period to paint Florence as a cautionary tale of black women’s haughtiness.