Black Man and White Ladyship.
Cunard’s Final Break With “Her Ladyship”:
Nancy Leaves Mother And Mother England For Good
Cunard, Nancy. Black Man and White Ladyship. [Paris: Published by the Author], 1931.
Thin 8vo.; red printed wrappers, stapled.
First and only edition of Cunard’s infamous self-published tirade against her mother and in support of racial equality and interracial relationships. The press-run is unknown, but was certainly small: bibliographers speculate fewer than 200 copies. A presentation copy, with the recipient’s name, “Maud Russell,” written in pencil, apparently in Cunard’s hand, on the inner front wrapper; beneath this, presumably in Russell’s hand, there is another penciled note: “Sent me by Nancy Cunard.”
With Black Man and White Ladyship, Cunard permanently distanced herself from her family and their fortune: she was officially disowned by her mother Lady Emerald Cunard soon after the matriarch saw a copy of this pamphlet, and the two never spoke again. Upon reflection, it is not hard to see why Cunard’s text incited such an irrevocable rift. Black Man and White Ladyship lodges a personal and vituperative attack upon the values of the English aristocracy as specifically embodied by Lady Cunard. A sample—but by no means the harshest—passage reads:
I have a Negro friend, a very close friend, (and a great many other Negro friends in France, England, and America.) Nothing extraordinary in that. I have also a mother—whom we will at once call: Her Ladyship. We are extremely different but I had remained on fairly good (fairly distant) terms with her for a number of years. The English channel and a good deal of determination on my part made this possible... (p. 1)
Although Cunard’s tome starts with a specific domestic incident concerning her mother’s reaction to her involvement with Henry Crowder, the black American jazz musician with whom she openly lived as unmarried lovers in the south of France, her thoughts and language soon turn toward the larger political situation. Extrapolating from her experience as part of an interracial couple and drawing from her growing knowledge of colonial and post-colonial history, Cunard launches page after page of searing missiles aimed squarely at the hypocritical tenets of white Western society. Much of Cunard’s more insightful political remarks are contained in the pamphlet’s second section, subtitled “The Black Man.” A few quotes will relay the overall flavor:
I believe that no fallacy about the Negroes is too gross for the Anglo Saxon to fall into. You are told they are coarse, lascivious, lazy, ignorant, undisciplined, unthrifty, undependable, drunkards, jealous, envious, violent, that their lips, noses and hair are ugly, that they have a physical odour–in the name of earth itself what peoples, individually, can disclaim any of these?
Now how does it seem to you put this way: several hundreds of thousands of whites have been torn from their country, chained in pairs to boats, flogged across the Atlantic, flayed at work by a nigger overseer’s whip, hunted and shot for trying to get away, insulted, injured, thrown out, prisoned, threatened with lynching if they dare ride in the black man’s part of the train, their houses burned down, if, despite everything, they seem to get too prosperous, their women spoken of as 'dirty white sluts' and raped at every corner by a big Negro buck, told there’s no job in the office for anyone with a bleedin white mug and that their stinkin white bitches needn’t go on trying to 'pass' nor hope to send their white vermin to any decent school–Over 300 years of it all in its different phases, substituting white for black all along the line...You would say Justice was strangely absent. You would say the hell of a lot more than that. Had this happened also to the white race as it has to the black one may well wonder which would have come out of it best. (pp. 8-9)
Dated though it may be, Black Man and White Ladyship remains one of t
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