SubscribeThe first time I heard the expression “baby” used by one cat to address another was up at Warwick in 1951. Gus Jackson used it. The term had a hip ring to it, a real colored ring. The first time I heard it, I knew right away I had to start using it. It was like saying, “Man, look at me. I've got masculinity to spare.” It was saying at the same time to the world, “I'm one of the hippest cats, one of the most uninhibited cats on the scene. I can say 'baby' to another cat, and he can say 'baby' to me, and we can say it with strength in our voices.” If you could say it, this meant that you really had to be sure of yourself, sure of your masculinity.I don't think that it's really talking about the same precise use of the word—more of a riff on the original—but it's interesting regarding the history of the word, so I've quoted it at length. Manchild In The Promised Land was published in 1965.
It seemed that everybody in my age group was saying it. The next thing I knew, older guys were saying it. Then just about everybody in Harlem was saying it, even the cats who weren't so hip. It became just one of those things.
The real hip thing about the “baby” term was that it was something that only colored cats could say the way it was supposed to be said. I'd heard gray boys trying it, but they really couldn't do it. Only colored cats could give it the meaning that we all knew it had without ever mentioning it—the meaning of black masculinity.
Before the Muslims, before I'd heard about the Coptic or anything like that, I remember getting high on the corner with a bunch of guys and watching the chicks go by, fine little girls, and saying, “Man, colored people must be something' else!”
Somebody'd say, “Yeah. How about that? All those years, man, we was on the plantation in those shacks, eating just potatoes and fatback and chitterlin's and greens, and look at what happened. We had Joe Louises and Jack Johnsons and Sugar Ray Robinsons and Henry Armstrongs, all that sort of thing.”
Somebody'd say, “Yeah, man. Niggers must be some real strong people who just can't be kept down. When you think about it, that's really something great. Fatback, chitterlin's, greens, and Joe Louis. Negroes are some beautiful people. Uh-huh. Fatback, chitterlin's, greens, and Joe Louis... and beautiful black bitches.”
Cats would come along with the “baby” thing. It was something that went over strong in the fifites with the jazz musicians and the hip set, the boxers, the dancers, the comedians, just about every set in Harlem. I think everybody said it real loud because they liked the way it sounded. It was always, “Hey, baby. How you doin', baby?” in every phase of the Negro hip life. As a matter of fact, I went to a Negro lawyer's office once, and he said, “Hey, baby”—and he knew how to say it—you felt as though you had something strong in common.
I suppose it's the same thing that almost all Negroes have in common, the fatback, chitterlings, and greens background. I suppose that regardless of what any Negro in America, might do or how high he might rise in social status, he still has something in common with every other Negro. I doubt that they're many, if any, gray people who could ever say “baby” to a Negro and make him feel that “me and this cat have got something going, something strong going.”
In the fifties, when “baby” came around, it seemed to be the prelude to a whole new era in Harlem. It was the introduction to the era of black reflection. A fever started spreading. Perhaps the strong rising of the Muslim movement is something that helped sustain or even usher in this era.
I remember that in the early fifties, cats would stand on the corner and talk, just shooting the stuff, all the street-corner philosophers. Sometimes, it was a common topic—cats talking about gray chicks—and somebody might say something like, “Man, what can anybody see in a gray chick, when colored chicks are so fine; they got so much soul.” This was the common meaning of the “soul” thing too.
“Soul” had started coming out of the churches and the nightclubs into the streets. Everybody started talking about “soul” as though it were something that they could see on people or a distinct characteristic of colored folks.
Cats would say things like, “Man, gray chicks seem so stiff.” Many of them would say they couldn't talk to them or would wonder how a cat who was used to being so for real with a chick could see anything in a gray girl. It seemed as though the mood of the day was turning toward the color thing.
Everybody was really digging themselves and thinking and saying in their behavior, in every action, “Wow! Man, it's a beautiful thing to be colored.” Everybody was saying, “Oh, the beauty of me! Look at me. I'm colored. And look at us. Aren't we beautiful?”
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posted by katillathehun at 5:48 PM on May 26