Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

This is a short biography of the classic blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937) by the poet Jackie Kay. It includes passages of fiction that speculate how some of the gaps in our knowledge of Bessie Smith's life might be filled.

Most of my Goodreads review:

This is not a straightforward biography of Bessie Smith. Mostly, I like biographies that are scholarly: lots of citations, and analysis with the seams showing so I can see how it's put together. This biography isn't that, but it's just what I wanted, because it taught me about the early blues scene without ever letting me forget that the person telling me about it is another woman who needs those blues.

Jackie Kay says that when she was growing up in Glasgow, a black child with white adoptive parents, it was Bessie Smith who gave her race meaning.

Like any child with a grown-up hero, Jackie imagined Bessie for herself: traveling across the wilds of America (like the set in a Western movie) in her private Pullman car (which she first imagined to be a sort of fancy covered wagon). Before she understood the meanings of the more ribald songs, she made up her own (the bit about Kitchen Man is charming).

The real Bessie Smith was fantastic in different ways. She was an extreme woman: cruel and generous, profligate and jealous, poor and rich. She was fascinating.

I love how Jackie Kay relishes the legends around Bessie Smith. She gives us the tallest stories and then, instead of toppling them, says, "Here's what the people who hear these stories need to get from them."

This book is part of the Outlines series, which is "an unofficial, candid and entertaining short history of lesbian and gay art, life and sex." It seems that the editors of the Outline series really do just mean lesbian and gay. This was the one thing that annoyed me about this book. It quickly becomes clear that Bessie Smith had sexual relationships with both men and women. But Kay constantly refers to her life as a lesbian one. Kay speculates that her marriage to her abusive husband Jack Gee was sexless. Maybe true, but she cheated on him with men as well as women, and at the time of her death she'd been in an apparently happy relationship with another man, Richard Morgan, for years. Kay says very little about him. I think that Bessie Smith might not have identified her sexual orientation the way people do today, but if she had, it seems like she would have chosen bisexual to describe herself, not lesbian.