Ai'da Without Makeup

Aida Without Makeup

In 1921, while eel-hipped, coffee-skinned Josephine Baker wriggled with abandon through the scenes of Shuffle Along, an obscure young Negress in the chorus named Catherine Yarborough was saving her subway nickels by trudging from the stage door on 63rd Street to her dingy $3.50-a-week room on 137th Street. Few years later, both women migrated from Broadway to Europe, the racy Josephine to gaudy fame in the Casino de Paris, Catherine Yarborough to drudge over the scores of Aida and L'Africaine in France and Italy. Some day she meant to return, become the first Negro prima donna to sing in a U. S. opera house. Last week, two days before her 30th birthday, she did so as Caterina Jarboro with Alfredo Salmaggi's Chicago Opera Company in Manhattan's vast Hippodrome. Dusky Harlemites, high and low, turned out to cheer her triumph and theirs.

Caterina Jarboro was born in Wilmington, N. C. of an Amerindian mother and a Negro father who worked as a barber. As a little girl she learned to moan the throaty melodies of her race, sang Gregorian chants in Latin in a Catholic choir. When her parents died she went to live with an aunt in Brooklyn, continued to sing in church at Sunday Mass, until Broadway's flair for Negro music resulted in Shuffle Along. Jarboro got a job in the chorus at $50 a week. Noticing that the other girl singers paid 50-c- for manicures, she learned to do their manicuring, charged them $1. Says she : "When I was feeling good it was a dollar and a quarter." With the money she saved she bought a two-story house in New Jersey.

In France in 1926, Jarboro hired a tutor to teach her the language. When her funds ran low, she sold the house in New Jersey, went to Italy. Four years passed before she made her debut, as Aida in the Puccini theatre in Milan. Later she sang in L'Africaine, for three years thereafter appeared regularly in leading opera houses in France, Italy, Switzerland. Last month she returned to the U. S. after seven years, showed Manhattan operagoers an Aida really Ethiopian.

For Jarboro's debut the Hippodrome was sold out days in advance, standees were thick in the aisles. From swank Striver's Row to the river slums, Harlem came downtown to welcome her, filled one-third of the house. Tall and good-looking, dark enough to need no makeup in the role of an Ethiopian slave, Jarboro revealed the husky voice of her race, rich in texture, not perfectly schooled. At the end of the aria "Ritorna vincitor" she was recalled three times, not by Negro cheers only.

When the curtain went down for the last time Caterina Jarboro came to the apron of the Hippodrome's gulf-like stage to answer wildly enthusiastic curtain calls. Her arms filled with bouquets, more piled on the floor around her, she knelt in acknowledgment. Tears welled to her eyes, her voice choked as she thanked two leading stage characters of her race for their tributes, Tenor Paul Robeson and Dancer Bill ("Bojangles") Robinson.

To darken the stage yet more, give Jarboro dramatic support, Impresario Alfredo Salmaggi got Negro Baritone Jules Bledsoe to sing Amanasro in the second performance of Aida, said he would later appear with Jarboro in L'Africaine as well.

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